Transportation | Environmental Law Institute

Electric Vehicles, Scorned by GOP, Speed Ahead Under Biden Policies

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David P. Clarke - Writer & Editor

Writer & Editor

Current Issue

July-August 2024

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Can electric vehicles become the United States’ dominant form of automobile transportation, as President Joe Biden is trying to facilitate? Or, will the deep Republican antipathy to EVs block their progress? Presidential candidate Donald Trump promises to stop Biden’s EV policies “the first day” if he is reelected, and even a handful of Democrats want to slow down their adoption. But, Biden remains upbeat that with EVs the United States can “own the future of the automobile market” and dominate manufacturing’s future, as he told a Detroit audience in 2022.

Notwithstanding detractors and recent news reports about EV sales slowing down, reasons for optimism are plentiful. U.S. automakers are undergoing “a renaissance, sparked by clean vehicles,” says Alice Henderson, the Environmental Defense Fund’s director of transportation and clean air policy. She notes that $188 billion in private investment has been announced so far and almost 200,000 jobs in EV and battery manufacturing are on the way. Part of the reason: EV costs have been declining rapidly and provide owners up to $27,000 in savings over the time they’re owned, she claims. In 2022, EV sales increased 60 percent, to 1.6 million.

Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, a coalition of more than 60 companies, likewise emphasizes the broad appeal of EVs “independent of politics or public policy.” Gore says that a “natural growth” in the U.S. EV supply chain both accelerated and expanded under Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which Gore believes will continue providing a framework for nationwide investment and job growth in coming years. That said, over the last year “policy uncertainty,” with shifting battery supply chains and EV-incentive eligibility, has posed the EV industry’s biggest challenge, he says.

On top of Biden’s signature laws, EPA announced national auto tailpipe emission standards in March that Administrator Michael Regan described as the “strongest-ever pollution standards for cars.” To meet the standards, 56 percent of new cars sold would have to be zero-emissions and another 16 percent, hybrid, by 2032.

That’s less demanding than EPA’s original proposal, which would have forced 67 percent of new cars and light-duty trucks to be all-electric by 2032, a standard automakers and unions opposed. But even the less-strict standard will still be a significant challenge given that, at present, only 7.6 percent of new cars sold are EVs. A separate rule requires 40 percent of trucks sold to be EVs by 2032.

According to the American Energy Alliance, a free market nonprofit, more than 4,000 auto dealers nationwide insist that consumer EV demand is “not remotely on trend” to meet the EPA requirements. Among issues AEA cites are cost, with lower tax credits available this year than in 2023, and a lack of EV charging stations. Although the 2022 IRA approved $7.5 billion for charging stations, after two years, not a single charger had been installed, Politico reported in December. AEA says the government estimates 2.8 million chargers will be needed by 2032, but only 170,000 exist today.

GOP lawmakers, with three Democrats helping, are on the offensive against EVs. On May 1, members of the House and Senate introduced Congressional Review Act legislation that would halt EPA’s EV rules. The next day, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) and 18 other GOP senators introduced a bill to repeal the IRA’s EV tax credits.

Clearly, headwinds exist. But EV-supportive actions are happening at a steady clip. In August 2023, the Biden administration announced $15.5 billion in funding to support retooling existing auto manufacturing facilities for EV production and related purposes. In January, the Department of Transportation, stating, “The EV revolution is here,” announced $150 million in grants to repair or replace almost 4,500 existing charging stations. While limited, the grants are part of a $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program created under the infrastructure law. Responding to the NEVI program, in April the National Governors Association and the National League of Cities launched a collaborative to build out a national EV workforce.

Although negativity toward EVs is a GOP talking point, EDF’s Henderson notes that the industry’s benefits are accruing “across the U.S. heartland,” with 84 percent of investments announced in such deep red states as Tennessee and Kentucky and swing state Georgia, where EV critic Representative Buddy Carter’s (R) district has a $7.6 billion EV and battery plant.

Electric Vehicles, Scorned by GOP, Speed Ahead Under Biden Policies.

Oregon’s All-In Approach to Electrification

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Author

Amanda Pietz - Oregon Dept. of Transportation

Oregon Dept. of Transportation

Current Issue

November-December 2023

Issue

Parent Article

Welcome to the Future

Climate change is affecting every corner of the planet. In Oregon, that means that extreme weather—wildfires, high heat, floods, and landslides—are growing more frequent and destructive. These disastrous events aren’t cheap. Every five years, we’re spending $20 million more to respond to extreme weather around the state, and we’re barely keeping up.

Not only does extreme weather cost the agency money, it’s also harming our communities. These dangerous events can close or damage roads, which disrupts the movement of goods and services and blocks lifeline routes critical for evacuation and recovery.

We must address the impacts of climate change and the single largest source of their cause: greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. Oregon’s plan for reducing emissions from transportation is multifaceted: cleaner vehicles and fuels; expanded and improved low-emission travel options (biking, walking/rolling, and transit); supportive land use changes; increased system efficiencies; and pricing. Our efforts in those areas over the past decade have paid off: by 2050, we project emissions will be 60 percent lower than they were in 1990.

Most of our progress results from regulations and investments in cleaner vehicles and fuels. But we also need to reduce people’s dependence on driving and increase use of low-emission options. Our recently adopted Oregon Transportation Plan includes bold policies around reducing passenger vehicle miles traveled, with a target of a 20 percent reduction by 2050.

That will not be easy. It will take coordination between local and state agencies, plus buy-in from the public. However, recently adopted regulations in Oregon ensure that local government plans and transportation project lists actually result in reductions to miles traveled.

The state Department of Transportation is making similar commitments and is examining roadway pricing strategies that better reflect the true cost and impact of driving, in support of transitioning to lower-emission options. But many people will still need to drive some or all of the time. For those trips, our goal is to make every mile driven clean.

Therefore, Oregon is all-in on transportation electrification. We’re already on a promising trajectory: In the first quarter of 2023, we were third in the United States for the share of new cars, trucks and SUVs sold that are electric. We average about 1,000 new EV registrations per month.

The public is clearly responding to the electrified future, and we’re responding with substantial investments in EV charging infrastructure. ODOT’s initial investment will be over $100 million, funded from the federal National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program and state dollars. While the NEVI funds create a charging network along major highways and interstates, we are also focusing on areas that the private sector may not initially see as profitable, like rural regions and disadvantaged communities.

Our new Community Charging Rebates Program aims to close charging gaps in those neighborhoods. The program reimburses most of the cost of Level 2 charging projects at multifamily homes and publicly accessible parking areas. Seventy percent of funding is reserved for projects in rural and disadvantaged communities. We launched the rebate program in June, and within two days we received requests equaling about half of the available funding for the first round. We plan to hold future rounds in 2024 and beyond.

These investments are a strong start, but our studies show that we need to double the amount of charging infrastructure each year to accommodate demand by 2035. That will require a huge investment, in the billions of dollars range, from both the private and public sectors.

Targeted and continued investments, policies, and programs are needed to reduce emissions from transportation, whether it’s cleaning up each mile driven, or reducing how far and how often people drive. Climate change threatens all of us, and it will take all of us to push back against it.

Don’t Let Big Oil Stop Clean Transportation

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Author

Roland Hwang - Heising-Simons Foundation

Heising-Simons Foundation

Current Issue

November-December 2023

Issue

Parent Article

Welcome to the Future

One of the military theorist Sun-tzu’s tactics set out in his classic The Art of War is to “divide and conquer.” That is exactly what some opponents of electric vehicles are doing. Every year the oil industry can delay the shift to EVs translates into hundreds of billions of dollars of extra profits.

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the six largest oil and gas companies with U.S. operations raked in a record-breaking $168 billion in profits in 2022––in just 12 months equaling about half of the 10-year investment in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act aimed at speeding the transition to clean energy.

