Cities are trying to cut down on cars. Some states are standing in their way.

This story was originally published by Yale Climate Connections.

Earlier this summer, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul made headlines around the world by canceling New York City’s long-planned congestion pricing program, which had been hailed as a promising model for reducing cars’ domination of American city streets. Her decision has been denounced by many New York City political and transportation leaders, including Comptroller Brad Lander, who is part of a coalition that has filed multiple lawsuits challenging the governor.

This kind of conflict isn’t unique to New York. Across the nation, state and local officials frequently clash over efforts to make urban transportation less car-centric.

“You have cities that really want to do things differently, and you have states that are prohibiting that,” said John Bailey, a transportation specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental nonprofit also known as NRDC.

In recent decades, many local governments have made increasingly ambitious pledges to nudge their residents out of their cars. Motivated by concerns like climate change, urban sprawl, and traffic deaths, U.S. cities are trying to make it easier for people to get around on public transportation, on foot, and by bike. Within the past five years, even famously car-centric cities like Houston and Phoenix have announced goals to significantly cut down on driving.

These efforts could add up to substantial climate benefits. Transportation is the nation’s largest source of planet-warming gases, and the everyday vehicles most Americans rely on are the biggest source within the sector. According to think tank RMI, cars and trucks were responsible for almost 40% of all U.S. emissions in 2019. Shifting to electric vehicles will greatly reduce these emissions, but it won’t eliminate them; car use also needs to fall.

“Even if we’re hitting home runs on electrification, which we should celebrate, we’re still not going to be able to meet our climate change goals if we’re still ever increasing the amount of driving,” Bailey said.

State as Friend and Foe

Conflicts over urban transportation play out in different ways across the country. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the local government announced plans to reshape its transportation system in 2022, aiming for half of all commutes to occur by means other than a solo drive within the next two decades. But state lawmakers have refused to approve a sales tax referendum needed to fund programs designed to achieve this goal, demanding that the city instead prioritize cars. According to Charlotte National Public Radio affiliate WFAE, earlier this year local officials halved the amount of proposed sales tax revenue that would be devoted to trains in an attempt to reach an agreement with the state, calling into question ambitious plans to build a light rail network spanning the city.

In San Antonio, where Bailey lives, the state agreed to give up Broadway Avenue, an urban road running past parks, restaurants, and apartment buildings that is technically a state highway, to the city government. To help make the area more amenable to walking and biking, the city government passed a $42 million bond initiative to reduce the number of car lanes, widen sidewalks, and add protected bike lanes on Broadway. However, “the state has since rescinded its ability to do it and said, ‘You absolutely can’t do that. Our No. 1 concern is alleviating congestion,’” Bailey said. The state is effectively applying the same logic to a city street as it would to an interstate loop, decreeing that cars shouldn’t slow down on either, he noted in an email.

Not all states block efforts to reduce driving, however; some have developed innovative ways to support this goal. Washington has a long-standing program focused on reducing solo commute drives, and the Seattle government has reported significant reductions in single-driver commutes within its borders as a result. Colorado recently passed a bill that will impose fees on oil and gas extraction to help fund local public transportation.

Many states’ stances on these issues are complex. New York is one example. Although Gov. Hochul has been widely criticized for ending congestion pricing, she plays an important role in the city’s public transportation network, which enables the city to have the nation’s lowest rate of car ownership. As the state’s governor, she, not the New York City mayor, appoints the board that leads the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s subways and buses, as well as its regional train network.

Many New York City residents don’t recognize the depth of influence that Hochul has over their daily commutes, said Alexa Sledge, the director of communications at Transportation Alternatives, a nonprofit that advocates against car dependency in New York City. “People are often like, ‘Oh, the mayor and the MTA …’ – and it’s just completely inaccurate. The governor has complete control over the MTA. It is a state program,” Sledge said.

Following the Money

To better understand how states manage these and related issues, Bailey and co-author Dave Grossman compared state transportation policies aimed at reducing climate change and improving equity for a 2023 NRDC report. Analyzing information gathered in late 2022 and early 2023, they found that states like California, Massachusetts, and Vermont have taken steps such as setting goals for lowering transportation emissions and reducing car use. However, even the national leaders could be doing much more, the research showed: California was the only state to score more than 70 points out of a possible 100.

At the other end of the spectrum, the study found that states like Kentucky, Louisiana, and Nebraska have taken virtually no action on climate or equity in their transportation planning. The lowest-scoring state, Kentucky, achieved only 12.7 points out of 100.

This policy context is critical to understanding urban transportation in the U.S. The largest source of funding for transportation projects within cities is federal money that gets distributed to state departments of transportation, which have a great deal of discretion over how to spend it. Most of these funds have historically been directed to building and expanding roads to enable more driving – a pattern that persists today.

“States control the lion’s share of transportation funding,” said Steven Higashide, who directs the Clean Transportation Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization. “They can use that to help address the climate and give people more ways to get around. Or they can make things worse – they can keep pouring more money into wider highways.” He cited highway projects in Austin and Houston as an example of the latter.

One area where all states generally fall short is in funding efforts to support walking, biking, and public transit, according to Josh Naramore, a transportation policy expert at the ​​nonprofit National Association of City Transportation Officials, known as NACTO. “At the state level, regardless of if it’s a blue state or a red state, there’s a lot of competition for a limited amount of funding that can support these types of activities to give people more travel options,” he said.

Case in point: Bailey’s research found that New York had the nation’s highest per capita state spending on public transportation, $280, but census data show that the state spent much more on highways in 2021: $609 per capita. Meanwhile, Mississippi spent less than $1 per capita on public transportation but $633 per capita on highways.

These funding patterns mean that federal efforts to reduce transportation emissions can backfire. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which devoted billions of dollars to climate-friendly infrastructure projects – roughly doubling federal transportation spending in the process – is one example. The Georgetown Climate Center, a policy research organization, found that the law will substantially raise net transportation emissions if 25% or more of its funding is used to increase road capacity, since adding new lanes leads to increased driving.*

“When we did our analysis, I think perhaps the most revelatory aspect of the results was the relatively high greenhouse gas impact of [road] capacity expansion projects versus other transportation investments,” said James Bradbury, the director of research and policy analysis at the Georgetown Climate Center.

“Dollar for dollar, it hits hard in the wrong direction,” he said.

*Editor’s note: This sentence was corrected Aug. 22, 2024.