TCI Regional Policy Design Stakeholder Submissions

In our Urban and Suburban centers there are too many cars and too much pollution. I taught high school students in Philadelphia who had to have their inhalers with them. I volunteer in an ER in Norristown where patients of all ages have breathing difficulties and need breathing treatments. We need to continue to work on lowering smoking, but we also need to make public transportation affordable and convenient. Lowering the levels of CO2 in the air will make breathing easier for all and lower the number of rage-related incidents in traffic-jammed streets. The climate will be closer to the old normal. Seas will stop swallowing shores. We will have more time to relax and enjoy life.

Our aim should be to have 3% of Maryland vehicles be electric (with the power to run them be 100% renewable) by the end of 2020, and grow that to 6% in 2021, etc., so that by 2050 we are 100% non-fossil fuel vehicles. This transition will be voluntary but driven by putting a realistic price on the true social cost of burning carbon fuels. We cannot afford to wait for a last-minute awakening or technological breakthrough in the year 2049, we must advance now with what is currently available, trusting that this will spur the future necessary advances.

Therefore, I urge you to put in place sufficient incentives to get the 3% buy-in needed for next year. The cap-and-invest fee rate for 2020 should be gauged so that it provides the funding for this incentive. The 2021 fee should then be set to adequately fund the incentive needed to reach 6% clean vehicles by end of 2021, etc. We need to treat climate change like cancer (an implacable enemy) and not expect it to go away on its own.

This is not a pipe dream. We made our house energy-efficient, so our solar panels run the entire house (heat, AC, well, hot water, cooking) PLUS enough surplus electricity for 20,000 miles of driving in our electric car. AND we are saving money in the long run.

Two things discourage the average homeowner from taking this plunge: reluctance to go into short-term debt for promised long-term gain, and seeing the transition as too complex. Other than the scarcity of public EV charging (which is RAPIDLY improving), we found it a surprisingly comfortable transition. Please consider offering more than just financial incentive; streamlining and normalizing the process and offering guarantees/insurance will go a long way toward pulling in the crucial early adopters.

Thanks for listening. Peter Yungbluth

Rural Maine is ill-served by public transportation. We have an all-electric car and need more widely spread charging stations. The roads are poorly constructed for bicycle use. There is little bus or train service to small towns from Portland or the Boston area and what is available is so limited that it does not coordinate with air schedules. Climate change is our world's number one problem. We need to address the issues now!

You are doing good work on the modeling, thanks! I have misgivings about one particular section- 8% growth in VMT per decade, and would ask you to review that part better. The citation ("state predictions") was pretty vague. Most reading I've seen report that VMT needs to decrease, via walk/bike/bus/rail or density, and surely some TCI returns will be spent on making this happen (much like your concerns for state EV incentives and ZEV mandates being a feed back loop affecting fleet makeup). You should probably include a mechanism for higher share prices to offset lower VMT to maintain level funding for state programs.

Full Disclosure: I am a rail and transit advocate for the Sierra Club - and also a member of the New England Electric Railway Historical Society (aka Seashore Trolley Museum).

As an active member of the Seashore Trolley Museum, my volunteer work constantly reminds me of the long forgotten role of light electric railways in the history of both Maine and New Hampshire. But equally important is that our museum also has examples of the high speed interurbans that i was ale to ride out of Chicago in my youth, and even numerous cars from other parts of the Midwest that i was never able to ride.

The whole pint of this submission is to remind the TCI initiative that the more populated rural and exurban areas of New England had public transportation options before the 1950's when automobile ownership became commonplace. And even into the 1970's, both the conventional railroads and intercity bus lines provided an equally lng forgotten transportation service to rural communities.

As a member of the Sierra Club, our focus must be on finding ways to sharply reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector, which means in great part finding various means to sharpy reduce the number of private automobiles that are used almost daily for commuting to work and similar purposes.

As a coastal state with water on 3 sides, it behooves us to change the character and emissions standards of our transportation system. We absolutely need more mass transit and more EVs to do our part in keeping down the rising sea levels. The Bergen Record had an article this last summer that put a possible more than 26 Super Storm Sandys by 2100. Investment now, by comparison, looks cheap.

Please support a firm and time boxed commitment to adopt a regional transportation policy that achieves a minimum 40 percent reduction in transportation sector climate pollution by 2030, to keep us on track to meet the climate goals updated by the General Assembly in 2016.
Ensure we mandate that investment and policy decisions be made based on pollution reduction and equity goals, as well as robust engagement opportunities from the public‒particularly those most overburdened by transportation pollution and undeserved by our current transportation system.

I am writing simply to say that I strongly support the Transportation and Climate Initiative because I believe it is an effective and necessary means of reducing carbon emissions and the consequent global warming.

On behalf of Connecticut stakeholders, please find attached letter in strong support of the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI) as a regional approach to reducing pollution from the transportation sector.