New York idles on green transportation plan

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

The opening pages of New York’s sweeping 2022 plan to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions includes a long list of steps the state had already taken to green its economy. Among them: advancing a congestion pricing program for New York City that would “improve air quality and enhance equity by expanding access” to mass transit.

Now, that program is in tatters. Two weeks ago, its planned start date came and went without any of its $500 million tolling cameras turned on.

As the state has backpedaled on congestion pricing, it has idled on other policies the climate scoping plan urged to clean up the transportation sector.

The Department of Environmental Conservation has not required certain trucks to be zero-emissions. The Department of State has not updated the manuals that cities use for street design. And the state legislature has not taken any of the actions that the scoping plan pushed it to. Most haven’t even been introduced as legislation.

In total, New York Focus reviewed 35 transportation policy prescriptions laid out in the scoping plan. Only one has been completed. Just over half have seen some signs of progress, ranging from lawmakers introducing (but not passing) bills to agencies administering small grants.

The rest have yet to see any meaningful action. State agencies and lawmakers have especially dragged their feet on a key component of the state’s decarbonization plan: efforts to reduce driving.

The state has made some headway on transportation electrification, as Hochul’s office highlighted in a statement.

“Governor Hochul is committed to reducing emissions from the transportation sector which is why she’s made nation-leading commitments to deploy electric school buses and zero emissions passenger vehicles across the state and is investing more than $1 billion in electric vehicle infrastructure,” a spokesperson told New York Focus.

New York Focus reviewed the full list of recommendations in the scoping plan's transportation chapter, as well as the Sabin Center’s Scoping Plan Tracker (which includes many, but not all, of the recommendations). New York Focus verified the status of the items by contacting state agencies and the governor’s office; searching for relevant legislation in the Legislative Retrieval System; and reviewing records available on state government websites. The review excluded three items that were either very general or fell under the purview of local governments.

New York’s climate plan was not written casually. Led by a panel of agency heads, advocates, scientists, and industry representatives, the process took more than two years, a dozen subcommittees, hundreds of meetings, thousands of pages of supporting studies, and thousands more public comments, yielding a 450-page blueprint for phasing out fossil fuels across New York’s economy.

The transportation policies recommended in the plan range from technical fixes, like adopting common standards for electric vehicle chargers, to outside-the-box ideas, like per-mile fees on drivers to fund mass transit. Ultimately, the plan says, any path to net-zero emissions involves large numbers of New Yorkers getting out of their cars.

That’s no small task.

“We’re going to have to really reimagine how we do transportation planning and how we get around,” said Kevin Garcia, senior transportation planner with the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance.

New York has a head start when it comes to low-carbon transportation. It already has the lowest transportation emissions per capita of any state, thanks to dense, transit-rich New York City. And, after a sharp dip during the pandemic, 2021 emissions from road transportation were down about 6 percent from 1990 levels.

But that leaves a lot more work to do. Transportation is still one of New York’s top sources of emissions, and the climate plan aims to cut those emissions by 30 percent by 2030. So far, there are few signs that the state is on track.

A big chunk of the scoping plan’s recommendations revolves around electrifying cars, trucks, and buses. Regulators have taken one key step toward that end: requiring that by 2035, all new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the state must be electric. The requirements gradually ramp up to that goal, starting with 35 percent of new car sales in 2026. But as of now, the figure stands at just 6 percent, according to the think tank International Council on Clean Transportation.

The state has also long promised to get 850,000 electric vehicles on the road by 2025, but it’s woefully behind. Currently, New York is just 15 percent of the way there, according to state data.

Aside from the 2035 clean cars rule, state agencies have yet to fully tackle any of the transportation items in the climate plan.

The legislature has not seized on them, either. About 10 of the to-dos New York Focus identified — many of which also appear in a tracker compiled by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law — fall in its court, and so far, only a few have even been proposed as legislation.

The scoping plan recommends that lawmakers fund “car-free streets” and require state contractors to use more electric vehicles, for example — but no one has introduced bills to do either.

Electrification is just one prong of the state’s transportation strategy. The more ambitious goals target New Yorkers’ reliance on cars.

“In order for us to reduce our emissions, we can’t just electrify our way out of it,” said Renae Reynolds, executive director of the advocacy group Tri-State Transportation Campaign. (Reynolds helped advise the experts who wrote the state’s climate plan.)

