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Climate Change

Clearing the Air: Thinking Globally, Acting Locally

Hydrogen fuel-cell bus


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The Bay Area emits greenhouse gases (GHGs), principally carbon dioxide, at three times the world average; and 40 percent of these emissions come from the transportation sector, mostly from cars, trucks, buses, trains and ferries.


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GHGs linger for years, trapping heat in the earth’s atmosphere and causing the global climate to change. Because the consequences of climate change are serious, MTC's Transportation 2035 Plan:

  • Commits $400 million to fund a multiagency Transportation Climate Action Campaign to reduce our carbon footprint, complementing MTC’s Transportation for Livable Communities Program, Regional Bicycle Program, Regional Rideshare Program, and other Transportation 2035 bicycle and pedestrian investments.
  • Directs $45 million to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s Goods Movement Emission Reduction Program to curb diesel particulate matter emissions that pose serious health threats to Bay Area residents — particularly children and adults with respiratory ailments, and those residing near the Port of Oakland and along major goods movement corridors.

Transportation Climate Action Campaign

This $400 million campaign focuses on public outreach and education efforts aimed at helping individuals develop climate-friendly behaviors, reduce the Bay Area’s carbon footprint, and lay the groundwork for future climate change initiatives. The campaign also encompasses a suite of complementary grants, incentives and action-oriented programs, including:

Climate Grants Program

The Climate Grants Program will fund major demonstration projects to test the most innovative strategies to promote changes in driving and travel behaviors. This marks the first time the Bay Area has focused its energies on a climate protection initiative, providing a great opportunity to learn what kinds of strategies can most effectively reduce GHG emissions. Potential projects may seek to increase the use of low-GHG alternative fuels, expand car-sharing programs, or implement low-GHG tire incentive programs or pricing demonstration projects.

Safe Routes to Schools

The Safe Routes to Schools Program aims to increase the number of children who walk or bicycle to school by funding projects that remove barriers to such activities. Barriers often include lack of infrastructure, unsafe facilities that result in uninviting walking and bicycling conditions, and lack of education and enforcement programs aimed at children, parents and the community at large. Through the Safe Routes to School program, local champions work with parents, schools, and transportation, health and law enforcement providers to implement community solutions. This program may also provide additional funding to expand existing Safe Routes to Schools programs that are being implemented successfully in Marin, Alameda and Contra Costa counties, and offer new funding to implement similar programs in other counties.

Safe Routes to Transit

The Safe Routes to Transit Program encourages walking and biking to transit, and offers funding for infrastructure to remove barriers that impede access to transit. Because demand far outstrips available funding in the current Regional Measure 2-funded Safe Routes to Transit program (which is scheduled to sunset in 2013) this program aims to provide additional funding for ongoing efforts.

Transit Priority Program

The Transit Priority Program increases the attractiveness of bus transit by improving speed and on-time reliability through improvements such as dedicated bus lanes, bus bulbs, accessible transit shelters, wheelchair landing pads and bus signal priority. This transit priority program will be coordinated with MTC’s regional signal timing program to ensure that air quality and travel time benefits are optimized.

Goods Movement Emission Reduction Program

Spearheaded by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, this program — to which MTC's Transportation 2035 Plan commits $45 million — aims to quickly reduce particulate matter emissions and health risks by replacing and/or retrofitting up to 800 port and general goods movement trucks currently operating along the Bay Area’s priority trade corridors. Trucks would be either retrofitted with particulate matter and nitrogen oxide filters or engines that comply with the California Air Resources Board's on-road emission standards, replaced with state-of-the-art vehicles, or scrapped.

Diesel pollution from goods movement operations worsens the health of community residents near ports, rail yards, distribution centers and roads with high truck traffic. In 2006, the U.S. EPA released new standards for particulate matter (PM). A key change in the new standards is a stricter 24-hour standard of 35 micrograms per cubic meter for fine particulates measuring no more than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM2.5).

In response, the Air Resources Board in 2007 recommended that the Bay Area be designated as a nonattainment area for the PM2.5 standard. The federal EPA announced the new designation in December 2008. The Bay Area must demonstrate attainment of the PM2.5 standard by 2014.

While the Goods Movement Emission Reduction Program and other initiatives specifically target diesel particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, they also will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and black carbon emissions that contribute to climate change.

Legislative Framework for Greenhouse Gas Regulation

California legislators have responded to climate change with some of the strongest environmental laws ever passed. Three prominent laws that will shape the Bay Area's efforts to regulate GHGs include:

Assembly Bill 1493 (Pavley)

Assembly Bill 1493, enacted in 2002, requires the California Air Resources Board (ARB) to develop and adopt regulations that achieve maximum feasible and cost-effective reduction of GHG emissions from passenger cars and light- and medium-duty trucks sold in California for 2009 and subsequent model years. Under ARB regulations adopted in 2004, automakers must meet increasingly stringent GHG emission standards that phase in between 2009 and 2016. California has committed to implement revised, more-stringent GHG emission limits by 2020 (the Pavley Phase 2 rules).

Assembly Bill 32

California Global Warming Solutions Act The California Global Warming Solutions Act (Assembly Bill 32), a groundbreaking law signed by Governor Schwarzenegger in 2006, requires reduction of statewide GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels means cutting approximately 30 percent from business-as-usual emission levels projected for 2020, or about 15 percent from today’s levels. The ARB in December 2008 approved a scoping plan that outlines strategies the state will use to reduce GHGs.

Senate Bill 375 (Steinberg)

Senate Bill 375, signed into law in 2008, establishes a process for the ARB to implement AB 32 by requiring the Board to adopt by September 30, 2010, regional GHG targets for emissions associated with the automobile and light truck sector. Metropolitan planning organizations such as MTC are required to develop a Sustainable Communities Strategy (SCS) element in their long-range plans to strive to reach the GHG reduction targets. The SCS adds three new elements to the plan: 1) a land-use component; 2) a resource and farmland protection component; and 3) a demonstration of how the development pattern and the transportation network can work together to reduce GHG emissions.

In the Bay Area, the provisions of Senate Bill 375 will apply to the successor plan to Transportation 2035, scheduled for adoption in 2013.

California Sea Level Rise Report

This study, funded in part by Caltrans, MTC and others, analyzes population, property and infrastructure at risk from future sea level rise along the California coast. It estimates that with 1.5 meters of sea level rise, about 3,500 miles of highways and roadways along the California coast and San Francisco Bay would be at risk from a 100 year flood, compared to about 1,900 miles of roadways and highways currently at risk.

Taking the Hy (as in Hydrogen) Road

With support from MTC, AC Transit is leading Bay Area public transit into a hydrogen fuel-cell future where buses emit only pure steam and the only sound is the quiet hum of electric motors. In addition to developing fuel-cell buses, AC Transit and its public and private partners in the HyRoad Project have built two hydrogen energy stations, with a third unit in the works. More fuel-cell buses are in the region’s future, thanks to an expanded demonstration involving AC Transit and four other operators: Golden Gate Transit, SamTrans, San Francisco Muni and the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority.

Climate Change Workshop, February 16, 2007

 

Learn more about how you can do your part: