Wiki Wednesday: Funding Green Transportation With CLEAN TEA

The decline in driving makes the gas tax less reliable as a transportation funding stream. VMT graph: FHWA.

One of the big challenges that federal policymakers will soon have to address is how to pay for a new generation of transportation investment. The federal gas tax, pegged at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993, just isn't up to the job in its current form. There's a whole range of ideas on the table to fix the problem, and in this week's StreetsWiki entry, John Boyle, advocacy director for the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, points us to a potential revenue stream for transit, smart growth, and bike-ped projects:

CLEAN TEA is contingent on some pretty big ifs, like whether a cap-and-trade program will make it through Congress. But the Obama administration projects raising $80 billion a year from auctioning off carbon emissions permits, and CLEAN TEA has sponsors from both parties in the House and the Senate, so this is definitely an idea with some momentum.