Dear Green Streets supporters:
The state Senate has sent to the House of Representatives draft
legislation to restructure the state’s transportation system. As
Director of Green Streets Initiative, I am writing to urge each of you
to get in touch with your Representative and with the leadership of the
House Transportation Committee (see details below) to urge support for a couple of particular components of the proposed bill. Please contact them as soon as possible, as the vote could be as early as next Monday, April 6.
1) Increasing the Gas Tax:
While the governor’s proposal to raise the
gas tax by 19 cents has generated lots of controversy, it is an
absolute necessity. First, it is needed to cover previous
Administration’s decades of neglected repairs and upgrading. Second,
it is needed to prevent the total collapse of our state’s public
transit system which, whatever criticisms of its performance we may
have, was hobbled with totally inadequate funding even to maintain its
current service levels. Third, it is needed to pay for finally pushing
our transportation system to give walking and bicycling more emphasis.
(For more details about why it will be cheaper to raise the gas tax
than let all these problems – and others – fester, see
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/02/26/gas_tax_paying_cents_to_save_big_bucks/
.
2) Institutionalizing a connection between transportation and health:
The Healthy Transportation Compact (section
13 in the Governor’s original proposal and included in the Senate’s
version) creates a way for the public health and medical world to
provide on-going feedback to top-level transportation decision-makers,
and requires Health Impact Analyses for all major transportation
projects. This is absolutely unprecedented in the United States and
will be a major step forward.
Transportation is not only about how we move people and
things, it is also one of the major ways that we impact both the
environment and our health. In the past, our state and nation have
given so much priority to designing our roads, residential areas,
commercial centers, and even our recreation areas around the needs of
automobiles that we’ve made getting it difficult to get anywhere in any
other way.
The inevitable result of our car-centric transportation
system has been pollution, noise, personal immobility, and reduced
safety – leading to diseases (such as asthma, heart disease, several
types of cancer, stress, skin irritations, and more) as well as
sedentary lifestyles and accidents.
It is time that our transportation system
be restructured, from its design to its operation, to prioritize public
transit, bicycling, and walking. This will do as much as almost any
other public action to reduce our carbon emissions, lower pollution,
make our neighborhoods safer, and protect our health. We believe,
based on national research and our own experiences, that such a
restructuring of our transportation system will also foster economic
growth, create jobs, and facilitate social connections within our
communities.
However, there are a couple ways that the transportation-health
connection could be made even stronger in the House version of the bill.
1) A “Walking and Cycling” division
should be established at the same level as Highways, Transit, and
Airports/Waterways in order to institutionalize those modes as having
equal importance.
2) The Bike Advisory Group inserted in the Senate
deals solely with recreational cycling on paths. Its purview should be
expanded to include on-road use of bikes by commuters, kids going to
and from school and after-school activity, and people using bikes for
short-trips doing every-day errands and visits – as well as those who
use the roads for recreational riding where no off-road paths exist.
(An expanded and strengthened Bike Advisory Group should be included in
the bill even if the unwise attempt to transfer DCR parkways and
bridges to Mass Highway is dropped by the House.)
 So,
please – write your own letter and send it (as soon as possible) to
your own Representative, or make a quick call to her/his office. (To
find out who is your Representative, and his or her contact
information, see http://www.mass.gov/legis/)
If you have time, it would be very useful if you also sent copies of your letter to the House Leadership:
Speaker of the House Robert A. DeLeo
State House, Room 356
Boston, MA 02133
Telephone: 617-722-2500
Facsimile: 617-722-2008
E-Mail: Robert.DeLeo@state.ma.us
Rep. Joseph Wagner
House Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Transportation
State House, Room 134
Boston, MA 02133
Telephone: 617-722-2400
E-Mail: Rep.JosephWagner@hou.state.ma.us
Rep. Jeffrey Sánchez
House Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Public Health
State House, Room 42
Boston, MA 02133
Telephone: 617-722-2370
Email: Rep.JeffreySanchez@hou.state.ma.us
Rep. Harriett L. Stanley
House Co-Chair, Joint Committee on Health Care Financing
State House, Room 236
Boston, MA 02133
Telephone: 617- 722-2430
E-Mail: Rep.HarriettStanley@hou.state.ma.us
Thanks for your help on this important effort. (I
apologize if you are getting this from another part of the world. Our
Green Streets email list is not differentiated. In any case, I think
these issues are more than just local.)
All my best,
Janie
Janie Katz-Christy
Founder & Director
Green Streets Initiative
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