Beefing Up the Clean Air Act : But an Amended Measure Is a Long Way From Law

For years Washington has ignored its own policy requiring that local transportation systems match local clean-air plans and goals. But now here comes the U.S. Senate with a list of quite simple but, for an automobile-oriented society, revolutionary ways to make the policy work.

In essence, the Senate says that if air chemists agree a region’s air cannot tolerate the pollution from more than, say, 5 million cars, the region cannot build a highway network to carry 6 million of them.

This seems such basic good sense that the obvious question is why it didn’t occur to somebody before. It did. The idea has been federal policy since the Clean Air Act was last amended in 1977, but the wording of the act was so loose that dubious highway projects kept slipping through. In voting to amend the act again this year, the Senate included a series of steps to slow down highway spending when a region must choose between cleaner air and more automobiles on the road.

Instead of cutting off highway funds to regions that fail to clean up their air, which seldom happens anyway, the Senate proposes to keep transportation money flowing to non-complying states but restricting its use to projects that promote cleaner air, such as construction of rail-transit systems and programs to expand ride-sharing.

A drastic change would let state governors divert federal highway funds to rail construction or other projects designed to reduce automobile pollution. Over the years, the so-called highway lobby has guarded the federal highway trust fund against such raids. Token sums have been diverted from highways to rail systems, but nothing on the scale of the Senate plan. Thus the lobby is almost certain to try to block it.

For clean-air planning, the attraction of rail is clear. A commuter driving alone generates eight times as many hydrocarbons during rush hour as a commuter riding the rails.

What encouraged the Senate to tighten up the machinery for designing and funding transportation networks? Apparently the pioneering work done by the Southern California Assn. of Governments in its regional mobility plan, published in 1989. The local plan persuaded the Senate that making transportation plans conform to clean-air goals is workable, not wishful thinking.

An amended Clean Air Act is a long way from law. The House plans to vote on its own bill before the end of the month, but there will be enough difference between the two versions to touch off a grueling, perhaps even brutal, conference, considering the likely lobbying frenzy to negotiate away disparities. The Senate language still is fuzzy on the question of who bears the ultimate responsibility for making the revolutionary new approach work.

There is a warning in the Southern California mobility plan that applies just as well to other metropolitan areas. Noting that if Southern Californians do not change their transportation habits over the next 20 years, they would waste more than 16 times as many hours sitting in traffic jams in 2010 as they do now, the report said:

“The streets and roads of the region simply cannot accommodate the additional traffic suggested by these projections, even with virtually unlimited construction. But perhaps even more important, the automobile is one of the major causes of the region’s severe air-quality problem . . . . “ The dilemma can’t be put any more clearly. The Senate’s Clean Air Bill should be enacted and signed by President Bush.