Cascade has received a grant from the Bullitt Foundation to help with their transportation work at the federal level.

According to Cascade’s David Hiller, the grant will allow Cascade to conduct studies and produce papers explaining the outcomes of different transportation policies. They will then give these to the Washington delegation to better inform their decisions.

Washington has several members on the Congressional transportation committee, so work from our state to demand better federal transportation policies needs to be strong. There are many, many policies that need changing, and the more research showing the advantage of having transportation policies for people, the better.

For example, the Active Community Transportation Act (the ACT act) would provide funding for communities ready to move forward with plans that will help people shift their mode of transportation away from the personal vehicle. Investments of relatively small amounts of money go a long way in bicycle and pedestrian plans, for example.

The federal transportation plan also does not include environmental and public health issues with it’s transportation program, which is pretty outrageous. The stalled environmental legislation would have put a mere 1 percent of cap and trade funds towards non-motorized transportation. Not that I think cap and trade is a great idea, but that kind of money would go a very, very long way towards helping bike pedestrian and transit projects.

And like Hiller said, “We can’t keep going the way we’re going … we create communities where obesity and chronic disease are rampant.” Not only that, but we then pay for these mistakes twice.

“We built those places with federal transportation dollars, and we’re trying to fix it with federal health dollars.” We have a long way to go.