“There is always a huge climate benefit — and, I would argue, a safety benefit — to ensuring people have access to excellent public transit,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said earlier this month at the Transportation Research Board’s annual meeting. “Even if we weren’t aggressively working to decarbonize existing modes of transportation, that alone is one of the biggest and the best things we can do from a climate perspective.” This is the closest thing to a mic drop that exists at such an event, so the assembled transportation academics, urban planners, and civil engineers erupted into applause. Buttigieg had to pause, letting the hoots fade out before he could finish his remarks. He was onstage with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to announce the first blueprint to decarbonize U.S. transportation by 2050, an unprecedented collaboration between the Departments of Transportation, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency to move the country away from using fossil fuels when, well, moving around.
Despite its many strengths, the blueprint is largely built around two things that have very little to do with what got Buttigieg the most applause from transit professionals: It’s heavily reliant on developing technologies that don’t exist yet and the Biden administration’s goal to have half of the new vehicles sold in 2030 to be electric (a figure closely negotiated with automakers). The latter point is perhaps why the slow but steadily growing number of electric vehicles, or EVs, sold in this country each year has become its own kind of shorthand for the decarbonization revolution. (“Electric Vehicles Keep Defying Almost Everyone’s Predictions,” “Electric Vehicle Sales Hit a Tipping Point in 2022,” “Electric Vehicles = 10% Of New Vehicle Sales Globally!”)…
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