Introduction: transportation and environmental sustainability

A brief history of transportation and the environment The relationship between transportation, technology and the environment is long standing. In the early 1920s, the car was first viewed as an improvement over the horse-polluted city environment. By the early 1930s, interest in an Interstate Highway System grew as a means to help get cars and trucks out of the mud. But, as automobile ownership grew and the Interstate system manifest itself across the country, the environmental impacts became pronounced. While advances in vehicle and construction technologies brought the mobility to an unprecedented percentage of the population, it did so at the expense of many social, environmental and community amenities. 2 Indeed, while the Interstate system advanced considerably from its enactment in 1950, there were a number of concerns surrounding its inception.1 Critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Lewis Mumford contended that, especially in urban areas, the Interstate system would adversely affect local communities.2 Still, as chronicled by Tom Lewis, the Interstate era propelled ahead, buoyed by a growing economy, high federal match ratios and a national consensus around most of the Interstate objectives.3 Over a 30-year period some 40,000 miles of Interstates were constructed, and even many more arterials. Increases in the manufacturing methods of automobiles made the auto affordable to most Americans, and the economy came to benefit and rely upon the surface transportation system. In short, automobile transportation came to be the mobility backbone of the nation's economy. This highway-centered emphasis of the Interstate era remained firmly rooted in urban transportation planning until 1991, when the federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) fundamentally altered U.S. transportation policy.4 ISTEA made unprecedented efforts to balance traditional transportation policy objectives (i.e., mobility) with nontraditional objectives such as neighborhood economic development, environmental quality and the preservation and enhancement of areas of cultural and aesthetic value. In doing so, ISTEA reflected the profound influence that a set of principles often labeled as " sustainability " or " sustainable communities " have had—and will continue to have under the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21)—on the transportation sector.5 3 Taking place alongside the policy revolution that ISTEA and TEA-21 have engendered in transportation is a second, more fundamental societal revolution: the shift to an information society. The fundamental elements of economic production, distribution and consumption are being affected by this revolution; and the range of impacts is at this point …