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that big oil’s efforts to stoke the fires of division are increasing. The industry’s disinformation campaign is so egregious that a House of Representatives investigation found big oil has misled the public about its central role in causing the climate crisis and has impeded efforts to find solutions.

A New York Times article published in 2018 clearly exposed the successful stealth campaign financed by oil companies to roll back federal regulations reducing greenhouse gas pollution from cars, including paying for Facebook ads and websites. With the Biden administration reversing that rollback and proposing even tougher standards, it’s no surprise that ExxonMobil recently launched a new advertising campaign to discredit electric vehicles.

The oil industry has political allies. Conservative attorneys general, with the oil-rich state of Texas in a prominent leadership role, have filed lawsuits hoping that the Supreme Court will strike down the decades-long authority of California and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to require the sales of EVs and other cleaner cars. We can expect EVs to become a wedge issue in the 2024 election season, with conservative media likely to call it a “ban” on gasoline car sales.

I have spent most of my three-decade career working for science-based environmental organizations advocating for cleaner transportation, first at the Union of Concerned Scientists and then at the Natural Resources Defense Council. I have served on two National Academy of Sciences committees to review EV and other clean car technologies.

Much of my time was spent on refuting specious criticism. I’ve debunked arguments that EVs are simply “elsewhere emitting vehicles”—not if they are charging using renewable electricity. And that the battery-manufacturing emissions take back any tailpipe pollution benefits over the vehicle’s lifetime—shown to be based on poor data on early pilot production of batteries. Or that the price of batteries would never come down to a reasonable level—Tesla and other car manufacturers have crushed that argument.

To be clear, there are legitimate criticisms of transportation electrification. Comments offered in the spirit of getting it right are necessary, and serve an important role in the public policy debate.

In order to avert the worst impacts of climate change, climate advocates must join forces with equity and mobility advocates to push for building fewer car-dependent communities, fully funding mass transit, and developing more vibrant mobility ecosystems—all important components of a sustainable transportation strategy that rapidly transitions to clean energy.

Another area that needs urgent attention involves critical minerals like lithium and cobalt: ensuring responsible mining practices are adopted before the industry is fully locked into poor practices defined by the lowest common denominator. What is needed is a race to the top to create consumer demand for a supply chain that respects human rights, communities, and the environment.

However trite it may sound, we must not let the perfect be the enemy of good. We must not forget about the frontline communities across the world who are suffering the impacts of pollution and corruption caused by one of the largest, dirtiest industries on the planet. Let’s not let the oil industry win by dividing communities at this critical moment in our efforts to create a zero-emitting, equitable, and fossil-fuel-free transportation future.

Welcome to the Future

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Author

Jeff Allen - Forth

Forth

Current Issue

November-December 2023

Issue

Four years ago, this magazine published my article entitled “Are Electric Cars the Future?” The intervening years have answered this question pretty clearly. In the first quarter of this year, 7 percent of all new cars sold in the United States were electric—and in California it was 21.1 percent. In fact, California and a half dozen other states have now banned the sale of new gas and diesel cars after 2035. Dozens of other countries and several major automakers are following their lead. Meanwhile, we are seeing the rapid deployment of electric bicycles, school buses, transit buses, long-haul trucks, agricultural and mining equipment, planes, and boats. Everything that moves is going electric.

Electric vehicles, now popularly known as EVs, have many advantages, including lower maintenance costs for the consumer, zero tailpipe pollution and less noise for the environment, and greater national energy independence. Most notably, EVs dramatically reduce climate pollution. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that driving the average electric car in America is equivalent to driving a gasoline car that gets 96 miles per gallon—if such a vehicle existed. In areas with cleaner electricity—such as California, where 40 percent of electric cars currently operate—the environmental benefits are even greater.

The official U.S. climate inventory shows transportation is responsible for 29 percent of national greenhouse gas emissions, making it the single largest source. And these emissions are growing at a faster rate than any other source. So you might reasonably expect the growing popularity of electric vehicles would be seen as an exciting and positive development by everyone concerned about climate change.

Instead, there has been a chorus of arguments pushing back against EVs—particularly electric cars and trucks—from progressive environmental advocates and some media sources. It’s clear that the oil industry is seeding some of these arguments with funding and misinformation, and conflict and contrarianism make for great clickbait. But there are deeper disagreements at work here that threaten our progress toward a sustainable, equitable transportation system. By dissecting some of the anti-EV arguments, I will make the case for why—and how—we need to come together as a transportation reform movement.

One of the first arguments made by environmental advocates is that electric cars are still cars—and electrifying them doesn’t reduce impacts like traffic congestion, injuries and deaths in crashes, or urban sprawl. Publications such as The Nation, The Hill, and others regularly run headlines saying in effect that “EVs won’t save us,” where advocates argue we should focus instead on transit, walking, and biking. The problem with this argument is the word instead. In reality, virtually every study of the subject says we must do both. Even the bicycling-focused Institute for Transportation and Development Policy found that “for the urban transportation sector—one slice of the climate-change equation—the road to keeping below 1.5°C global warming involves both compact cities developed for walking, cycling and public transit, as well as a rapid and strategic transition to electrified vehicles.” For rural and suburban residents, of course, EVs are even more important.

Across the United States about 90 percent of all trips take place in a personal vehicle, and this figure has hardly budged in the past few decades. The New York Times recently profiled my home town of Portland, Oregon, noting it has “tried harder than most American cities to coax people out of their cars,” yet about 80 percent of trips here are still made by auto. Less than 3 percent of Portlanders currently commute to work by bicycle; another 8 percent walk or take transit.

We absolutely need to change this extreme car dependency—but we also need to acknowledge the reality we currently face, which needs broad solutions that will appeal to and engage the public in saving carbon emissions throughout the economy, including the major single source, transportation.

Advocates have been working for decades to make it easier for Americans to walk, bike, and take transit. That struggle requires deep investments in light rail, buses, sidewalks, and bike lanes; substantial redevelopment of our urban areas; and changes to the way we price mobility (more on that later). That work is important and needs to continue. As with transitioning from gasoline to electricity, it will take decades to develop an infrastructure that will reduce our dependence on private vehicle use.

But let’s be clear: that work has always been challenging in America. Nothing about moving to cleaner electric cars makes it any harder. Those headlines could just as easily say “bikes and transit won’t save us.” In the face of climate catastrophe, we need an all-of-the-above approach.

Sometimes critics allow that electric vehicles might be helpful—but argue that electric bikes, electric transit buses, or perhaps shared electric cars are better for the planet and communities than privately owned electric cars, and we should focus on them instead. Outside magazine’s headline “Why You Should Buy an E-bike Instead of an Electric Vehicle” is typical of this genre. Here again, binary, either-or thinking is the main problem—paired with a misplaced assumption that these strategies are easier than moving to electric cars.

Forth’s recent report “Electric Micromobility in Oregon” notes that electric bikes are an extremely promising way to get more Americans riding more often, especially for the roughly half of all trips that are less than three miles long. For example, Denver’s electric bike incentives of up to $1,400 for income-qualified residents have been an extremely effective tool to increase riding, reduce carbon pollution, and save money for commuters. However, expanding the use of electric bikes will require more robust public outreach and education about the technology; better bike lanes and other facilities, especially in historically underserved communities; incentives to lower the cost of purchasing e-bikes; and improved access to charging, especially for residents who live in apartments without elevators.

Similarly, shared electric cars can provide a valuable service, particularly for those without the ability to purchase a vehicle of their own. Forth operates such electric carshare services in over a dozen locations. However, there is not yet a sustainable financial model to support these services and, for most people, a privately owned vehicle is still a necessity for the demands of daily life. Likewise, electric transit buses are a great option—but they won’t solve the underlying challenges of fixed-route transit systems. Long-haul trucks are going electric, too—but building out their high-power charging network will be challenging.

In short: none of these policy ideas is mutually exclusive, which is good news—but implementing them will still not be easy. We need to electrify everything that moves, and we need to support more and better electric transportation options. We can and must do both at the same time.

