TCI Regional Policy Design Stakeholder Submissions

I strongly support a bold TCI that requires transportation-sector polluters
to pay for the pollution, funding investments that reduce carbon emissions on
a sufficient scale to truly address the climate crisis.

We are facing a climate crisis and need to take bold steps to prevent further damage. The transportation plan should be a big part of this. The plan needs to hold large transportation polluters accountable for the pollution they create and needs to invest in clean transportation solutions. This should include transit and electric vehicle infrastructure in rural areas, expansion of commuter rail, electric vehicles, and streets in the suburbs that are safe, walkable, and bikeable and sustainable and equitable housing near transit and electric bus fleets in urban communities.

We need to take strong actions to minimize the climate impact of our transportation system now, to reach zero carbon emissions in a decade or two! Half measures are NOT enough. We should be adding charging stations for electric cars and trucks, electrifying our buses and railroads so they don't pollute in cities and can be powered by electricity from renewable energy. This is not a time for incrementalism, it's a time for big, bold measures.

We need an improved transportation system to reduce noise and pollution, especially in our cities, but everywhere. We need the improved health that cleaner air and water will bring. We need the improved quality of life that quieter streets will bring. Most importantly, we need the reduction of global warming that using much less fossil fuel for transportation can bring.

Only a major shift can bring the degree of change necessary. I urge you to develop more rapid transit, and make it powered electrically, so green energy can be the source, not fossil fuels. The amount of wind and solar power generation must be increased rapidly, along with the distribution system to move the power to where it's needed. The distributed nature of renewable sources means some of the generation will be nearer the suburban and rural places where it is used, which should improve the reliability of the power grid and lower overall cost.

I urge more charging locations be built for electric street vehicles. I urge electrifying all rail operations in the region, with the possible exception of branch lines with less than one train a day. Electric railways have been practical for a century or more. We dismantled some electrical rail systems in the Rocky Mountains, instead of adding more miles to them. Diesel locomotives seemed the cheaper, more flexible choice, but have helped bring us to the current, unsustainable situation we are in. It's time our transportation systems were modernized to be as good or better than the Europeans' and Japanese'!

Thank you

I am writing to voice my strong opposition to the TCI. Maine is predominantly a rural state, without public transportation except in the larger cities. Many working Mainers have no option other than to drive their personal or business vehicles to their employment. How can raising the fuel tax by, initially, 17 cents per gallon, benefit these workers?

Mainers already suffer the third highest tax burden, behind New York and Hawaii, while ranking 43rd in per capita income (as of 2018). The last thing hard working Mainers need is an additional tax! I suspect you are well aware of these statistics.

Not only will this tax affect each individual on every gallon of fuel they purchase, it also increases the tax burden from their local municipalities, as well as the state government. Fuel for municipal and state vehicles is paid by tax dollars. Fire equipment, police vehicles, animal control officers, building inspectors, school busses and so on and so on and so on...all paid for by the taxpayer!!! Technically, the additional tax burden on each individual is a lot more than a "mere" 17 cents per gallon. It will be added to ALL products and services that are delivered over the highways and these deliveries do not go through Maine on their way to somewhere else...Maine is the end of the line. This "17 cent a gallon" will be increased many times over for all Maine citizens.

This initiative is a bad plan for hard working Mainers and will do very little to reduce carbon emissions, by the TCI's own admission. What it will do is make it much more difficult for hard working Mainers "make ends meet". It will affect low income and the elderly in Maine much more significantly than citizens in more affluent states to the south.

This is a bad idea.

This TCI can be a good part of the many needed tools to reduce GHG emissions. The goal over ten years should be at least a 50% reduction.

We need clean transportation immediately. What we started in the 1970s should have been finished long before now. We need to build and sell electric vehicles to replace combustion engine buses, trucks and cars. I purchased an all-electric car, the Volkswagon eGolf and paid $20,000 for it after rebates. Not everyone can afford to buy a new car, however, even if it is only $20,000, so the government needs to give incentives to people so that they can afford them. Cities and towns across the country need to replace their old buses and city vehicles to electric vehicles. Companies that use trucks need to purchase electric trucks.

First we need to implement a carbon fee and dividend program that will tax any company that extracts fossil fuels based on the ton of greenhouse gases the extracted fuels will emit when burned. Once the tax is collected by the government, the government will rebate all of that money back to every American household in the form of a dividend check. To incentivize other countries to reduce their carbon footprint, a border tax should be imposed on imports again based on the ton of greenhouse gases that were emitted to produce that product. Once a carbon fee and dividend law is enacted, innovation will be unleashed and manufacturers of electric vehicles will flood the market with them and their prices will decrease.

There is no time to waste on this.

Maine is a rural state and adding costs to fossil fuels will hurt our economy tremendously. We can't afford higher transportation costs and the associated inflation associated with that (unlike more densely populated states). We also will take a disproportional hit on the cost of heating our homes and businesses. This is unacceptable as an outcome but clearly what these proposals will make happen.

Please help us invest in clean, efficient public transportation - critical for our global competitiveness. Anyone who has traveled in Europe is embarrassed with the lack of good public transportation in the U.S.