IV. CONCLUSION: A COMPONENT, NOT A PANACEA

For all its virtues, ISTEA alone cannot solve the world's energy problems, even those attributable solely to U.S. transportation. The majority of the Car Talk committee, for example, identified a comprehensive package of policies that would return U.S. car and light truck greenhouse emissions to the 1990 level by 2005. The list includes the following:

• raised vehicle fuel economy standards;
  
  
• feebate incentives for low rolling resistance tires;
  
  
• integrated, ISTEA-based, land use and transportation strategies;
  
  
• reform of workplace parking subsidies;
  
  
• shifting state and local road financing from tax-based subsidies to cost-of-driving fees;
  
  
• electric vehicle introduction;
  
  
• natural gas vehicle introduction; and
  
  
• biofuel and other low-carbon fuel introduction.^[95]

Some of these measures are controversial. But, as the list makes clear, meeting energy conservation goals in the U.S. transportation sector will require a multifaceted approach, with policies to promote significant improvements in vehicle technology as well as more efficient patterns of mobility.

We also will have to do more outside the transportation sector. For example, in 1991 a group of four energy and environmental organizations banded together to devise and promote comprehensive strategies necessary both to reduce energy consumption and maintain a strong economy. The resulting report, America's Energy Choices, stresses the need to deploy efficient technologies in residential and commercial building design and retrofit, as well as to reduce energy intensity and increase the use of renewable energy resources in industrial processes. It also recommends motor vehicle fuel economy improvements.^[96]

But ISTEA's partnership approach to federalism has a critical role in any sensible national energy strategy. The trends on vehicle use and transportation energy consumption speak too plainly of where we are headed if we do not maintain and build upon the current federal programs that enable and encourage regions and states to address these problems in their planning, investment and management strategies. America's Energy Choices, developed prior to the passage of ISTEA, put it this way:

A range of policies are needed to reduce the steady increase in vehicle miles traveled by providing a wider range of transportation choices, and encouraging the use of the most cost-effective combination of transportation modes for each application.^[97]

This is exactly what the statute is designed to do. Although there can be legitimate argument over whether ISTEA goes far enough, to roll back any of its efficiency-promoting features would be a disaster.

Instead, the reauthorization should maintain a strong federal leadership role in the transportation efficiency partnership. It should maintain and improve the federal efficiency goals for transportation. It should build upon the planning safeguards that place energy considerations at the heart of transportation planning and encourage realistic, thoroughly considered investment strategies. It should maintain and improve upon the programs that dedicate at least some funding for efficiency strategies and allow local flexibility in meeting transportation needs. Let's keep the "E" in ISTEA.

Notes

95. Majority Report to the President, supra, 14.

96. Alliance to Save Energy, et al., supra.

97. Id. at 22.