A webinar series sponsored by Smart Growth America is examining virtual public engagement practices for community outreach, examining a range of online platforms, as well as email and social media, as means of public involvement on projects and programs.
The group is holding three webinars on the subject, the first of which was held on April 28 and is now available via recording. The next two webinars are in June and cover:
Equitable Inclusion in Virtual Community Engagement: To be held June 16, it will feature a discussion among top equity experts to understand the considerations that must be when conducting virtual community engagement.
“Online engagement might not be the best platform for every community to engage every citizen on every topic,” Smart Growth America noted. “But necessity is often the mother of invention and the need to stay home has exposed inequities and fostered innovations that have started many community leaders thinking about new and better ways to achieve wider and more meaningful representation in public decision-making.” For more information, registration, and recordings, click here.
The Oregon Department of Transportation is approaching the end of a multi-year environmental and public relations ordeal in which a seemingly routine herbicide-spraying project in a national forest poisoned 2,300 towering Ponderosa pine trees that eventually had to be cut down.
By June, the agency should be grinding down the last of the stumps left by its massive 2019 logging of herbicide-poisoned trees along U.S. 20 in the Deschutes National Forest in Central Oregon.
Photo courtesy Oregon DOT
Aside from the wood chips, what will remain are valuable environmental lessons the Oregon DOT is taking to heart.
The problem began when the Oregon DOT contracted with Jefferson County Public Works in 2013 to spray the herbicide aminocyclopyrachlor – also known as Perspective – along a 12-mile stretch of U.S. 20 to kill vegetation that could pose a fire hazard.
In 2014, U.S. Forest Service rangers noticed some trees were stressed, but no one linked it to the herbicide until the spraying was completed in 2015. By then, the damage was done and the Oregon DOT determined the trees – some of which were 36 inches in diameter – were safety hazards and had to be removed.
Environmental groups and residents criticized the agency, its contractor and the U.S. Forest Service for using the herbicide. Although a review of the decision-making process did not fully put the blame on the Oregon DOT, “at best, it wasn’t clear,” explained Joel McCarroll, Oregon DOT’s District 10 manager.
“We took full responsibility. It was not a comfortable decision, but I felt it was an easy decision,” he emphasized. “It just didn’t make sense to lay the blame off on someone else. It was just easier to go forward and get this done.”
Photo courtesy Oregon DOT
To that end, the agency held open houses for public discussion of its remediation plan because “we needed to be transparent with the public – we had more than 2,000 trees that had to come down,” McCarroll noted. “We were very clear about the criteria and the process we were using. And, people were fine. I’ve had people come unglued on me for other things at public meetings, but these crowds were respectful.”
Although Perspective was legal to use, a warning label about its use around pine trees was added before the project ended, but no one caught the change. “We overlooked a warning label, and that’s one of the process-improvement changes we’ve made,” McCarroll said.
In response to the tree killing, Oregon became the first state to prohibit the use of aminocyclopyrachlor in numerous applications on May 9, including along rights-of-way. Additionally, each Oregon DOT district now has an integrated vegetation program, and personnel within the district are cross trained to prevent a loss of institutional knowledge, McCarroll noted.
“Learn from our experience – you still have to have the expertise internally, even if you’re contracting out spraying,” he explained. “If you’re dealing with highways that are on federal lands, make sure the decision-making is clear. And it’s important to be public about your process.”
The Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement or CMAQ program offered via the Federal Highway Administration provides funding to state and local governments for transportation projects and programs that reduce emissions and help improve air quality and congestion. And to help those agencies track the emissions benefits of their projects, the FHWA developed and is now rolling out a new CMAQ Emissions Calculator Toolkit.
“CMAQ project justification as well as annual reporting require the development of reliable air quality benefit estimates,” the agency explained. “Realizing that every potential project sponsor may not have the capacity for developing independent air quality benefit estimates, the FHWA has undertaken the initiative of developing a series of spreadsheet based tools to facilitate the calculation of representative air quality benefit data.”
There are 10 tools currently available which cover a wide range of CMAQ-eligible project types, including: bicycle-pedestrian improvements; transit service and fleet expansion; alternative fuels and vehicles; diesel retrofit/repower; and traffic flow improvements.
More information about the new CMAQ tools can be found by clicking here.
Colorado is embarking on an ambitious program to have 940,000 electric vehicles (EVs) registered by 2030, and the Colorado Department of Transportation is tasked with helping to lead the charge within the department and throughout the state.
The Colorado Electric Vehicle Plan 2020 also looks beyond 2030, setting a “long-term goal of 100 percent of light-duty vehicles being electric and 100% of medium- and heavy-duty vehicles being zero emission.” The plan taps Colorado DOT as one of the main players to develop the state’s strategy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by replacing internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles with EVs.
