What Obama's campaign literature says about Smart Growth:
III. STRENGTHEN OUR OIL SECURITY AND ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
...
Build More Livable and Sustainable Communities: Over the longer term, we know that the amountof fuel we will use is directly related to our land use decisions and development patterns, much ofwhich have been organized around the principle of cheap gasoline. Barack Obama believes that wemust move beyond our simple fixation of investing so many of our transportation dollars in servingdrivers and that we must make more investments that make it easier for us to walk, bicycle and access ther transportation alternatives.
- Reform Federal Transportation Funding: As president, Barack Obama will re-evaluate thetransportation funding process to ensure that smart growth considerations are taken into account.Obama will build upon his efforts in the Senate to ensure that more Metropolitan PlanningOrganizations create policies to incentivize greater bicycle and pedestrian usage of roads andsidewalks, and he will also re-commit federal resources to public mass transportation projectsacross the country. Building more livable and sustainable communities will not only reduce theamount of time individuals spent commuting, but will also have significant benefits to air quality,public health and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
- Require States to Plan for Energy Conservation: Current law simply asks governors and their stateDepartments of Transportation to “consider” energy conservation as a condition of receivingfederal transportation dollars. As president, Obama will require governors and local leaders in ourmetropolitan areas to make “energy conservation” a required part of their planning for theexpenditure of federal transportation funds
- Level Employer Incentives for Driving and Public Transit: The federal tax code rewards driving towork by allowing employers to provide parking benefits of $205 per month tax free to theiremployees. The tax code provides employers with commuting benefits for transit, carpooling orvanpooling capped at $105 per month. This gives drivers a nearly 2:1 advantage over transit users.Obama will reform the tax code to make benefits for driving and public transit or ridesharing equal.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/pdf/EnergyFactSheet.pdf
Great speech from Obama speaking truth about the "gas tax holiday."
However naming stricter fuels standards as a solutions isn't enough.
It's not (just) about alternative fuels, it's about alternative transportation. It's about driving less but still getting where you want to go.
http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/gcindex.html
Turn to the graph on page 3 of the PDF. It shows that even with strict fuel efficiency standards, emissions will keep going up because every year we collectively drive more miles because of population growth and because we build our houses further and further from destinations.
In addition stricter fuel standards may present some of the same problems that Obama describes with the gas holiday. Some economists say that stricter fuel standards will have even less of an effect on fuel consumption and emissions than expected because many people will just use the money they're saving on gas per mile to drive more. And that driving will result in the need for more roads (which by the way we won't be able to pay for because we're collecting less gas tax per mile) and many of the negative consequences of excessive driving and road building including heat island effects, water quality reduction from runoff off of roads, congestion, the destruction of neighborhoods--especially poor neighborhoods--by excessive traffic.
The answer is to change the way we build our neighborhoods and cities. Check out CNU.org. And it's a nonpartisan issue. The current state of affairs is not solely the result of free-market forces. It's the result of a lot of poor choices in government regulation and investment. It's tied in with both social equity and freedom of economic choice.
