The CAA of 1990 acts as an insurance policy that California continue meeting the goals established in the CCAA. However, the California program will meet the federal requirements by default.Although NEPA regulates many actions, it does little to address proposed projects on a Statewide or local level. Consequently, California and thirteen other States have enacted environmental legislation to govern activities affecting their respective territories . “For most State programs, the points that must be covered in environmental impact documents are similar to those in Section 102 of NEPA” . Nevertheless, a few States include additional environmental assessment requirements . For example, California requires “an assessment of the ‘growth-inducing impact’ of proposed actions and a description of ‘mitigation measures’ that could be taken to minimize adverse impacts” .In 1970, the California legislature passed the California Environmental Quality Act , which requires that environmental analyses be performed by State and local governments before proposed actions are undertaken. CEQA recognizes several key goals for the State of California: 1) maintaining a quality, healthy environment for the future as well as the present; 2) maintaining the capacity of the environment well beyond minimal thresholds of health and safety; and 3) regulating the activities of citizens of the State to safeguard the environment,round plastic pots while preserving the lifestyles and living environment for the citizens of California §21000.
In general, CEQA’s intent is to require “all agencies of the State government which regulate activities of private individuals, corporations, and public agencies which are found to affect the quality of the environment [to] regulate such activities so that major consideration is given to preventing environmental damage, while providing a decent home and satisfying living environment for every Californian”. In comparison to other State programs, California has the broadest environmental-planning coverage . For instance, CEQA “applies to State-initiated actions, such as highway projects, as well as a variety of decisions made by cities, counties, and regional agencies. Local agency actions, which include the granting of building permits and zoning variances, have made the California impact assessment requirements applicable to proposals made by private parties. Environmental impact reports have been written for virtually thousands of private land development projects in California” . When both NEPA and CEQA are applicable to a proposed project, both regulations may be satisfied with the preparation of a joint EIS/EIR document. To help agencies fulfill the requirements of CEQA, the State Office of Planning and Research has prepared a set of CEQA guidelines.In some cases, the EIS program is managed by the State Department of natural resources. Other States rely on their environmental protection agencies .The 1990s may well be remembered as the decade in which the idea of “sustainability” first took hold in government, business, academia, and popular culture. The most well-known expression of sustainability–sustainable development–occurred at the 1992 Earth Summit, where representatives from more than 150 nations, including 117 presidents and prime ministers, pledged to integrate environmental and economic development in their respective nations’ planning and policy. Defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” , sustainable development has become a leading standard for measuring human progress .
In the U.S., concerns about sustainability or sustainable development have entered policy discussions at various levels of government and sectors of society. Important sustainable development projects exist at the national level , the State level , and the local level . Similar efforts to incorporate sustainability concepts are now underway in the transportation sector. For example, the Transportation Research Board completed a major study on the concept of “Transportation and a sustainable environment.” Other efforts to link transportation and sustainability include a White House sponsored dialogue on greenhouse gas emissions from personal automobiles and the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ adoption of “Transportation and Sustainable Communities” as the theme of its 1997 conference. All of these initiatives will have important impacts on the design of future transportation systems. Efforts to apply the sustainability paradigm to transportation have coincided with the advent of ITS, and a debate is now underway over whether ITS will facilitate or undermine efforts to promote sustainable communities. Replogle , for example, argues that an ITS program stressing demand management strategies could “be the most important enabling technology driver in decades to reform and progress in American transportation, winning for our citizens sustainable high wage jobs, reduced traffic delay, more livable communities, and a healthy environment.” Cervero , however, expresses far less optimism about ITS’s potential contribution to sustainable communities, arguing that a major ITS deployment program “stands to worsen by orders of magnitude” the problems of excessive auto travel, suburban sprawl, and air pollution.