According to Sophie Shulman, the agency’s chief of innovative mobility, the Colorado DOT’s role in the state’s EV plan is two-fold. First, it must begin replacing its current fleet of ICE vehicles to zero emission vehicles (ZEV) whenever practical. The second – and bigger – task for the department is to work on several fronts to increase ZEV use among private, commercial, and transit entities and to support further growth of the state’s EV charging infrastructure.
The plan’s goals “complement and build upon our existing work in the field of vehicle electrification, such as our management of transit electrification grants, our planning coordination through the public-private Freight Advisory Council and our support of charging infrastructure and vehicle grant programs,” Shulman said.
While Colorado’s 28,722 EVs on the road represent a 25 percent increase from August 2019, the state will have to consistently post a 40 percent annual increase to hit the 940,000 EV mark by 2030. In addition, the Colorado DOT and other agencies have until 2021 to “establish timelines, identify strategies and dedicate sufficient resources” to convert the entire state transit fleet to an all-ZEV fleet by 2050, with at least 1,000 ZEV transit vehicles on the road by 2030.
An added challenge is that the electrification of medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles, which make up the vast majority of transit vehicles, has lagged behind the development of passenger EVs for a host of reasons, including battery issues, range problems and cost barriers.
However, a recent report from Atlas Public Policy determined that purchasing such EV vehicles can be cost-effective if low-cost charging and vehicle incentives remain in play.
Developing strategies and plans for EV infrastructure and purchasing incentives also are on Colorado DOT’s to-do list as well, noted Shulman. She explained that the agency has “a long history” of supporting EV incentive programs and charging projects, including the agency’s work on REV West, a multi-state effort to build an EV charging network through the Intermountain West states. The EV plans are “ambitious and will push us further than ever before,” Shulman added. “We are excited by this challenge and eager to partner with industry, state, and local agencies and Coloradans to make the plan’s vision a reality.”
The charismatic and familiar Monarch Butterfly serves as a “flagship species” for pollinator conservation – and a new report from the Transportation Research Board examines how transportation industry stakeholders can evaluate whether certain roadway corridors provide suitable habitats to aid in their preservation.
That report – NCHRP Research Report 942 Pre-Pub: Evaluating the Suitability of Roadway Corridors for Use by Monarch Butterflies – examines the potential for roadway corridors to provide habitat for monarch butterflies and provides tools for roadside managers to optimize potential habitat for monarch butterflies in their road rights-of-way.
This NCHRP report follows on the heels of a “historic agreement” finalized between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the University of Illinois-Chicago on April 8 that encourages transportation and energy firms to voluntarily participate in Monarch Butterfly conservation by providing and maintaining habitat on potentially millions of acres of rights-of-way corridors on both public and private lands.
The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials supported this effort in a two-page letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior on March 12; seeking “expedited approval” of voluntary national CCAAs to further encourage the creation of pollinator habitats in highway rights-of-way – especially the Monarch Butterfly.
“This decision gives state DOTs the ability to meet their highest priority to provide safe roads for the traveling public while simultaneously safeguarding the health of habitat for essential pollinators like the Monarch Butterfly,” noted Jim Tymon, AASHTO’s executive director.
The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials recently made recordings available of its weekly series of COVID-19 “virtual panels” held in April.
The AASHTO Committee on Transportation System Security & Resilience, through its Resilient and Sustainable Transportation Systems or RSTS Technical Assistance Program, sponsored those panels, which focused COVID-19 response and recovery issues faced by state departments of transportation.
The panels featured COVID-19 updates from the Federal Highway Administration, Transportation Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security as well as from other state and local transportation agencies, followed by a question and answer session.
The panel recordings and materials can be accessed by clicking here.
The inaugural episode of the Environmental Technical Assistance Program or ETAP Podcast includes an interview with Allie Kelly executive director of The Ray – a corporate venture devoted to roadway technology testing. She talks about her group’s work with the Georgia Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration as part of a “public-private-philanthropic partnership” or P4 charter to collaborate on ways to better use an 18-mile-long portion of Interstate 85 The Ray manages as a “living transportation laboratory.”
“The infrastructure changes we need to make for autonomous and connected vehicles is pretty clear,” she explained during the podcast. “Clear signage and lane markings are critical as are technologies for managing the data streams coming from connected vehicles in real-time to understand where dangerous crashes are located and how to better protect work zones, among other benefits.”
It’s about developing highway infrastructure that is cleaner, smarter, and more efficient, Kelly noted. “We’ve been working with the Georgia Department of Transportation for five years and the formal [P4] charter agreement we signed in 2019 is helping us develop larger projects, such as a group of solar panels on the highway right-of-way managed by Georgia Power that helps reduce expenditures on right-of-way maintenance.” To access more of Ray’s ETAP podcast commentary, click here.
