“What we’re going to do now is open up the public process,” Serena McIlwain, the state’s Environment secretary, said during an online news conference Friday. That report is likely to result in legislation and regulatory action to strengthen Maryland’s climate protections. The new analysis will be used as a jumping-off point for the Department of the Environment to take the public pulse this summer on the state’s climate goals and use that input for a final report, to be issued in December, on what the state needs to do to achieve them. “The rapid, clean, affordable, and just energy and economic transition needed to achieve these goals will be challenging, but it is possible,” the report, assembled by the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy says. State law seeks a 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2031 and requires the state to hit net-zero emissions 14 years after that. The analysis, “Maryland’s Climate Pathway,” lays out policy, regulatory and lifestyle changes that the state needs to embrace to meet the carbon-reduction goals mandated by the Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022. That’s the conclusion of a preliminary report issued Friday by the Maryland Department of the Environment. Maryland is halfway toward meeting its ambitious climate goals, and a path exists for the state to reach net-zero emissions by 2045.
States also must grapple with the social and environmental implications of their plans for replacing the gas tax, said Asha Weinstein Agrawal, director of the National Transportation Finance Center at San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute.A path leads to the Maryland State House. Jay Inslee vetoed the measure, though, arguing that Washington needs a program in place before starting to collect citizens’ personal data. Lawmakers passed a bill in April that would have begun early steps toward a program by allowing collection of motorists’ odometer readings on a voluntary basis.
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Indeed, a chicken-and-egg dispute over how to proceed in Washington state has stymied road usage charging efforts there. “That doesn’t mean that a program can’t be designed to do so, but I feel like if you can’t even conceive of the program architecture that seems like something that would work, you probably shouldn’t put too much faith in it.” “There’s no program design that I have seen that I think can be implemented at scale in a way that is publicly acceptable,” he said. “We’ve been doing it one way for 100 years, and that way is not going to work anymore.”Įric Paul Dennis, a transportation analyst at the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, said the failure of states to convert years of research into even one fully functional, mandatory program by now raises questions about whether road usage charging can really work. “This is about the relationship between the people who are using our roads and bridges and how we’re paying for it,” Hendren said. The biggest hurdle, she said, is to inform the public about the diminishing returns from the gas tax that has long paid for roads. Hendren’s organization, a 17-state partnership that researches transportation safety and technology innovations, participated in one of the earliest pilot projects and eight others since. Virginia’s program, launched in 2022, is already the largest in the nation and will provide valuable lessons, she said. Patricia Hendren, executive director of the Eastern Transportation Coalition, said figuring out how to account for multistate trips is particularly important in the eastern U.S., where states are smaller and closer together than those in the West. states face as they experiment with road usage charging programs aimed at one day replacing motor fuel taxes, whose purchasing power is less each year, in part due to inflation, fuel efficiency and the rise of electric cars. “It’s probably a good thing, but on top of everybody else’s stress today, it’s just one more thing,” she said of Oregon’s first-in-the-nation initiative, which is run by the state transportation department where her son serves as a survey analyst.īurroughs’ reluctance exemplifies the myriad hurdles U.S. She figures it’s far less hassle to just pay at the pump, as Americans have done for more than a century. Margaret Burroughs, 85, said she has no intention of inserting a tracking device on her Nissan Murano to record the miles she drives to get groceries or attend needlepoint meetings.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Evan Burroughs has spent eight years touting the virtues of an Oregon pilot program charging motorists by the distance their vehicle travels rather than the gas it guzzles, yet his own mother still hasn’t bought in.
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