TCI Regional Policy Design Stakeholder Submissions

I used to live in Portland, Oregon. Take a look at what they are doing. All electric light rail. Walking and biking are king. Cars discouraged: expensive parking, cars not allowed on some bridges. When new areas for light rail are proposed, once routes are established housing goes up along the lines.

On December 11th, 2019, Green for All released "Designing an Equitable Cap-and-Invest Policy for Transportation". This equity toolkit for TCI provides detailed policy recommendations and resources for ensuring a regional cap-and-invest policy delivers equitable outcomes. It provides guidance to Governors, state agency officials, legislators, advocates, community members, and other critical stakeholders to design a program that is responsive to the needs of low-income families, disproportionately pollution-impacted neighborhoods, and transit-underserved communities.

Our policy recommendations are aligned with the Policy Design Principles for an Equitable Clean Transportation Program, which were delivered to the Transportation and Climate Initiative via the online portal on July 26, 2019. The principles were co-developed by national environmental equity groups and community-based organizations with input from over a dozen racial justice, economic justice, environmental justice, and transit justice organizations. (https://www.thedreamcorps.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Regional-Policy-Design-Principles-for-Equity-3-1.pdf)

Attached is a slide deck that provides case studies of three cap-and-invest policies that have included equitable guardrails and guarantees, in California, Oregon, and New York, to serve as models for equity provisions in a TCI Model Rule.

We can cut poverty and pollution at the same time. We urge you to design a regional program that prioritizes the needs of communities overburdened with pollution and underserved in mobility options.


Addressing climate change is my number one priority as a voter and citizen.

Minimizing climate change is crucial to our health, environment, economy and national security. This disaster is destroying livelihoods, causing conflict and food insecurity, creating refugees, and fueling extinctions and natural disasters. It will continue to worsen even as we address it as long as we are still producing any greenhouse gases, and will accelerate unpredictably due to numerous tipping points and domino effects. We need to immediately change course as sharply as possible while we still can.

Our current modes of transportation are large contributors to climate change, and our crumbling infrastructure limits opportunities for our citizens and is a drag on our economy. We need major investment ASAP.

Governor Baker, please join the regional initiative and make the strongest commitment possible, and waste no time in working with our neighboring states to take as much action as possible. I deeply appreciate actions you have taken to date, but we need much more, more quickly.

Please also make it easier for citizens to multiply your actions by facilitating our adoption of clean energy. For example, PLEASE CHANGE THE UNETHICAL LAW THAT ALLOWS OUR GREEDY LOCAL ELECTRIC COMPANY TO LIMIT THE SIZE OF OUR RESIDENTIAL SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC SYSTEMS.

Thank you.

Reducing congestion on the roads is vital to the quality of life of everyone in the Boston area - and the rest of the much larger region covered by the Transportation and Climate Initiative. All of us have spent far too many hours caught in traffic, often on a daily basis as commuters. It's bad enough to have been recognized as a serious drain on the economy, which seems to weigh more heavily with policy makers than the mere suffering of the public. At the same time, housing costs force many of us to live far from where we work, and far from other needed resources. There's also a significant chunk of the population that for one reason or another have no car, placing them at a serious disadvantage and causing further economic drain.
All of these problems would be ameliorated by cheap, reliable, widely available public transportation, as proposed by the Transportation and Climate Initiative. Adequate public transit would improve everyone's life in the entire region, whether or not they personally made use of it. These benefits are on top of the improvement in regional air quality that would result from reduced automotive traffic.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a critically important goal, and one which still receives far too low a priority in public policy. In the long run, that will be the most important benefit of the Transportation and Climate Initiative. In the short run, however, the direct benefits to everyone living in the Northeast are quite sufficient to justify the Initiative.

General statement: Transportation is the largest source of air pollution in the region, and we need to build a modern, clean, safe, and accessible transportation system for the 21st century. The more we limit pollution from motor fuels, the more jobs we create, the more the economy grows, the healthier our air becomes, and the more lives we save. Massachusetts should join TCI to fund better transportation infrastructure, reduce traffic, and make my community a cleaner, safer place to live.