Another argument focuses on the negative environmental and social impacts of mining the materials needed in electric vehicles, especially for batteries. There’s no question that the mining industry has always had a heavy environmental and social footprint. The patchwork of laws that governs mining in the United States hasn’t been substantially updated since the General Mining Act of 1872, thanks to strong opposition from the mining, oil, and gas industries. All too often, mining operations inflict lasting harm on vulnerable ecosystems and communities.

The mining industry is also trying to take advantage of the growth in electric vehicles and other clean technologies to argue that it should be allowed to dramatically increase U.S. mining production with minimal regulations and little concern for local residents and communities. This cynical strategy seeks to capitalize on a scarcity mindset to force false tradeoffs. In reality, however, the clean energy transformation underway represents a tremendous opportunity to reduce the overall need for mining and drilling, especially for oil and gas. In fact, a recent article by Michael Thomas in the Distilled substack estimates a fossil fuel economy requires 535 times more mining than a clean energy economy.

The EV transition is an opportunity to develop more responsible practices, reduce reliance on imports from nations with even more lax regulations than the United States, and dramatically expand recycling of key minerals. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act are investing billions of dollars in domestic battery producing and recycling initiatives. As we create new supply chains for electric vehicles, we can and should seize the opportunity to create higher environmental and social expectations. However, it hardly seems reasonable to expect electrification to immediately fix centuries of failed mining policy.

Some have argued we should make raw materials go further by “convincing” people to buy smaller vehicles with shorter-range batteries. A recent study by researchers associated with UC Davis pointed out the obvious—that smaller batteries and fewer cars would reduce lithium demand—leading to a Wired article claiming “The Earth Is Begging You to Accept Smaller EV Batteries.” Actually, what the Earth is begging for—if not demanding—is that we stop burning fossil fuels.

If there IS one thing we have learned in the past decade in transportation electrification, it’s that Americans have a lot of anxiety about vehicle range and charging. Even though the average American drives about 50 miles a day, consumer research consistently shows they want 200-300 miles of range in an EV. It’s not rational. But few things about consumer behavior are purely rational, especially when it comes to cars. It’s clear that today’s longer-range electric cars are much more popular with consumers than the first-generation cars we had a decade ago, with ranges of only about 100 miles. Yes, today’s increased range makes cars more expensive—and yes, it also increases the natural resources needed to produce them. However, in the real world the alternative is not smaller EVs—it is equally large gas cars.

Roughly 80 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States are trucks and SUVs, not sedans or coupes. Until recently, the lack of electric options in those classes has been a major barrier to wider EV adoption. In the past two years, we have finally seen electric SUVs and trucks offered for sale, and EV demand has surged in response. Most notably, the Ford F150, America’s best-selling vehicle, recently gained an electric version—which immediately had a one-year waiting list. Many of us see this as exciting good news—even pickup trucks are going electric! Unfortunately, some critics want to blame electrification for consumers’ preference for trucks and SUVs. The Atlantic went so far as to argue “Electric Vehicles Are Bringing Out the Worst in Us.”

The trend toward larger vehicles certainly creates safety concerns for pedestrians, cyclists, and anyone else not riding in one. That has been true for decades. Advocates should keep working to close regulatory loopholes and incentives that encourage production of large vehicles, and should keep working to promote smaller and more affordable options. They should continue that work in parallel with electrification efforts—but they should not expect electrification advocates to solve that problem for them. Nor can the planet wait while we try to radically reshape consumer preferences.

Lastly, advocates often assert that electric cars are not equitable. The simplest form of this argument points out that the average electric vehicle cost $54,000 in 2022, and then assumes this is far too expensive for most people, and therefore only rich people buy EVs. There are a number of problems with this argument. The average new fossil fuel-powered vehicle cost $44,400 in 2022, so electric cars are only about $10,000 more—a difference outweighed by government purchasing incentives and EVs’ much lower fuel and maintenance costs.

Further, in the United States, used vehicles outsell new ones by a three-to-one ratio. Because EVs are quite new, there is not yet a deep pool of used electric cars available. Once there is, that will enhance EV uptake by lower-income drivers. But it is not true that only rich people buy new cars. Hedges & Company reports that over 30 percent of new vehicles are purchased by households with incomes under $50,000.

There is strong evidence that low-income drivers and people of color are quite interested in EVs. A survey by Consumer Reports recently found that while 33 percent of White respondents said they would definitely or seriously consider purchasing or leasing an electric vehicle, that figure rises to 38 percent for Black respondents, 43 percent for Latinos, and 52 percent for Asian Americans. So the fact that these populations are currently less likely to buy EVs is more likely because of the many other barriers they face to purchase them. For example, Consumer Reports found that roughly 80 percent of Americans have never driven an electric car. Historically, opportunities to experience these cars—and even advertising for them—have been less prevalent in low-income communities of color. Such communities are also more likely to live in apartments, which makes charging at home difficult. The National Consumer Law Center and others have documented that car financing is another major barrier: Black consumers pay more for cars, have more trouble qualifying for loans, and pay higher interest rates compared to White consumers.

Our collective work to promote a more equitable transportation system needs to be grounded in the lived experience of community members and designed to address real needs and barriers like the above—not based on assumptions or stereotypes or wishful thinking.

of all people, environmentalists should understand the importance of biodiversity in any ecosystem. The mobility ecosystem is no different. We need a wide variety of clean mobility options to meet the needs of diverse communities. It will take a range of policy interventions to ensure those options are able to flourish, and that historically underserved communities truly have access to them. Here are a few strategies that could help us move us towards that vision together.

First, we need more networks and opportunities to bring together electric mobility advocates and other transportation reform advocates. We generally come from different backgrounds, have different training, move in different professional and social networks, and speak different languages. Forth is inviting more “traditional” transportation advocates and planners to our Roadmap Conference, and seeking out opportunities to speak at their events. We need more of that cross-fertilization. We also need to invest in coalitions that bring us together to find common ground, such as CHARGE—the Coalition Helping America Rebuild and Go Electric.

Second, advocates should find common ground around the need to ensure historic federal funding in the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law that supports a full range of strategies to reduce carbon pollution from transportation. Both statutes provide billions of dollars that could help drive transportation electrification and help reduce our dependence on cars. However, many of these programs are extremely broad and flexible—their actual impact will depend heavily on how the programs are implemented at the federal level, and how they are used at the state and local levels. For example, EPA will award $5 billion in Climate Pollution Reduction Grants and $20 billion in a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, and it’s possible that none of this money will support transportation programming. Worse yet, analysis by the Georgetown Climate Center suggests that federal funds could actually fuel business-as-usual investments like freeway expansion that actually increase climate pollution.

Third, we can also work together to increase the amount of philanthropic investment supporting sustainable transportation of all kinds. Charitable foundations and donors can play critical roles in increasing the impact of governmental and NGO programs, but they have not yet matched their giving to the scale of the transportation reform challenge. Research by ClimateWorks Foundation found that less than 2 percent of global philanthropic giving in 2020 was for climate change and less than 4 percent of that global climate change funding was focused on the transportation sector. In the United States, it is estimated that less than 10 percent of philanthropic climate funding goes to transportation. Dozens of transit advocates recently issued an open letter calling for U.S. philanthropy to invest an additional $200 million in their work over the next five years, and the global Drive Electric Campaign is working to mobilize $1 billion worldwide to support transportation electrification. These efforts represent a good down payment, but spending on sustainable transportation needs to be at least an order of magnitude greater.

Fourth, we should all agree on the need to center equity in our work. Transportation policies and investments have a long and ugly history of injustice, often grounded in race. Redlining and race-based lending practices forced communities of color into particular neighborhoods; urban planning and renewal policies forced freeways through these neighborhoods; investments in transit, walking, and biking were made elsewhere; and where progressive transportation investments have come to historically underserved communities, they have often accelerated gentrification without benefit to local residents.

Communities of color and historically under-served communities suffer the most, both economically and environmentally, in our current transportation system. They bear the brunt of air pollution from those roads punched through their neighborhoods, They spend a higher percentage of their income on transportation and tend to rely more on unreliable and polluting vehicles that are expensive to maintain—or on transit systems that are rarely funded well enough to be as convenient as a private car. The most affordable housing is usually furthest from jobs—a Harvard study found that low commute time is the single greatest predictor of escaping poverty.

Transportation advocates of all kinds should be working together to address these injustices, and we should be following the lead of these communities as we do so. That will generally require an all-of-the-above” strategy that helps people where they are (for example, by helping them access cleaner and more affordable electric cars) while also helping transform larger systems (by, for example, expanding transit.)

Finally, we should be working together to change the way transportation is funded. The United States spends the vast majority of its transportation funds on road expansion, while investing very little in transit, bike lanes, pedestrian facilities, or charging infrastructure. Registration fees, fuel taxes, and other funding mechanisms generally collect revenue; planners, engineers, and politicians then decide how to spend that money. Those spending decisions disproportionately tilt towards building new road capacity—even though, as social critic Lewis Mumford said way back in the 1950s, “Adding highway lanes to deal with traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to cure obesity.”

In addition to changing spending priorities, it’s also important to change how transportation funds are raised. We need road pricing that varies based on congestion and pollution, so that drivers have an incentive to shift to other modes or other times of day. Pricing to manage demand is well established in the electric utility industry and has helped save billions of dollars by avoiding the construction of unnecessary power plants. Managing demand through pricing should play a more central role in transportation as well.

The oil industry has been pushing punitive EV registration fees in many states—including a proposed $1,000 annual fee in Illinois that would have been several times as much as the average driver pays in gas taxes. We need to fight these bad policies, but the transition to a post-petroleum future also gives us an opportunity to develop a better system for funding transportation. We should be working together for a system that manages demand through pricing, encourages investment in a variety of transportation modes, is fairer and more equitable, and better reflects environmental impacts.

Transportation is a large and complex system with impacts throughout the economy and overall society and of course the environment. Cleaning up transportation at the pace required to address the climate crisis—and in a way that begins to undo a long history of racial, economic, and social injustices—will be the challenge of a lifetime. It will take years of effort by an incredibly diverse coalition of partners. The first step is to stop attacking one another, and focus on working together to address the immense challenge in front of us.

OPENING ARGUMENT Electric cars are bursting onto the U.S. market with astonishing speed, but meeting policy resistance as well. Dissecting some of the anti-EV arguments makes the case for why—and how—society needs to come together in a transportation reform movement.

Political Propulsion: Policy and the Rise of the Electric Vehicle

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Author

G. Tracy Mehan III - American Water Works Association and Scalia Law School

American Water Works Association and Scalia Law School

Current Issue

September-October 2022

Issue

book cover with a plug-in electric car on the front

Last May, Ford rolled out its first full-size electric pickup, the F-150 Lightning, retaining the name of its famous muscle truck that is the most popular vehicle in America year after year. According to Dan Neil, an admitted fanboy of electric vehicles and auto reviewer for the Wall Street Journal, “The Lightning represents an American manufacturing triumph, a brand resurrection, a win for working people, a vehicle segment out of the darkness into the light.” Raves Neil, “I can’t believe they got all those smart people to move to Michigan.”

The coming of the hard-working electric F-150 is a departure from the high-tech Tesla, the strongest brand in what the Germans call “electro-mobility,” catering to young, hip, and rich buyers. Whether or not this new plug-in all-American truck is the harbinger of mass commercialization is the subject of John D. Graham’s massive, comprehensive, thorough, enjoyable, and in-depth study The Global Rise of the Modern Plug-In Electric Vehicle: Public Policy, Innovation and Strategy.

Longtime readers of The Environmental Forum will recall Graham’s service as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, within the Office of Management and Budget, during the George W. Bush administration, where he functioned as “regulatory czar” overseeing all rules promulgated by federal agencies. His portfolio, both in academia and government, encompasses public policy and health, relative risk, and benefit-cost analysis. Oliver Houck and this reviewer noted his book, Risk v. Risk, co-edited with Jonathan Wiener, in our survey of best books for ELI’s 50th anniversary issue (“Reading the Environment—1969-2019,” November/December 2019). He also led the Paul H. O’Neill School of Public Affairs at Indiana University, where he still resides as professor of risk and policy analysis.

It is hard to conceive of a more exhaustive, informed study of the history of electro-mobility than the The Global Rise of the Modern Plug-In Electric Vehicle. Its thirteen chapters contain one hundred to two hundred footnotes each, citing a vast literature on its subject. It is global in reach and granular in its technical, environmental, economic, and political analysis. The book explains how politics, i.e., “industrial policy,” is at the heart of the rise of electrified vehicles.

This is not a story of spontaneous free markets responding to consumer demand, although many enterprising people and companies are highlighted throughout. Nor is this a case of the supply creating the demand or an inventor, like Steve Jobs, creating something people want without prior knowledge—“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Electrifying vehicles is a government-run show from end to end, be it in California, Japan, China, Europe, South Korea, or the United States as a whole. That said, absent outright bans on the internal combustion engine, unlikely at the federal level in the United States but not in California or Europe, “politicians will allow consumers to decide the rate of PEV (plug-in electric vehicle) penetration in the marketplace from 2021-2025.”

The marketing challenge of electric vehicles is illustrated by a study cited by Graham comparing the costs to drive a Hyundai Kona BEV, or battery-electric vehicle, and a Kona turbocharged gasoline vehicle over a 515-mile route in California. The gas vehicle “charged” twice, filling up at the pump while taking five minutes each time. The BEV recharged at Level 3 stations twice, but took 2.3 hours each time. “The cost comparison found that the energy costs of the BEV are more than twice the costs of the gasoline.”

Rachel Wolfe wrote of her trip in a Kia EV6 from New Orleans to Chicago and back for the Wall Street Journal. The title: “I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping.” $7.5 billion has been allocated in the newly enacted Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for the deployment of 500,000 hopefully faster charging stations.

Graham describes how concerns with energy security, urban air pollution, and climate change have all motivated national governments to promote electro-mobility, although the relative weight of these motives has changed over time. Fracking, directional drilling, and the demise of “peak oil” theories and the success, say, of the Clean Air Act in the United States have shifted the focus to climate—as has happened decisively in California.

A word about terminology and acronyms and other abbreviations the reader will encounter in Graham’s magnum opus. Much of the technical discussion in the book revolves around batteries, specifically, lithium-ion batteries, (LIBs). They are the single largest cost item in a plug-in electric vehicle (PEV), and have been instrumental in the rise of electro-mobility. The verdict is still out as to future LIB improvements, which might enable mass commercialization. Breakthroughs are needed.

The hybrid electric vehicle (HEV), think Toyota Prius, combines electric power and the internal combustion engine, allowing the batteries to be constantly recharged during “regenerative braking” or by the gasoline or diesel engine. “The plug-in hybrid vehicle (PHEV) is different because the battery charges from a standard electrical wall socket,” reports Graham. Since the PHEV does not unduly limit driving range, it reduces customer “range anxiety” over finding charging stations or the length of time that it takes to charge, which is a concern with battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) as well as PHEVs.

There are also fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs or FCVs) utilizing hydrogen instead of a battery to store electricity. Drive trains are the same in both fuel cell vehicles and BEVs.

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) is an umbrella term covering both BEVs and PHEVs, since both have plug-in capability for charging, unlike HEVs. The phrase “electrified vehicles” includes HEVs, PEVs, and FCVs.

According to Graham, “We may be standing on the precipice of a revolution in propulsion not seen since the horse and buggy.” Still, “the pace of the transition to PEVs will be determined as much by politics as by markets.”

