Clean Air Transportation Conformity

Accounting for Travel Growth to Assure Progress for Livable Communities and Healthy Air Quality

The Clean Air Act's transportation conformity provision assures that the $150 billion dollars spent annually on transportation infrastructure will not unwittingly undermine progress towards healthful air quality. It motivates broad support for vehicle technology, fuels, and inspection and maintenance strategies for air pollution reduction. It protects the public's right-to-know the short and long-term effects of transportation decisions on air quality and community livability before funds are committed to projects likely to shape the land use growth patterns of metropolitan areas for decades to come. Conformity provides accountability and integrity to air quality and transportation planning in seriously polluted and fast-growing metropolitan areas and communities and will be vital to timely and cost-effective attainment of healthful air quality in coming years, particularly to reduce NOx and small particle air pollutants. Conformity can help transit, traffic safety, smart growth, bicycle, pedestrian, and clean vehicle projects in the competition for transportation funding.

Growth of motor vehicle use is one of the most stubborn obstacles to lasting progress in cutting NOx, particulate matter, and cancer-causing air toxics from the transportation sector. National and state programs to control air pollution from transportation through cleaner vehicle and fuel technologies and inspection and maintenance have significantly reduced motor vehicle pollution rates. But because of steep increases in the number of vehicle miles, cuts in the amount of pollutant emitted per mile, particularly for NOx and small particulates (PM2.5), have been offset by growth in miles driven.

Growth in motor vehicle use stems from many factors. Large investments in highway system expansion, subsidies for driving and sprawl, and policies favoring increased car-dependence over the past half-century have contributed to growth in trip distances and the number of vehicle trips for most Americans. More than three-fourths of all job and housing growth since 1970 has been in suburban areas that have been designed to promote automobile access as the only convenient or available means of travel for most trips. From 1970 to 1998, vehicle miles traveled (VMT)-has increased by 136 percent, or more than three times the rate of population growth. Other indicators of driving activity - vehicle trips per person, average vehicle trip length, and number of motor vehicles per person - have also risen sharply. Traffic growth not only threatens air quality progress, but it adds to traffic congestion and travel times, greenhouse gas emissions, dependence on imported petroleum, and degradation of water quality and community livability.

The 1990 Clean Air Act (CAA) included strengthened provisions to assure that transportation investment and planning decisions in metropolitan areas would be accountable for the short and longer-term effects they have on air pollution emissions and traffic growth. The regional transportation system must be designed to limit emissions from transportation sources in a nonattainment area to the levels set by the State in its clean air implementation plan.

The CAA requires that state implementation plans (SIPs) for achieving healthful air quality in polluted areas establish emission budgets for mobile sources (cars and trucks), stationary sources (powerplants and factories), and area sources (paints, agriculture), including control strategies limiting emissions from each. Trade-offs can be negotiated between control of various sources, encouraging exploration of the lowest cost means for timely attainment. The CAA requires short-term transportation funding programs and long-term (20-year) regional transportation plans conform to these emission budgets so that new transportation approval, acceptance, and funding decisions will not violate the SIP emission limits or delay timely air quality attainment.

Transportation conformity has ensured that state and local air quality planners account for the growth in vehicle driving activity and other sources of vehicular emissions, helping assure progress on clean air goals in the past decade:

• Conformity has expanded the base of political support for control strategies to reduce air pollution emissions through more stringent emission controls on vehicles, cleaner fuels, and more effective inspection and maintenance. Local and state transportation agencies and real estate development interests and the highway construction industry are motivated to support such strategies to avert transportation conformity constraints on highway construction funding.
• Conformity has assured that transportation agencies coordinate with state and regional environmental agencies through interagency consultation procedures to evaluate the emissions impacts of major transportation investments before funding decisions are final.
• Conformity has fostered continuing improvement in transportation forecasting and emissions models used to appraise the implications of transportation and land use alternatives, providing a more sound basis for air quality and transportation plans.
• Conformity has enhanced the public's right-to-know about air quality and transportation impacts before decisions have been made.

These successes have come about even though transportation conformity is only now being fully implemented for the first time by many regions.

