Mobility justice in low carbon energy transitions

Mobility systems raise multiple questions of justice. Work on mobility justice and policy often treats different elements of the debate separately, for example focussing on environmental justice or accessibility. This is problematic as it can privilege policy solutions without a full view of the winners and losers and the values implicit in that. Using analysis of current policy, we investigate how mobility justice can reconcile its different components, and find two major consequences. First, is doubt about the justice of the existing policy approach which tries to tackle transport pollution primarily through a shift to low emission vehicles. This approach privileges those with access to private vehicles and further privileges certain sets of activities. Second is a need to reassess which basic normative ideas should be applied in mobility justice. Work on mobility justice has tended to appeal to conceptions of justice concerned with access to resources including resources enabling mobility. These conceptions say little about how resources should be used. We show that avoiding stark inequalities means collectively thinking about how resources are used, about how we value activities involving mobility, and about what sorts of goods and services we create

Impacts of Transit Benefits Programs on Transit Agency Ridership, Revenues, and Costs

The federal tax code allows employers to provide tax-free transit benefits to employees. Although transit benefits programs are commonly promoted as having advantages for transit agencies, such as increasing transit ridership and transit agency revenues, their effects and effectiveness are not well understood and need to be better assessed. This research is designed to help transit agencies, policy-makers, and organizations that promote transit benefits better understand what effects they might expect from a transit benefits program and how to quantify these effects. Overall, the research found that transit benefits programs can be effective for transit agencies attempting to meet various goals, in terms of increasing ridership and revenues, and decreasing costs. However, it is critical to set realistic expectations and conduct valid evaluations to assess these effects

Financing Transit-Oriented Development: Understanding and Overcoming Obstacles

Although the development and lending communities have become much more aware of transit-oriented development (TOD) in the past 5 years, the lending process remains highly institutionalized and compartmentalized. TOD developers still face significant challenges in obtaining financing and structuring deals. After a brief review of common sources and structures of financing, this paper details obstacles to financing that TOD developers face, starting with the increasingly high risk attached to construction lending and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s recent actions emphasizing increased bank oversight in this area. Complexity, design, and construction challenges, along with mixed-use and related lender concerns, compound the difficulties presented by the relative newness of the mixed-use, TOD product, as compared with the conventional real estate products that are more commonly underwritten and traded on the secondary market. This puts more pressure on TOD developers to present a solid equity position and prove that they have the know-how and wherewithal to carry a risky project through. Strategies to overcome these barriers to TOD financing include the structuring of uses to align with existing product categories, value engineering and the use of alternative building methods and materials, use of advanced information management systems, addition of large or experienced partners, and gain of higher-equity, patient investment. Finally, presenting the local and national market demand for TOD may help increase financiers’ understanding of the unique benefits offered by TOD, and of its potential upside. Local governments can help by developing supportive plans and appropriate zoning, building public support, and streamlining the process to create a more predictable environment for developers and lenders

The road to zero a vision for achieving zero roadway deaths by 2050

Imagine that, in 2050, not a single person in the United States dies in a traffic crash. This is the scenario described in this article, in which RAND researchers set forth a vision and strategy for achieving zero roadway deaths by 2050. The authors propose that a combination of three approaches can realize this scenario. The first is doubling down on programs and policies that have already been shown to be effective, including laws and enforcement, changes to roadway infrastructure designed to reduce traffic conflicts, reductions in speeds where crashes are likely, improvements to emergency response and trauma care, and more safety education and outreach. The second is accelerating advanced technology, beginning with advanced driver assistance systems (many of which are already in the market) and progressing up to fully automated vehicles. The third is prioritizing safety, which includes both (1) embracing a new safety culture that will lead Americans to think differently about our individual and collective choices and (2) widespread adoption of the Safe System approach, a paradigm shift in addressing the causes and prevention of roadway deaths and injuries. The authors conclude with a list of actions that key stakeholdersincluding professional engineering and planning organizations, public-sector organizations, safety advocates, vehicle manufacturers, technology developers, public health, emergency medical and trauma care organizations, and law enforcement and judicial system representativescan take to bring about the changes needed to achieve zero roadway deaths by 2050. Document type: Boo

Automobility in Brazil, Russia, India, and China: Quo Vadis?

This paper introduces an innovative methodology to answer the question: Toward which 2 levels of automobility are the BRIC countries headed? We apply this methodology to understand 3 why long-term saturation levels for car travel differ across the OECD study countries and what 4 this means for the saturation levels that the BRIC countries may attain. In our approach we factor 5 out the GDP development in order to focus on how other factors have influenced specific paths 6 of automobility in individual countries. That is, we focus on the question: Why are the long-term 7 automobility saturation levels so much higher for some countries than for others, even at similar 8 levels of GDP? Our methodology draws on quantitative analysis of historic developments in four 9 industrialized countries (USA, Australia, Germany, and Japan) that serve as case studies 10 representing prototypical paths of automobility with very different levels of per capita automo-11 bility, in combination with qualitative data derived from an expert-based qualitative approach. 12 We use the latter to transfer historic experiences about how automobility evolution was shaped in 13 industrialized countries and how these experiences may affect the future of automobility in the 14 BRIC countries. Based on our analysis, Brazil turns out to be the most car-oriented country 15 among the BRICs with a potential long-term level of automobility between Germany and Aus-16 tralia. Russia comes in second, also with a likely long-term level of automobility above that of 17 Germany. China and India, on the contrary, are heading towards lower levels of automobility 18 below Germany but higher than Japan