While every mode of transportation in the U.S. will be affected as the climate changes, potentially the greatest impact on transportation systems will be flooding of roads, railways, transit systems, and airport runways in coastal areas because of rising sea levels and surges brought on by more intense storms, says a new report from the National Research Council. Though the impacts of climate change will vary by region, it is certain they will be widespread and costly in human and economic terms, and will require significant changes in the planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance of transportation systems. The U.S. transportation system was designed and built for local weather and climate conditions, predicated on historical temperature and precipitation data. The report finds that climate predictions used by transportation planners and engineers may no longer be reliable, however, in the face of new weather and climate extremes. Infrastructure pushed beyond the range for which it was designed can become stressed and fail, as seen with loss of the U.S. 90 Bridge in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
TRB Special Report 298: Driving and the Built Environment: Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions examines the relationship between land development patterns and vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the United States to assess whether petroleum use, and by extension greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, could be reduced by changes in the design of development patterns. The report estimates the contributions that changes in residential and mixed-use development patterns and transit investments could make in reducing VMT by 2030 and 2050, and the impact this could have in meeting future transportation-related GHG reduction goals.
It is not intended to model or quantify the impacts of each policy option over time but instead to examine the means by which each influences behavior and the demand for and supply of energy- and emissions-saving technology, particularly in the modes of transportation with the greatest effect on the sector's consumption of petroleum and emissions of GHGs. In choosing among policies, elected officials must take into account many factors that could not be examined in this study, such as the full range of safety, economic, and environmental implications of their choices; therefore, the report does not recommend a specific suite of policies to pursue. Instead, the emphasis is on assessing each policy approach with regard to its applicability across transportation modes and its ability to affect the total amount of energy-intensive transportation activity, the efficiency of transportation vehicles, and GHG emissions characteristics of the sector's energy supply.
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