SIP Delays. Full implementation of the 1990 conformity amendment was delayed until motor vehicle emissions budgets were established in SIPs. Delays by the States in the development of air quality attainment plans for most of the nation's largest cities has delayed setting the emissions budgets that are to be met by metropolitan transportation systems. The first motor vehicle budgets designed to attain the 1-hour ozone standard in most large cities were first submitted in 2000 in response to litigation enforcing Congress's deadlines for SIPs.

These new mobile source emission budgets took effect last year as interim budgets while EPA continues to review the adequacy of the overall attainment plan for the more polluted metropolitan areas. These budgets provide a standard against which to measure the emissions produced by regional transportation plans. Metropolitan areas have 18 months from the submission of the interim budgets to revise their transportation plans to meet the new emissions targets for motor vehicles in each air shed. Most cities will adopt final revisions to their transportation plans to meet the 1990 Act in 2001.

For most of the 1990s, conformity in most regions relied on a weak, widely criticized, and easily gamed 'build/no-build' test established by EPA as an interim stop-gap measure while States were developing the attainment plans with emissions budgets that are required by the CAA. The result was a system that required extensive modeling and planning, some upgrade to analysis methods, but in most cases produced little change in transportation plans or investments beyond a few ridesharing and transit projects. Now that attainment motor vehicle emission budgets are finally in place in non-attainment areas, conformity is operating as intended.

Rule Changes. Conflict over loopholes in the transportation conformity regulations also added to delay. Loopholes in the national regulations that allowed new highway projects to receive initial funding commitments after an area exceeded its emissions budget delayed full implementation of conformity until a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit 1999 overturned these overly broad exemptions.

Metropolitan areas were given substantial new incentive to meet emissions budgets in March 1999 when the Court of Appeals overturned EPA rules that had allowed state and regional agencies to ignore conformity problems by exempting a large share of transportation projects from conforming when initial funding commitments are made. The 1990 CAA exempted old transportation projects from the new conformity requirements for three years as the new law took effect. But the national rules unlawfully extended this narrow exemption, creating a process to exempt future road projects that had never received initial project funding commitments so long as they existed on paper. The Court of Appeals held that the CAA requires the regional transportation plan to conform when project and plan approval, acceptance, and funding decisions are made. Projects envisioned in past plans, but not yet approved for funding, should be reconsidered as the pollution problems, plans, control strategies, and knowledge of the effects of projects and plans changes over time.

Before the March 1999 court ruling, in areas where conformity had lapsed, such as Atlanta in 1998-2000, all funds for six years worth of projects had been committed to projects that together would worsen air quality and no funds were available to the MPO to remedy the exceedance of emission budgets. Only the decision of the Court restored the authority of the MPO to re-allocate funds from these projects to alternatives that would reduce mobile source emissions.

The court also overturned EPA regulations that had allowed motor vehicle emission budgets submitted by States to be used for conformity determinations before EPA had made any determination that the budgets meet the requirements of the Act.

Implementing Clean Air Projects During a Conformity Lapse. Another change to the conformity rules allows projects that reduce emissions to receive funding approval when an area's conformity status has lapsed. EPA's initial rule barred transit and other projects that reduce emissions from going forward if motor vehicle emissions in an area exceed the emissions allowed in the SIP. Subsequently, EPA revised the rule to allow projects identified in the State's clean air plan to receive federal funds.

Guidance from US DOT and EPA issued in April 2000, assure that transportation funds can be reallocated by the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) and state to implement transit or VMT-reducing measures needed to meet air quality budgets. US DOT had previously refused to approve a transportation improvement program (TIP) for a metropolitan area, even if the TIP approved funding for projects that reduce vehicle emissions and are included in the State's air quality plan. The recent Guidance allows interim TIPs containing funding authorizations for projects in the air quality plan to be approved. The result of this TIP Guidance is to allow MPOs to shift funds in a nonattainment area to respond to a conformity lapse, and to prevent any loss of federal transportation funds allocated to that nonattainment area.

