By Eric Miller, Staff Reporter
This story appears in the March 22 print edition of Transport Topics.
Congress should include comprehensive funding policies in the upcoming transportation reauthorization bill both to modernize freight transportation and reduce diesel emissions, an environmental group said in a report last week.
“A really key place right now that we think has a lot of potential to help reduce freight impact is the federal transportation bill,” said Kathryn Phillips, director of the Environmental Defense Fund’s California Transportation and Air Initiative. “That bill traditionally hasn’t specifically outlined a way to address freight.”
Phillips, who outlined the report March 15, said her group believes federal dollars ought to be distributed in a way that ensures the modernization of freight movement and a reduction in freight’s adverse environmental effect.
“There ought to be a freight-specific section of the bill, and it ought to emphasize modernization simultaneously with environmental impact reduction,” Phillips said.
EDF’s report said the federal government estimates freight tonnage will increase 70% from 2002 to 2020.
The report, released last week, details the results of a survey of 28 case studies of “clean freight solutions.” The solutions range from port and corridor truck, rail and ship diesel-emissions-reduction programs to shore power and truck electrification being used in the United States and internationally to reduce truck idling.
Such innovations are used across the globe but mostly in an isolated manner and not widely distributed, the report said.
“Our freight system in this country is aged and in desperate need of repair,” Phillips said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out.”
“Projections of the increase in freight movement in the next few years are really quite alarming,” added Lilly Shoup, a research associate with Transportation for America, a group affiliated with EDF.
EDF’s report said federal and state transportation funding programs should encourage a green freight movement, spur innovation and develop a freight system for the future.
Federal programs should prioritize spending in a way that identifies important freight corridors and hubs, ensures planning for cleaning up freight transportation’s emissions in those hubs and corridors and advances innovation and cleaner technologies and practices, including the funding of demonstration projects, the report concluded.
“Without thoughtful infrastructure and operations improvements, projected increases in trade threaten to make these problems worse and place greater strains on the nation’s aging infrastructure,” the study said.
The report noted that trucking is the most flexible mode in the goods-movement sector, reaching more than 80% of U.S. cities and towns. In 2006, trucks moved 61% of all freight in the United States by weight, the study said.
However, it also said trucks are the most fuel-intensive freight mode: “Rail freight is three times more fuel-efficient than trucking and is a flexible and efficient way to move bulk commodities long distances, since containers can easily move from ship to rail to truck,” the report said.
“Although rail is considerably more fuel-efficient, increases in tonnage typically require additional diesel fuel, which reduces the magnitude of the environmental benefits,” the report said.
Also, older rail locomotives and a great many pieces of rail-yard equipment are highly polluting and rail-yard sites create noise and pollution in surrounding neighborhoods, the report said.