Thus, he discusses subsidies, tax credits, protectionism, manipulation of markets, feebates, limits on cars in city centers, and other creative interventions by governments around the world. Clearly, Norway and California are in the vanguard of these efforts, with the former way ahead of the latter.

Germany was committed to diesel engines until the Volkswagen cheating scandal, described at length by Graham in a very interesting chapter. VW viewed the California zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) standards as more protectionist than protective. German Chancellor Angela Merkel even met with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Air Resource Board Chair Mary Nichols over breakfast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills to argue the benefits of diesel in reducing carbon dioxide levels, but to no avail. This trauma transformed Germany, and, hence, the European Union, from laggards to enthusiastic supporters of electrification. As another bit of good news, Japan has made hybrid vehicles work and is hoping, eventually, to move to a “hydrogen society.”

Each jurisdiction discussed in this volume has a unique story or history behind its governmental approach to electric vehicles, batteries, supply chains, subsidies, and regulation. To take another country and only one aspect of the topic, China, deciding it could not compete with traditional auto companies worldwide on the internal combustion engine, has sought to “leapfrog” to electric vehicles, as well as controlling the essential minerals and supply chains.

“China has been successful in manipulating the global price to discourage private investments in competitive mining and processing activities,” writes Graham. “Since the central government of China is willing to use rare earths as a geopolitical weapon, it will take coordinated governmental policies of multiple countries to neutralize China’s power.”

At the end of his tome, Graham revisits his earlier claim that we are on the “precipice of a revolution in propulsion not seen since the horse and buggy,” declaring that “we are, but the transition will move faster in some parts of the world than others.” He notes a study by the Boston Consulting Group, pre-Covid, estimating that “the 29 largest automakers in the world will invest more than $300 billion over the next ten years on new offerings of electrified vehicles. More than 400 new models (MHEVs, HEVs, PHEVs, and BEVs) should appear in 2025.” 78 will come to the U.S. market alone; six will be pickup trucks. A MHEV is a “mild” hybrid electric with a small, higher-voltage LIB, usually 48 volts supplementing the 12-volt lead-acid battery.

Despite this impressive investment, the future is uncertain, given the great unknown: consumer reaction. So Graham sets out four different scenarios which may, or may not, play out between now and 2030: BEVs are restricted to niche markets; a decade of robust competition between MHEVs, HEVs, and PEVs; PHEVs share the limelight with BEVs; and, finally, BEVs share the limelight with FCVs. He then goes on to discuss the variables of consumer appeal, CO2 regulation, and other policy that might tip the balance, one way or the other, among the various technologies.

While “some politicians may be inclined to make the decision for consumers by banning, restricting, or taxing heavily (as does Norway) the use of conventional powertrains,” again, it is unlikely to happen in the United States as a whole, California excepted. China and Europe are a different case entirely.

For electric vehicles, the consumer is still king in America, at least for the foreseeable future.

G. Tracy Mehan III is executive director for government affairs at the American Water Works Association and an adjunct professor at Scalia Law School, George Mason University. He may be contacted at gtracymehan@gmail.com.

On the Plug-in Electric Car Movement.

Utility Initiatives Aim to Accelerate Electric Vehicle Adoption and Use

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Author

Linda K. Breggin - Environmental Law Institute

Environmental Law Institute

Current Issue

July-August 2022

Issue

Utilities around the country are fostering adoption of electric vehicles, including investments in charging infrastructure, incentives and rebates, and customer education. These moves complement federal, state, and local plans and programs aimed at realizing an epic transition to electrification of the transportation sector, which accounts for over a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions.

Front and center are utility investments in much-needed EV charging infrastructure. McKinsey & Company projects that to achieve the federal sales target for zero-emission vehicles —50 percent by 2030—about 30 million new chargers will be needed to provide the requisite electricity. The estimated cost is a staggering $35 billion for hardware, planning, and installation for the public charging infrastructure alone, which is essential to alleviate consumer “range anxiety” and for EV owners without home charging options.

PWC’s Hugh Le opines that “utility players are in a unique position to fill the gap between the deployment of EV charging stations and mass EV adoption.” Environmental groups also welcome utility infrastructure investments, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color that may not realize the full benefits of transportation electrification due to inadequate charging infrastructure. Furthermore, as the Natural Resources Defense Council observes, utility investments in charging infrastructure can provide “a broader, more diverse, mass EV market” and displace diesel pollution from trucks and buses that disproportionately impacts low-income communities.

Utility investments are not without critics, however, including those concerned about the competitive impacts vis-a-vis private companies—particularly if utilities are allowed to recover their investments from ratepayers. Others worry about burdening electricity consumers; as a study by M.J. Bradley & Associates and Georgetown Climate Center notes: “The potential [exists] for stranded assets, given the early stage of the market and the fast-paced evolution of charging technology.”

The result is a still-evolving regulatory tableau. Investor-owned utilities, which serve 75 percent of customers nationwide, require regulatory approval for their initiatives—and rulings have been mixed on the permissibility of rate-basing infrastructure investments. Some states, such as Washington, have enacted laws that remove barriers and specifically sanction cost recovery by utilities.

In addition to infrastructure investments, research conducted by the National Council of State Legislators identifies a multitude of customer incentives and rebates provided by investor-owned utilities, rural electric cooperatives, and municipal generators. These include, for example, providing free chargers, financing charging installation, offering cash incentives for electric equipment, providing rebates on EV purchases, and time-of-use rate reductions or billing credits for residential, commercial, and multi-unit customers.

To accelerate the uptake of EVs, many utilities are providing information to customers about the benefits of EVs and the availability of charging stations. Complementary efforts focus on educating customers about the most economical EV charging times, which has the attendant benefit of helping utilities manage their load by deterring EV charging at peak periods of electricity demand.

In addition to these direct interventions, utilities are supporting transportation electrification through system upgrades, such as grid infrastructure improvements that will address the increased EV charging load.

The enthusiasm among utilities for EV-fostering initiatives is explained in part by what ICF’s Stacy Noblet calls a “golden opportunity” to boost revenue growth. To emphasize the point, she notes that a Chevy Bolt uses about 3,500 kilowatt-hours of energy per year, as compared to an entire household of three that uses only about 6,000 kilowatt-hours annually.

Other benefits may not be as immediately tangible but include, according to Noblet, favorable public relations opportunities, early compliance with potential climate mandates, and serving as “a valuable partner to local governments that need to hit decarbonization goals.”

Fortunately, benefits also can inure to customers who reap the health and environmental improvements of climate change mitigation and improved air quality. But, as the Bradley/Georgetown study points out, there are more immediate pecuniary benefits: “Higher utility revenues due to increased electricity sales and improved overall system utilization. . . puts downward pressure on electricity rates for all utility customers.”

Utility Initiatives Aim to Accelerate Electric Vehicle Adoption and Use

Reforming Funding for Active Transport

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Author

Hal Hiemstra - Summit Strategies

Summit Strategies

Current Issue

September-October 2020

Issue

Parent Article

A Political Tandem

Senator John Chafee turned to his senior transportation aid and asked, “How did we pull off the Transportation Enhancements Program?” It was 1993, some 18 months after Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act. She smiled and said, “Schuster just wanted earmarks. He didn’t really care about policy.” Pennsylvania Republican Bud Schuster was the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Chaffee, a Republican from Rhode Island, was the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Chafee had teamed up with New York Democrat Pat Moynihan to draft what was a radically different surface transportation bill — one that created the flexible Surface Transportation Program, or STP, with a $2.4 billion set-aside dedicated to a new category of “transportation enhancement” projects, including rail trails, bikeways, pedestrian walkways, and historic preservation projects.

We staff debated among ourselves how long it would take for state transportation departments to embrace rail trails and other bicycle and pedestrian facilities as legitimate modes of transportation. None imagined that nearly 30 years later, we would still be having some of the same funding fights.