We argue that ITS technologies can indeed promote efforts to build sustainable communities. By providing vast amounts of information on the performance of the transportation system, ITS could allow for greater operational control of that system and reduce the negative externalities associated with transportation. Easily disseminated information about the transportation system- -such as price signals that convey the true costs of driving, “real-time” traffic and emissions data, or information on the costs and benefits of alternative transportation policies — could enable transportation to serve the multiple economic, social, and environmental goals implied by the sustainable communities paradigm. ITS offers the prospect of a “knowledge-intensive” transportation system in which the information provided could increase mobility, reduce environmental damage, and improve the overall quality of life in communities. Such a system will not evolve automatically, however. Before the promise of ITS becomes a reality, ITS deployments must be integrated into an overarching policy and institutional framework aimed at promoting sustainable communities.Before describing possible linkages between ITS and sustainable communities, it is necessary to provide some background on the “sustainability” concept. Since the WCED’s 1987 definition of sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs,” over 70 definitions of sustainable development have entered the policy literature . Despite its promise as a measure of progress and as a mobilizing vision, the concept of sustainable development remains controversial and difficult to define, and is particularly difficult to translate into practical action. Indeed, Ruttan correctly notes that the popularity of the WCED definition stems in part from it being “so broad that it is almost devoid of operational significance.” Take the notion of ecological sustainability with respect to a lake, for example. “Sustaining” a healthy lake as a stable aquatic ecosystem means reversing the natural process of eutrophication that slowly turns lakes into marshes, and marshes into forests. In such instances, it is ecological integrity that must be sustained,hydroponic bucket not necessarily a particular ecosystem. Despite their limitations, sustainability concepts provide useful frameworks for thinking about the future. Given that almost 200 international conferences, professional meetings, and scientific associations have used sustainability as the theme of their gatherings in recent years , it is not surprising that the transportation community is now discussing about sustainability.“Communities” represent the social and physical expression of interdependence. While they can be organized for both good and ill ends, communities connect individuals with each other, and collectively with the bio-region that envelops them. When designed to promote cooperation for mutual benefit, they provide what Robert Putnam calls “virtuous circles” or self-reinforcing stocks of “social capital: [which includes] cooperation, trust, reciprocity, civic engagement, and collective well-being.” Communities do for people what ecosystems do for nature, they bring a measure of stability and common purpose to the lives of individual organisms. Another key element of sustainable communities is concern for ecological “carrying capacity.” Ecological carrying capacity depends on at least three key factors: 1) the as similative capacity of ecosystems and bio-regions ; 2) the regenerative capacity of natural systems , and 3) the technological expansion or substitution effect, whereby man-made artifacts can be used in place of damaged natural amenities .
Physical indicators such as emission levels of CO, CO2, the level of paved surface area, etc., can suggest the threshold level for sustainability . Perhaps more than anything else, it is concerns about the earth’s carrying capacity that spur investigation into the concept of sustainable transportation.The link between ITS and sustainable transportation stems from ITS’s ability to create a transportation system rich in information, or what might be called an “information-intensive” transportation system. An “information-intensive” transportation system raises two prospects. First, it means using information instead of new lanes, roads, and highways as a way to increase the capacity of the transportation system. In this sense, ITS “substitutes information for stuff,”2 resulting in capacity enhancements that use fewer material resources, consume less open space, and reduce the noise and community disruption related to new roads. ITS thus support an underlying premise of “sustainability thinking:” that the Earth’s resource base has limits, that some of those limits are being approached, and sustainable development depends on accommodating economic growth while consuming fewer resources. Beyond potentially substituting for physical elements of the transportation system, the information provides may also enhance the system’s performance. It is critical, however, that “enhanced performance” be defined broadly to include greater traffic efficiency and a reduction in the transportation system’s negative externalities. ITS can contribute to this broader notion of enhanced performance by providing information that allows for greater operational control of the transportation system. Achieving more control of the system, in turn, increases the opportunities to address specific purposes, including broad social, economic, and environmental goals. Figure 3 illustrates ITS applications that facilitate greater control of the transportation system by channeling information to system managers and users. “Remote sensing,”for example, can generate emission data and assist air quality officials in targeting “gross polluters.” Another example is “congestion pricing,” or charging drivers a fee that varies with the level of traffic on a roadway.Congestion pricing conveys information that alerts drivers to the overall social and environmental costs of driving, making them aware that driving imposes external costs while encouraging more environmentally benign travel behavior.5Integrating transportation policy with efforts to improve mobility and accessibility, reduce air pollution, manage land use patterns, and promote social equity is an application of the sustainability framework. ITS systems, by providing information on the performance of the transportation system, provide a technological means of moving toward the sustainability ideal. But this promise cannot be realized without a transportation policy framework that goes beyond the traditional emphasis on mobility and traffic efficiency. Crucial to the creation of a sustainable transportation system is a transportation policy guided by a vision of sustainable communities. Such a vision was behind major transportation legislation passed in 1991, the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act . ISTEA marked an evolution in the U.S. transportation policy, shifting the focus away from highway construction projects. ISTEA is the first comprehensive federal transportation legislation to explicitly endorse the idea that transportation can serve a broad range of social and environmental goals . The law instructs transportation planners to analyze “the overall social, economic, energy, and environmental effects of transportation” [CFR, 450.316]. In conjunction with the 1990 CAAA ISTEA further integrates transportation policy with efforts to control air pollution and manage land use patterns. ISTEA also mandates that the benefits of the transportation system be extended to poor and minority communities and others “traditionally under-served by the transportation system” [CFR, 450.316]. ISTEA has thus made regional transportation planning a more comprehensive, participatory process, and one in which planners are increasingly required to balance the goal of traffic efficiency with broad social and environmental concerns.This process differs significantly from traditional transportation planning, when policy makers had “few incentives to include urban renewal, social regeneration, and broader transportation objectives in their programming” . ITS provides a new set of tools to implement the holistic vision of transportation policy embodied in ISTEA, but it is critical that these tools be properly directed in relation to sustainable communities. ITS systems per se are neither all “good” or all “bad;” what matters is that they be integrated into a policy and institutional framework aimed at achieving this vision.The purpose of this part of the PATH project was to develop a methodology for evaluating the role and impact of ITS technologies on the environment.