When Atlanta went into a conformity lapse in early 1998, it was the region most affected by US DOT's prior policy. However, Atlanta did not lose transportation dollars during its conformity lapse because US DOT relaxed its prior policy to allow emission-reducing projects to be funded as an alternative to polluting projects in the prior TIP. Atlanta successfully reprogrammed hundreds of millions in federal funds to emissions-reducing transit and HOV projects, as well as highway safety, traffic signal, pedestrian/bicycle, and bridge reconstruction activities that do not impair air quality and are exempt from conformity.

This flexible policy aimed at helping areas solve their air quality problems is being abandoned by US DOT. In recent litigation, US DOT has filed papers arguing that no project can be approved for funding if the entire TIP does not conform. Thus the Department appears to be returning to the initial policy that blocks funding for emission-reducing projects.

Prospects for Reducing Traffic Growth

While technology based emission control strategies have been vital to progress towards cleaner air, strategies that reduce VMT growth can make low cost contributions to timely attainment and maintenance of healthful air quality, offering substantial benefits beyond clean air. These strategies include smart growth that renews existing communities and incentives and investments that improve transit, walking, bicycling, ridesharing, and telecommuting. Together these can provide reductions of 15 to 25 percent in VMT, hours of vehicle travel, and emissions relative to trend-line automobile-dependent sprawl development forecast over the 20 year horizon of regional transportation plans. Recent changes in the tax code, make it more attractive for employers to provide transit, vanpool, and cash-in-lieu-of-parking benefits for their employees, which if widely implemented could reduce motor vehicle commute trips by 26-30 percent. These and other innovative strategies - such as intelligent transportation systems, value pricing of roads and transit, usage-based car insurance, traffic calming for pedestrian and bicycle safety, smart growth and telework-can expand equitable access to jobs and public facilities and reduce growth in traffic, congestion, and air pollution. Regions can cap and reduce per capita VMT in coming years with such strategies, producing diverse benefits.

However, further enhancement of computer models is needed in many regions to better account for induced travel which comes from changes in land use, mode, and time of day of travel, in response to changes in travel costs, congestion, or transportation facilities. Obsolete models often lead to overestimation of the benefits of expanding costly new capacity and miss more cost-effective management and operations strategies. Enhanced modeling tools are important to allow the planning agencies to reliably assess the benefits of measures that can reduce traffic growth and congestion.

The Future of Transportation Conformity

States and local governments have the opportunity to use their SIP process to establish caps on pollution from the transportation sector that will make conformity a meaningful performance objective for progress in attaining more healthful air quality by reducing traffic growth. If they choose, by law they may increase emission controls on transportation vehicles and fuels and non-transportation sources to allow extra room for growth in motor vehicle use while still meeting deadlines for timely attainment of healthful air quality. If states relax emission controls or allow increased emissions from power plants, new energy development, airport expansions, or other activities, states may need to further curb motor vehicle emissions to offset these other sources of pollution and protect public health.

Conformity will help assure progress towards timely attainment of newly revised National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). Proposed and potential emission controls on diesel engines and fuels and off-road mobile emissions will create considerable new room for growth in motor vehicle use within conforming transportation plans unless the on-road SIP motor vehicle emission budgets are reduced to assure more timely attainment of healthful air quality. Many transportation agencies will seek to use such near-term emission controls to make irretrievable commitments to sprawl-inducing outer beltways and other traffic and pollution generating investments in advance of the setting of new more stringent motor vehicle emission budgets that are part of attainment demonstrations to the new NAAQS. If this occurs, the public, utilities, and industry alike will face higher costs and greater delay to attain healthful air quality.

Areas in attainment of the current NAAQS but at risk of being classified as non-attainment under the new NAAQS could avoid need for conformity analysis if they adopt attainment plans to meet the proposed NAAQS prior to established deadlines and demonstrate timely progress towards meeting the new NAAQS and remain in attainment of current NAAQS. By law, newly designated non-attainment areas have one year following designation before conformity applies to their transportation plans.

Congress should resist pressure from the road builders to weaken or rework conformity before it has had opportunity to operate under the framework of adopted emission budgets demonstrating attainment, which have only taken effect during the last year in most seriously polluted regions.

For more information: Michael Replogle, Environmental Defense, 1875 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20009, 202-387-3500