Over the past three decades, various attempts to eliminate or weaken the transportation enhancements measure led Congress to eventually transition it into the Transportation Alternatives Program, or TAP, and to reduce its overall funding level. Thankfully, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, known also as RTC, has been in the middle of every one of those fights and prevailed more times than not.

Despite efforts to kill active transportation funding, since 1991 the enhancement program and its subsequent iterations have resulted in billions of dollars being invested in bicycle and pedestrian projects. That investment, though, is still less than 2 percent of the federal surface transportation budget.

This year, as Congress considers the reauthorization of yet another multi-year surface transportation bill, and at the urging of a coalition of bicycle, safety, trails, environmental, local government, and active transportation businesses, Chairman Peter DeFazio’s surface transportation reauthorization bill restores the10 percent set-aside within the STP program.

The bill also adds new flexibility for a state to meet non-federal match requirements for active transportation projects, and places restrictions on the ability of a state to transfer TAP funds out of the program (a trick recalcitrant state DOTs have become quite adept at over the last 30 years).

It has become clear that communities that perform best in encouraging active transportation create interconnected systems that make it convenient and safe to travel on foot or by bicycle to destinations on a routine basis (think Amsterdam or other cycle-friendly European cities). As such, with Representative Chris Pappas (D-NH) as their primary sponsor, earlier this year RTC proposed an entirely new federal program that could make grants to build safe and connected options for cyclists and walkers within and between communities. Their proposal led to the inclusion of the Active Transportation Connectivity Grants program as part of the now-House-passed INVEST Act.

Though initially funded at just $250 million, this program has the potential to drive future federal investments in active transportation networks connecting points within a community, and active transportation spines connecting one community to the next. Given the contributions such networks could make in achieving national carbon reduction and other policy goals, and their ability to accommodate short trips at the least cost to the public and individuals, RTC continues to lead a coalition advocating for funding connectivity grants, helping to transform America’s cities and rural communities.

Such regional networks would be among the most strategic, cost-effective federal transportation investments Congress could make.

Trails Now Essential Community Assets

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Author

Kevin Mills - Rails-to-Trails Conservancy

Rails-to-Trails Conservancy

Current Issue

September-October 2020

Issue

Parent Article

A Political Tandem

Rail-trails are a true American success story, with more than 24,000 miles of disused train corridors converted into beloved multi-use paths, linear parks for walking and biking. Upon its founding, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy prioritized tracking the rampant losses of train corridors, providing eager local advocates and governments with tools to build political will, acquire rights of way, and plan, design, construct, and maintain trails. Rail-trails proved popular in every state.

RTC reached the first of several crossroads that have shaped the movement with the landmark, reform-oriented 1991 federal transportation law known as ISTEA. Rail-trails are both greenways for recreation and highways for human-powered travel. Should we rely upon recreation or transportation for trail-building resources?

The decision to depend upon transportation policy was not obvious but proved propitious. ISTEA produced programs that remain the nation’s largest sources of funding for active transportation projects — together having provided more than $15 billion in federal investment plus $5.5 billion in matching funds.

Another pivotal point came in the 2005 federal transportation reauthorization. RTC helped create the Non-motorized Transportation Pilot Program, which provided $25 million each to four communities — rural, suburban, urban, and college town — to test whether focused investment creating critical infrastructure connections would prompt people to walk and bike instead of driving. The pilot was a resounding success, averting 85 million miles of driving in four communities during the study. Few realized the tectonic importance of the experiment. Railroad abandonments had slowed, but their legacy of disparate trails created a rich new opportunity.

Trails that don’t lead anywhere often proved less used and useful than those that connected to other trails and neighborhoods, and routine destinations like jobs, schools, restaurants, and transit. RTC organized dozens of communities to reimagine their existing trails as a seamless system.

Ten years later, hundreds of communities have ambitious trail and other active transportation network plans that will take many decades to build using only existing funding sources. While rail-trails typically serve as centerpieces of these networks, a focus on connecting people to the places they need to go prioritizes finding ways to fill critical gaps using available spaces, such as streets, utility lines, or active rail corridors with room for coexistence.

Network connectivity is the center of RTC’s work, including eight regional Trail Nation projects, such as the 800-mile Circuit Trails covering metropolitan Philadelphia and Camden. Long-distance trails, including the cross-country Great American Rail-Trail, serve as spines connecting communities and states along their routes. Together, networks and spines could form a national active transportation system akin to how roads connected America a century earlier.

RTC’s policy priority is to supplement existing programs with deeper investments to complete connected systems. Our challenge is to establish this innovation as federal policy and prompt more states to prioritize connectivity and invest resources.

In 2020, we encounter another critical juncture. COVID-19 has prompted a rapid boom in walking and bicycling, with trail use surging 200 percent at the pandemic’s height. People needing to get active outdoors for physical and mental well-being are relying on trails and streets temporarily closed to traffic. Non-drivers, including some persons with disabilities and essential workers, rely on trails to commute and meet daily needs, especially given limited transit options. A decade of rising pedestrian and bicycle fatalities, now about 20 percent of all traffic deaths, raises the urgency of providing safe routes.

Today, most everyone believes that rail-trails are nice to have, but now plans and policies must prioritize trail systems as essential assets, necessary to a community’s success.

A Political Tandem

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Author

Peter Harnik - Rails-to-Trails Conservancy

Rails-to-Trails Conservancy

Current Issue

September-October 2020

Issue

When the once-secure American railroad industry went through its grinding economic contraction in the 20th century, a notable casualty was the dense lattice of rail corridors that once connected virtually every city, town, hamlet, mine, and forest. Beginning in 1916, the system shrank from 254,000 miles to about 137,000 today. Many of those potentially useful rights of way were plowed under or otherwise lost forever, but thousands of others were saved by plucky activists or farsighted government agencies for non-motorized trails, utility corridors, and other public purposes.

Interestingly, the conversion of abandoned rail lines to trails wasn’t a Great Society-type program that came out of a mandate from Washington, D.C. It was a from-the-grassroots movement that bubbled up in the 1960s in several small midwestern places. But, within a few years of the creation of the earliest trails, the rise of some thorny political and legal issues — not to mention some exciting opportunities — elevated the issue to national prominence and caught the attention of Capitol Hill and the executive branch.

Federal agencies and ultimately Congress were pulled into the fray. Most relevant was the Interstate Commerce Commission, which had been dealing with abandonments for decades, but only in the context of a binary conflict between railroads and shippers. The idea of a “third way” — post-abandonment trails — was a new knuckleball that the commission was less than excited to take a swing at. Now, suddenly there was pressure from local communities and citizens organizations to slow down the process to afford them more time so that they could frantically gear up to rescue a line for a trail.

The other federal agency that perked up its ears to the faint sound of rail-trails coming was the Department of the Interior, specifically its small and obscure Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, a unit that had been created in 1962 by Secretary Stewart Udall to fill the space between the highly preservation-oriented National Park Service and the sports-and-crafts bent of local park departments. With a motivated and entrepreneurial staff, the bureau had developed a culture of activism, doing outreach into low-income communities that were often political tinderboxes partly because of a lack of outdoor places to exercise. Rail-trails, which were national in scope but not “natural” enough to pass muster with the National Park Service, were a perfect fit for the bureau, and in 1971 it published a visionary booklet called “Establishing Trails on Rights-of-Way.” Among other things, the publication exhorted activism and even noted the specific locations of hundreds of railroad corridors that had been abandoned between 1960 and 1970.

Meanwhile, two unrelated tides were rising on Capitol Hill. One aimed to solve the railroads’ economic problems, while the other sought to address the public’s demand for more trails. If joined together, they would make waves. Ironically, when it finally happened, the railroad law yielded a surprise trails program, and the trail act broke new ground in railroad practice.