Public Health: It is clear that air pollution from cars, trucks, and buses have become a huge detriment to my community’s health. Air pollution has been linked to a variety of health problems, including asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer, and the more ambitious TCI is, the more our community stands to benefit from a cleaner transportation system. I urge my Governor to join TCI and push it to be as ambitious as possible, for the sake of my community’s health and livelihood.

Rural areas: As a person living in a rural area, I think that TCI is extremely important. When states join TCI, they have the opportunity to invest in rural communities where transportation options are limited. Joining TCI would allow Massachusetts to ensure that rural communities aren’t left behind in the green transition and stuck behind the wheel of costly, inefficient vehicles. Governor Baker should push for an ambitious TCI program so that rural communities like mine get the solutions they need.

Transportation is the number one source of climate pollution in the United States. In order to cut emissions, and to slow the impact of global warming, we need to reimagine the way that we transport people and goods. As a Pennsylvanian living in Massachusetts for 30+ years, I am very pleased to learn that my “homes” have joined with Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., to work on a groundbreaking policy to modernize the transportation sector as part of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) and Transportaion & Climate Initiative (TCI). Transportation polluters should be held accountable, spurring necessary modernization & invention. I support this and I urge TCI to aggressively promote and adopt innovative initiatives. I live in Hingham, where we have train service and love our Commuter Boat to Boston. But, for the most part unless we work in downtown Boston, driving is the only reasonable option. We need alternatives that allow growth and economic vitality with minimal additional pollution. Is it time to insist that internet purchases be delivered to the door in an electric vehicle? I urge you, Gov. Baker, to push TCI to be as ambitious as possible, for the sake of my community’s health and livelihood.

We would love to help you deliver the Next Generation of Infrastructure in the middle of our $4 Trillion U.S.-Canada-Africa-Global ecosystem - eliminate traffic congestion, a $43B/year Northeast ROI, Radicaally reduce carbon, and delier a 400% ROI in a Next Gen P4 Finance model.

Our Tower-based design can deliver a triple return for Transit, 5G Communications, and Power T&D – tying in all the renewable sources and making the Power Grid MUCH more Resilient. This is the BIG breakthrough needed (as pointed out by Bill Gates and Breakthrough Energy) to allow us to supply the power grid with clean energy even during windless days, cloudy weather, and nighttime.

More than 40% of all carbon emissions come from the transportation sector and our iSAIL Energy-Fin-Transit can do root-cause fixes while making the U.S. a leader in Climate Change Resiliency and Carbon Reduction …….. iSAIL Energy-Fin-Transit is Towers, Guides and Pods that Fly for 80-100mph intracity/250 mph intercity at the cost of asphalt, $2M-3M/mile and 1/100th the cost of even light rail that can $250M/mile, $1B/mile for hyperloop (IF it works) and up to $5B/mile for heavy rail. iSAIL is based on decades of R&D at DARPA, NASA and MIT with AI proven to work where other methods failed. iSAIL Transit will open up a whole new world of urban-rural and land use optimization, turn commutes and freight delivery from hours to minutes, and Radically Reduce GHG emissions.

Our public–private framework enables a New Financial Model with private investors who are patient and risk tolerant, global corporations, and financial institutions with the capital necessary to finance the world’s largest infrastructure projects as we fill the $90 trillion global void and deliver the 400% return.

With humanity in the “race of our lives,” sea level rise accelerating faster than thought (The Guardian, Feb 3, 2020), together, we can deliver the Breakthrough solutions needed at 1/100th the cost of “dinosaur infrastructure” and deliver the URGENT and Bold Solutions to Climate Change the world is looking for, fill voids in the $90 Trillion infrastructure market, minimize the financial burden, especially in developing countries, maximize Revenue to municipalities, and set the Gold Standard for Resilient Transit, Cities, and world infrastructure.

Can you please let me know if we could schedule some time in the next few days to discuss how, together, we can accelerate delivery for ambitious carbon neutral goal? ….. And fix (much of) the brokenness, that will accelerate with the looming global recession?

Thank you very much!
Joe

Joseph Zagrobelny
Founder & CEO, Nine-AI | www.nine-ai.com | M: 781.825.3267 | joseph@nine-ai.com