OpenMarket: Automobiles and Roads

Eleven Northeast states plus the District of Columbia on December 17th released a draft memorandum of understanding this week on how to implement their Transportation and Climate Initiative (or TCI). The draft memo lays out a framework for creating a “cap-and-invest” system to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

In what amounts to the tax component of the Green New Deal, the House Ways and Means Committee released a draft of its “Growing Renewable Energy and Efficiency Now (GREEN) Act” (summary available here). This draft contains tax credits for a long list of alternative energy-related technologies unable to compete otherwise.  

On November 10th, longtime CEI friend Shirley Ybarra passed away. Shirley was an accomplished transportation economist and a leading thinker on innovative transportation infrastructure finance and operations. But even more importantly, she put these ideas into practice during her long career in public service.

It is not unusual for Congress to keep extending a supposedly temporary federal program, and that includes the tax credits for electric vehicles and wind and solar electric generation. For this reason, the Competitive Enterprise Institute opposed the 2015 tax extenders legislation despite several members’ insistence that it would be the last such extension, and that these provisions would sunset after a few more years.

Will the Trump administration’s auto rule harm public health? That’s what all five majority witnesses and several Democratic members of the House Oversight Environment Subcommittee claimed at a recent hearing on the administration’s Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule.  

It’s the ultimate dealmaker versus the ultimate dealmaking challenge. President Trump has again sought changes to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) that he hopes both supporters and critics of this program can live with. The previous reform effort granted ethanol producers and corn growers their request to raise the amount of ethanol allowed year-round in gasoline from 10 to 15 percent (E-15), while, on the other hand, giving the refining sector more exemptions for small facilities which serves to lower the overall RFS targets.   

The Federal Highway Administration announced it will rescind its World War I-era regulation governing the use of patented and proprietary materials in federal-aid highway projects. We are glad FHWA agreed with us and other commenters urging for a clean rescission of this obsolete regulation. Going forward, we expect state departments of transportation to be better positioned in modernizing their highways for a 21st century of self-driving cars and other novel beneficial road transportation technologies currently under development.

​​​​​​​A California-led coalition of 24 states and three cities today petitioned the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to declare unlawful the Trump administration’s One National Program Rule, which finds that California’s motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards and zero emission vehicle mandate are unlawful because they are pre-empted by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act.

Today, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) took the first step towards finalizing the proposed Safer, Affordable, Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule by issuing a final action entitled the “One National Program Rule.”

Congestion is a persistent and growing problem facing America’s road networks. The challenge facing policy makers is how to address this growing problem. Given that traffic congestion is inherently a local phenomenon, the federal government has a limited set of tools to address it.