First up was the railroad bill. By the time the Penn Central went bankrupt in 1970, the tightly regulated U.S. railroad industry was so deeply mired in crisis that Congress needed 11 years and five different laws to devise a way out. One of many sticky questions was whether railroads would be allowed to abandon money-losing routes and, if so, how. In 1975, when a Senate subcommittee held 15 days of hearings on the topic, virtually everyone who testified shared one of two opposing concerns — keeping the lines open for the benefit of shippers and communities, or sloughing off uneconomical routes for the benefit of railroads and their stockholders. But one subcommittee staff member, Tom Allison, had something else on his mind.

Allison, a young Seattle lawyer, was a strong runner (“he would cut back to quarter-speed so that I could keep up with him,” recalled one of his colleagues), he loved trains (“actually, he loved everything that went fast,” his wife later reminisced), and he was a clever tactician (“I have yet to find anyone who had his overarching understanding of the role of railroads,” reminisced another committee colleague, and he “was driven by notions of the good things that government can do.”). During his law school years at the University of Washington, Allison had closely followed a local controversy over the 1971 abandonment of a train track through the university’s grounds. The fledgling effort to save it as the Burke-Gilman running and biking trail may have had particular resonance for him since he had suffered leg damage in a bicycle accident while in school.

When Allison passed the Washington state bar, he had the honor of being sworn in by the Supreme Court’s pro-conservation justice, William O. Douglas, and then landed a clerkship with Senator Warren Magnuson (D-WA), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. In D.C., in his free time, Allison ran on the C&O Canal towpath (which had been saved and recently turned into a national park partly through the help of Justice Douglas). While running, Allison undoubtedly spotted the adjacent, little-used Georgetown Branch rail line, and he was probably also aware of efforts in nearby Virginia to create a trail out of the abandoned W&OD Railroad. He started wondering whether he could use politics to combine his instincts for railroad preservation with his interests in recreation and nature conservation. Fortunately, at work, he had been promoted to counsel for the subcommittee on surface transportation.

What Allison envisioned was the preservation of abandoned rail corridors. He may or may not have known about the many legal complexities that surround the ownership of the corridors, but, with Magnuson’s blessing, he took to Senator Vance Hartke (D-IN) the concept of a program for developing railroad rights-of-way as car-free transportation routes. In June 1975, Senators Hartke and Magnuson cosponsored the Conversion of Abandoned Rights-of-Way Act. The bill called for the identification of railroad rights-of-way without rail service (or where it was likely soon to terminate) and which were potentially suitable for biking or walking. It authorized $25 million for the Departments of Transportation and Interior to provide technical and financial assistance for the conversions. The concept was approved and folded as Section 809(b) into the much larger Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform bill.

Every bill goes through markup — backroom discussion by the senators — before passage. For the 4R Act the principal participants were Hartke, Lowell Weicker (R-CT), James Buckley (R-NY) and Howard Baker (R-TN). Although markup sessions are initially private, after 30 years the record is unsealed. The conversation on Section 809(b), as revealed from the National Archives, was very brief:

Hartke: “Should states be assisted in the acquisition of abandoned rights-of-way for conversion to recreational uses? I think they ought to preserve them for bicycle paths and things of that sort.”

Buckley: “How much money is involved?”

Hartke: “$25 million. I think in a lot of cases they ought to have acquired these rights-of-way anyway. All right. Is there any objection to that provision?”

(No response.)

After passage by the committee, the full $7.6-billion 4R Act passed the Senate in December.

Two weeks later, the House of Representatives enacted similar legislation. It included a provision to set up a smaller, $5-million rails-to-trails program within the Transportation Department.

Since the House and Senate bills were not identical, a conference committee was set up to iron out the differences and bring the two bills into alignment. That committee accepted the more generous Senate rails-to-trails funding.

However, before the final vote, the Ford administration announced that the spending level was too high and threatened a veto. In response, the conferees returned for intensive negotiations with the White House. The three-year rails-to-trails program was reduced but it survived. President Ford signed the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act in February 1976. Thanks to Tom Allison, the United States finally had a national rails-to-trails program.

In reflecting on Allison’s work, his colleague Sallie Adams said, “Tom was able to keep the micro, the macro, and the public interest all in alignment.” He had done that with this program — a small strategy that, if it could prove itself, held the seeds for something much bigger. Sadly, while Allison had a very successful legal career, his behind-the-scenes role in the rails-to-trails movement wasn’t recognized during his lifetime. He died in 2012 with his achievement unheralded.

Meanwhile, an even more remarkable story was starting to play out in the other chamber of the Capitol, on the “trail side” of the coin.

When it came to footpaths, Congress had never shown much interest. It had created the 1968 National Trails System Act, but in comparison to canals, railroads, and roads, trails received little funding. To the limited extent that trails ever received support, it was always at the state or local level, and usually through private donations or volunteer labor.

Even the 1968 law, passed with great anticipation, was disappointing to its backers. Eight years after passage, so little had occurred on the ground that frustrated conservationists prevailed upon Representative Roy Taylor (D-NC) to schedule an oversight hearing. The testimony revealed that, in a typical Washington scenario, money had been authorized by Congress but then hadn’t been obligated by the Nixon and Ford administrations. It was like being told to go shopping with an empty wallet.

“In his gentlemanly way, Taylor pinned their asses to the wall,” recalled Cleve Pinnix, the committee staffer who set up the hearing. He was describing the predicament of the bureaucrats who came up to testify. The record clearly showed that significant trail money was badly needed. When the elderly Taylor retired soon thereafter, he was succeeded by a remarkable labor lawyer, a congressional bulldog from San Francisco named Phil Burton (D-CA).

Although parks were not Burton’s top passion, his primary interest in justice for the poor and downtrodden made him see parks as refuges for the less fortunate. As a San Franciscan, he also had a particular interest in preserving the redwoods and saving the green spaces around the Golden Gate Bridge.

Burton had staffer Cleve Pinnix do much of the policy work while he did the political horse trading. The first outcome of the collaboration was the breathtakingly vast National Parks and Recreation Act. (Memorably, when the $1.4-billion bill cleared a committee hurdle in only five minutes, a conservative congressman said, “Notice how quiet we are. We all got something in there.”) Passed in 1978, it still stands as the largest park bill ever voted by Congress.

The following year Burton picked up where he had left off. Since seven trail bills had failed to make it into the previous bill, the congressman and Pinnix pulled those concepts together as the nucleus of new legislation to amend the National Trails System Act. The bill mostly focused on the nitty-gritty needs of particular trails, but one section was different. It was lofty and non-specific:

“The secretary of transportation, in administering the Federal Aid Program, together with chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the secretary of the interior, in administering the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976, shall encourage state and local agencies and private interests to establish such trails using the provisions of such programs.”

The bill passed the House on September 22. The vague “such trails” clause was simply referred to as one of “numerous technical and clarifying amendments.” During the House floor debate, it wasn’t even mentioned. The Senate also passed it, but time ran out before the bills could be resolved, and the measure died with the end of the session.

Burton planned to immediately reintroduce his amendments in the next Congress, but then came the political earthquake of the 1980 election. Not only was President Jimmy Carter defeated by Ronald Reagan, but the Democrats also lost their majority in the Senate as well as multiple seats in the House. Because of the precarious new politics, Burton asked his staff and allies to take the bill around to all the remaining senators and to members of the bureaucracy to make sure that no one had any problems with it. One of the young allies who literally walked the bill around the halls of the Interior Department was Craig Evans, the new director of the American Hiking Society. Normally, Evans recalled, when he spent time at the sprawling Interior Department, it was in the sixth corridor, at the Na-tional Park Service, but this time Burton specifically told him to go to a different corridor and show the bill to a young lawyer from Long Island named Pete Raynor.

Although Raynor had been working at a large New York law firm, he soon decided that he wanted to work for the public good, settled for a lower salary, and landed a job in the solicitor’s office at Interior. There, he cut his environmental teeth on a lawsuit over the newly established Redwoods National Park. Through that work he connected with Burton, who asked him to help draft legislation to enlarge the park.

