As part of ongoing efforts to relax Obama-era climate efforts, the Trump Administration on May 29 repealed a rule that required recipients of federal transportation dollars -- mostly states, cities, and metropolitan planning areas -- to measure greenhouse gas emissions when planning transportation projects.
The rule change removes the obligation to measure greenhouse gas emissions from fuel use by vehicles that would be associated with new transportation projects.
Finalized in the last days of the Obama Administration, the greenhouse gas performance measure was designed to make state and regional infrastructure planners account for climate impacts to encourage "smarter" transportation planning strategies, such as mass transit and electric vehicles, while discouraging sprawl-inducing exurban road projects.
The rule required states to "evaluate and report more effectively and consistently on transportation system performance, including travel time reliability, delay hour, peak-hour congestion, freight movement and on-road mobile source emissions."
Many in the transportation community said that the rule would discourage projects from generating new and wider roads.
Several states and cities, including California, Oregon, Massachusetts, Seattle, the Twin Cities, and Chicago, already take carbon pollution into account when developing transportation plans.
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