The serious assessment of climate change impacts on transportation is just six years old. Yet considerable progress has been made in this short time. Analytical frameworks to couple decision support for transportation decision makers at the national, regional, and local levels with the leading edge of climate science have been established and tested. A better understanding of the risks and vulnerabilities facing transportation agencies has been accomplished through a growing number of assessments. But significant gaps exist, and the full integration of climate impacts in transportation planning, design, and operations has yet to be accomplished. Adaptation planning and implementation lag except where disasters have struck. Research must play a critical role over the next decade to address societal impacts, better define critical concepts and make them useful for practitioners, and integrate climate concerns more completely in the natural and built environments across all sectors, including transportation.
The challenge of jointly addressing transportation and air quality concerns has been the subject of research for some time, but it reached its apex after passage of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 and the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991. Since that time, the legislative and regulatory context that prompted extensive research has been in continual flux, leading to ever-new areas even as the original agenda set in the early 1990s has yet to be completed. Critical relationships between transportation behavior and air quality impacts have yet to be clarified, and more data and better analytical tools will be necessary before greater understanding is achieved. The advent of new strategies related to telecommuting, e-commerce, vehicle insurance, car sharing, and “sustainability” poses serious questions for the research community. Concurrently, new challenges abound spawned from current and future developments. New air quality standards have redefined the meaning of “clean” air. Air toxics loom as the next focus area from the 1990 amendments. New vehicle and fuel standards are being adopted. Greenhouse gases and global warming pose particular challenges for transportation, but radically new vehicle-fuel systems for cars, trucks, and buses show promise that the transportation community can again rise to meet these challenges. Knowing where the greatest air quality problems exist and how best to address them is the stuff of cutting-edge research, which will pose a challenge into the next decade. It is an exciting time to be in transportation and air quality.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.