“Burton was a brilliant, omnivorous, larger-than-life character with a steel trap mind,” recalls Raynor. “Anything he read, he never forgot. If you wrote him a memo, he could recall it better than you could. He remembered the exact wording of early drafts that had long been discarded. Plus, he was aggressive and fearless. He rose late, rarely got to the committee room before 4 p.m. and then worked past midnight. I would go over there in the evening and we’d kick around ideas for hours. I was mesmerized.” They wrote a redwoods bill together and Burton saw that it got passed in 1978.

Raynor, like Tom Allison, was a runner on the C&O Canal, which headed in the direction of his home in suburban Maryland. He too soon noticed the lightly-used Georgetown Branch railroad track which paralleled the towpath before curving off into the woods. “I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if instead of having my wife drive to pick me up from the Canal, I could run on the tracks, which would take me almost right home.” But, as a lawyer, he also realized that if the railroad ever stopped running, the easements underlying the track might likely disappear, breaking the corridor into useless individual parcels.

One of Raynor’s friends and mentors at the National Park Service was Chuck Rinaldi, the man in charge of land acquisition for the Appalachian Trail. At the time, the AT was painfully discontinuous, with many on-road sections substituting for proper natural trail routes. Rinaldi was an aggressive, skillful negotiator and land purchaser, and one of his mantras was, “Don’t buy easements.” In contrast, he pioneered a counter-intuitive approach of buying land with full title, then turning around and offering easements for things like cattle grazing, a second home, or a farm-road crossing. Spending time with Rinaldi gave Raynor a good opportunity to learn about the many problems and challenges that easements posed to maintaining a continuous corridor.

When Craig Evans carried Burton’s draft bill over to Raynor’s office and Raynor saw the sentence about railroad corridors, he knew immediately that it was not specific enough to make a difference in a legal dispute. Going to one of his superiors, he suggested the idea of something stronger. “How about a ‘bank’ for railroad corridors?” he hypothesized. “If they were in a bank, they wouldn’t be officially abandoned but could be saved for the future.” This was pushing an envelope that didn’t even exist. This was the invention of a unique device in public policy, soon to be called railbanking.

The response he received was enigmatic. “Whatever your idea is on this, I don’t want to know about it.” To Raynor, that was a go-ahead to try it on Burton’s people. Pinnix liked the concept, as did his Republican staff counterpart, Clay Peters. To the theoretical worry that the railroad industry might have a problem with railbanking, the staffers recalled one of Burton’s frequent responses: “I only deal with people at the table.” The railroads weren’t at this particular table (and not even aware of it). In any case, Raynor, whose old New York law firm had represented the Pennsylvania Railroad, felt he was attuned to the rail industry’s thinking about this issue.

“The railroads’ main fear was liability,” he said. “They didn’t really care about a bank. They just didn’t want anyone using their tracks, getting hurt and then suing. As long as we could protect them from liability, they didn’t worry all that much about the old corridors.”

Raynor loves what he calls “simple little laws.” When he sat down at his typewriter that day, the language that he banged out — only two sentences — did just that. To the bland original, which he left alone, he added some muscle:

“Consistent with the purposes of that act, and in furtherance of the national policy to preserve established railroad rights-of-way for future reactivation of rail service, to protect rail transportation corridors, and to encourage energy efficient transportation use, in the case of interim use of any established railroad rights-of-way pursuant to donation, transfer, lease, sale, or otherwise in a manner consistent with the National Trails System Act, if such interim use is subject to restoration or reconstruction for railroad purposes, such interim use shall not be treated, for purposes of any law or rule of law, as an abandonment of the use of such rights-of-way for railroad purposes. If a state, political subdivision, or qualified private organization is prepared to assume full responsibility for management of such rights-of-way and for any legal liability arising out of such transfer or use, and for the payment of any and all taxes that may be levied or assessed against such rights-of-way, then the commission shall impose such terms and conditions as a requirement of any transfer or conveyance for interim use in a manner consistent with this act, and shall not permit abandonment or discontinuance inconsistent or disruptive of such use.”

In the bill’s accompanying report, Pinnix added a bit of explanation to bring the legalese into easier focus: “The purpose of this section is to encourage the development of additional metropolitan area trails in conjunction with the provisions of the Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act of 1976. This reflects the concern that previous congressional efforts have not been successful. . . despite the fact that these efforts have also been to preserve established railroad rights-of-way for future reactivation of rail service. . . . Interim use. . . , if subject to restoration or reconstruction for railroad purposes, should not necessarily constitute an abandonment of such right-of-way for railroad purposes.”

This new language was added right around New Year’s Day 1981, between the end of the 96th and the beginning of the 97th Congresses. At the same time, Burton was being given the chairmanship of a different committee and had to step down to number two on the National Parks subcommittee. The new chairman became Representative John Seiberling (D-OH), a close ally and a committed supporter of parks and trails.

A few months later, after the subcommittee had held a public hearing, there was another closed markup session, in which the railbanking provision played only a bit role:

Seiberling: “[This amendment] deletes unnecessary language so that if some organization is willing to assume the full responsibility for assuming an old railroad right-of-way as a trail, paying the taxes thereon, then the interim use will be permitted. There is already in the law a provision authorizing the use of abandoned railroad rights of way for trails. This amendment protects railroad interests by providing that rights of way can be maintained even though rail use is discontinued, and assists recreation users by providing opportunities for trail use where such rights of way exist.”

Burton: “With the understanding that the railroad people under these procedures come to us — if they come to us — and say that this is something that is not acceptable to them, that we will drop it.”

When Seiberling began to explain that the amendment did not amend the existing Railroad Revitalization and Regulatory Reform Act, Burton interrupted him.

Burton: “Just to be sure that we do not have an inadvertent impact . . . the amendment is adopted subject to the previously stated understanding.”

After being voted out of committee toward the end of 1981, the bill finally came before the full House of Representatives on May 11, 1982, with Burton as floor manager. He had worked his usual dealmaker magic, and the floor debate was a love-fest, with members of all political stripes showing support. The bill passed, 389-6.

Over in the Senate, three months later, the Public Lands Subcommittee held its own hearing on the Trails Act Amendment. A cross-section of federal agencies and private hiking groups strongly endorsed the bill, but again the railbanking provision received virtually no attention. The only person who flagged its importance — the only one who even mentioned the word “railroad” — was Jeanette Fitzwilliams of the Virginia Trails Council. A month later, the Interior Department’s official response devoted only one pallid sentence to the topic: “While we strongly support the objectives of this provision, we defer to the views of the other agencies involved as to its enactment.”

The measure was reported out of the Senate committee but it unfortunately again lost out to the calendar. Failing to come up for a full vote in time, it expired with the 97th Congress. The legislation would have to start over once more.

This next time the trail gods were finally smiling. On January 27, 1983, the bill, unchanged, was introduced by Senators Frank McClure (R-MT) and Malcolm Wallop (R-ID). It passed the Senate by voice vote on February 3, passed the House in identical form by voice vote on March 15, and was signed by President Ronald Reagan as the National Trails System Act Amendments, Public Law 98-11, on March 28.

Two weeks later, on April 10, Phillip Burton died of an aneurysm.

Although neither Tom Allison nor Phil Burton lived long enough to be celebrated for their contributions to the nation’s conservation, recreation, and historic preservation, their legacies shine on in the more than 2,000 rail-trails that are in existence around the country. Meanwhile, Pete Raynor did live to be recognized for his “simple little law.” Upon the discovery of his role — 40 years after the fact — the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy in 2018 presented him with its Rail-Trail Champion award at a ceremony on the Capital Crescent Trail. TEF

Adapted from From Rails to Trails: The Making of America’s Active Transportation Network, by Peter Harnik, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Forthcoming May 2021.

The rails-to-trails concept is famous, celebrated throughout the nation. Millions of Americans use the trails for recreation and transportation. Forty years later, it’s time to acclaim the two behind-the-scenes staffers who made a miracle happen on Capitol Hill.

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