The climate plan recommends “historic investments” to expand public transit and promote “smart growth,” a form of urban planning that revolves around dense, walkable city centers.

The Hochul administration has at times signaled support for this direction. This spring, when it applied for a major federal grant, New York listed reducing sprawl as one of nine top ways for the state to reduce emissions.

But it’s seeking a relatively small amount of federal money to support that goal — just $17 million over five years, according to application documents New York Focus obtained through a public records request. Asked why it did not seek more, a spokesperson for the Department of State, which is due to oversee the spending if granted, noted that the federal program is highly competitive.

Beyond the federal grant application, the Department of State touted its “significant progress” in implementing smart growth items in the plan through initiatives like the Smart Growth Planning and Zoning program, which this year is offering $2 million in grants to local governments.

Most of the climate plan’s specific prescriptions for promoting smart growth, though, are still pending. They hinge in part on updating an existing law on the topic, a process that requires action from the legislature. No lawmaker has proposed such amendments yet.

The broader push to shift modes of transportation has likewise been slow to gain steam in the legislature, but it is starting. One bill introduced last year directly picks up a recommendation from the climate plan: creating a vehicle weight fee, designed to discourage sales of gas-guzzling SUVs. But the bill remains stuck in committee.

Senate transportation committee chair Jeremy Cooney did not directly answer questions about why the legislature hasn’t taken up more climate plan items, but he indicated that the committee would evaluate them ahead of next year’s legislative session. His Assembly counterpart, William Magnarelli, did not respond to inquiries.

While legislators have yet to latch onto the specific recommendations in the plan, some are picking up on its broader agenda. One bill introduced last year would seek to reduce the total amount of driving in the state — measured in “vehicle miles traveled,” or VMT — by one-fifth by 2050. It would require planners to evaluate whether a highway project would increase or decrease driving and offset increases by shifting funds to public transit and pedestrian and bike infrastructure.

Modeling by the clean energy research group RMI found that a 20 percent reduction in driving would not only shave emissions, but also save the lives of thousands of New Yorkers each year by reducing crashes, improving air quality, and promoting exercise.

The bill’s backers say the key to achieving that shift, and the state’s wider climate goals, is better infrastructure.

“People don’t want to change their behaviors because the options that they’re presented with are not good,” said Senator Andrew Gounardes, who sponsors both the VMT and vehicle weight bills. The legislation is not about “cars versus no cars,” he continued.

“I drive a car pretty often. I also take the bus, and I take the railroad, and I take the ferry,” said Gounardes, who represents a stretch of the Brooklyn waterfront. “It’s about providing people options.”

The bill’s Assembly sponsor, Karen McMahon, represents the suburbs of Buffalo, on the opposite end of the state.

“Buffalo used to be a city that had great public transportation, back when, like, my parents were kids. There were electric streetcars all over the city,” she said. “Then the automobile took hold, and it kind of changed everything up here.”

Now, it can be a pain for her just to get to Albany without a car, she said, even though it’s a straight shot on Amtrak. The passenger rail line shares its tracks with the freight network, which gets the right of way, causing regular delays. McMahon hopes that steering more resources away from highways could improve intercity transit, too.

The Senate’s secretive working rules group considered the VMT reduction bill in the final weeks of session, according to an agenda obtained by New York Focus. But it ultimately remained stuck in committee.

Reynolds, of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said it wasn’t surprising that such efforts to reduce car dependence haven’t taken off yet.

“If you’re talking about VMT, I think it’s a new issue, it’s new language that people are needing to absorb and understand. And that takes time,” she said.

McMahon noted that efforts to decarbonize buildings, like the All-Electric Buildings Act and the NY HEAT Act, have so far dominated climate debates in the legislature, making it harder to build momentum around transportation.

In the meantime, the state Department of Transportation has forged ahead with business as usual. As New York Focus reported in February, the state has heavily prioritized roads over transit in spending federal infrastructure money, lavishing them with over 90 percent of the $1 billion in “flexible” funds spent to date.

It’s not just institutional inertia. Combating car culture also rubs up against deeply ingrained habits, proponents note, which are hard to snap out of.

“People just hate the idea of change,” McMahon said. “But then when it happens, people get used to it pretty quickly.”