Yesterday, Moving Cooler: An Analysis of Transportation Strategies for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions was released by the Urban Land Institute (pdf) with the support of a strong array of public and private sponsors.

Sponsors include the American Public Transportation Association, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, the Kresge Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Shell Oil Company, the Surdna Foundation, the Funders Network for Smart Growth, as well as a number of federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Highway Administration, and the Federal Transit Administration.

The report (pdf) is the most comprehensive look to date at transportation strategies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save consumers money.

Key study findings:

• To address transportation-related emissions, you need to address four areas (typically people only talk about the first three here):
  • improve the fuel-efficiency of vehicles (President Obama has taken an important first step here with aggressive new national standards)
  • reduce the carbon content of fuels (by moving to next generation biofuels and electricity to power our vehicles)
  • reduce the need to drive (by supporting transportation options and improved land-use planning)
  • improve vehicle and system operations (by supporting more efficient eco-driving and reducing system congestion).
    
• A bundle of policy strategies in these four areas can reduce transportation-related emissions by up to 24 percent below baseline in 2050 while saving as many as 660 million barrels of oil per year and saving consumers as much as $112 billion annually.
• Congestion relief through bottleneck removal or capacity expansion will result in increased global warming emissions.
• Policy implementation for all of these areas can begin immediately
• After a modest initial six-year implementation ramp up, the consumer cost savings that result from the policy implementation would far outweigh the implementation costs.

Our thoughts on the study:

• The study does provide an impressive level of cost analysis that has been largely been void in the discussion of reducing transportation-related emissions, and it has a rigorous assessment of freight mode shift effects not found elsewhere.
• It provides a compelling argument for investing immediately in policies that will have short, mid, and long-term cost savings for consumers.
• We believe the study's baseline assumptions about growth in vehicle miles travelled (VMT) are too high. Annual growth of 1.4 percent was assumed. VMT trends since 2004 have been shown stable or declining VMT. Even allowing for a rebound, the sustained rate of growth seems excessive and dampens the effect of the strategies applied. For reference, Census projections for U.S. population increases between 2010 and 2050 start at 0.98 percent per year early in the period, steadily declining to 0.79 percent by 2050.
• Additional research looking at further expanded transportation options and strategies to support market share for electric vehicles will still be necessary to assess options to reach a target of more than 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050.