Policy in Motion is offering a “Sustainable Community Grant Navigation” package to assist local governments in optimizing successful grant submissions for both the five federal grant opportunities totaling $748 million, and the California Proposition 84 grant awards totaling $22 million this cycle.  Consultancy service for the Navigation package includes:

1. overview of how federal and California policy direction ties into the scoring criteria for federal and California planning grants, and
2. custom consultation for applicant on which grants to pursue and how to prepare grant materials through strategic planning submissions.

For more information contact Lauren Michele at lauren.michele@policyinmotion.com.

Click here to access the publication

However, as funding for transportation projects becomes scarcer, more often than not, this traditional planning paradigm is unrealistic.  Funding availability to construct a project can no longer be assumed.  This has already been well established in regional transportation planning process, but has yet to take widespread hold at the individual city and county level. Moreover, with increasing congestion in urban areas, designing facilities that would meet target LOS thresholds in the long-term is becoming cost prohibitive.

This article promotes replacing the traditional transportation planning process with a constraints-based approach that addresses new funding, environmental, and political realities. 

Click Here for the Full Paper

Low gas prices have automakers worried new hybrids won’t sell

The Problem with Cheap Oil

With gas falling, trucks come back

Exxon to Congress: Give Us A Carbon Tax, Please!

California is in Desperate Need of a Gas Tax

Imagine being an automaker and trying to predict what will happen with gas prices and how it will affect the fleet of vehicles that you should construct?  These are decisions that generally need to made 10 years in advance of the roll-out of any new auto product to allow for product development and machining of factories.  And yet it is difficult to predict the price of oil (and therefore gas) next year, let alone next decade. 

Here is a simple solution – a floating gas tax increment.  How about if we set a minimum price for a gallon of gas and structure a tax that achieves that price?  We all noted dramatic progress in the number of people using transit, increased purchase of more efficient vehicles, and good, old fashion conservation when gas prices rose above $4.  So how about a $4 minimum gas price target.  In today’s market, that amounts to better than a $2 increase in the gas tax, which would generate about $29 Billion per year to a state (California) very much in need of new revenue.

During periods, such as in late 2008, when gas prices exceed $4, the increment would be zero so the benefit to the state budget would be negated, but we would continue to reap rewards from the relative predictability of gas prices.  These would include:  investment in clean fuels and alternative energy sources; changeover of a California vehicle fleet to one that is more efficient and cleaner; increased use of transit; greater conservation of a precious resource, and the resulting emissions reductions from all of these.  While some of the conservation may come from simple decisions to walk rather than drive to the store, long-term predictability also encourages long-term lifestyle changes such as relocating closer to work and school, or to be adjacent to a transit hub.  It enables car-free households after more investment in transit .  And it encourages change in land use patterns to locate complementary uses (for example houses and schools) in integrated communities such that walking is possible.

It is a tax that has enormous societal benefits and generates significant revenue.