Colorado legislators once again are discussing how to move office workers and other commuters out of single-occupancy vehicles, setting up another potential confrontation on the subject during the 2025 legislative session.
Democrats on the Transportation Legislation Review Committee, which examines issues each year in between legislative sessions, voted Friday to draft a bill that would require state officials to make air-quality improvements related to transportation. Although Sen. Kevin Priola, the Henderson Democrat who asked for the bill draft, did not specify the contents of the proposal, he said it could incorporate numerous suggestions that environmental advocates presented to the TLRC.
Those suggestions included two ideas that have met with opposition previously — employer trip-reduction efforts (commonly known as ETRP) and emissions limits on indirect sources, which are areas like warehouses or construction sites that attract significant traffic.
TLRC members also heard a general plea from the Natural Resources Defense Council to redirect existing funding away from highway expansions and toward transit and other multimodal solutions. That could be incorporated into a bill that Sen. Faith Winter, D-Broomfield, asked to have drafted to ensure the Colorado Department of Transportation’s 10-year plan is meeting its carbon-reduction goals while also providing more transit and other mobility options.
Next step on potential bills
Committee members will vote Sept. 25 on which bills will proceed to introduction for the 2025 session, and they will consider other proposals, including a potential bill to let counties increase fees on commercial vehicles to fund multimodal transportation options. But it seems clear that majority Democrats who have pushed a wide variety of environmental measures in recent years want to take steps to move travelers from lightly occupied vehicles to shared-transportation options, whether via incentives or mandates.
“To meaningfully reduce transportation emissions, we will need more than electric vehicles … Now is the time for bold action, and we need a roadmap,” said Alana Miller, Colorado policy director for the NRDC, during Friday’s meeting. “We can’t simultaneously incentivize, encourage and subsidize more driving.”
A bus drives by the Colorado Capitol in March 2023.
Legislators have put more money into transit in recent years, including subsidies in 2022 and 2023 that allowed transit systems to offer free service during the highest-ozone-pollution months of the summer. Meanwhile, the Colorado Transportation Commission passed a rule in late 2021 limiting highway-expansion funding unless additional transit and other tools offset the increased emissions that would come from more vehicles using growing stretches of roadways.
But legislative efforts to reduce single-vehicle commutes or heavy truck traffic have run into roadblocks.
A committee killed a bill in 2022 to incentivize large employers to limit single-occupancy-vehicle commutes. And a provision to begin the rulemaking process for indirect sources got stripped out of an air-quality bill in 2023 and was part of a proposal that was killed earlier this year as part of a compromise on oil and gas bills put together by Gov. Jared Polis.
Legislators interested in reviving old ideas
No matter that history, though, both ideas re-emerged last week at the TLRC.
Brian Lagerberg, director of public transportation for the Washington Department of Transportation, explained how his state mandates large counties to develop trip-reduction plans for work sites where at least 100 employees arrive between 6 and 9 a.m. daily. That effort, which impacts 4% of daily vehicle trips in Washington, has cut 450 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year and led to much higher rates of multimodal-transportation adoption by employees at those regulated employers, he said.
Officials from several transportation management organizations, including Denver Regional Council of Governments’ Way to Go program and the Boulder Chamber’s Transportation Connections initiative, explained that they’ve worked with local employers to set up transportation-demand-management programs voluntarily. Darcy Kitching, associate executive director for the Boulder program, said she’s seen more openness in the past two years from employers for voluntary programs, and she encouraged the state to offer more funding to organizations that run such programs statewide.
Colorado Department of Transportation Executive Director Shoshana Lew laughs as a train rolls by while she talks about the need for more transit options during a news conference in April.
Legislators passed a law in 2022 to offer employers a refundable tax credit equal to 50% of their costs for providing employees free or partially subsidized transit options such as a bus/train pass, a van-pooling program or payments for micromobility options like scooters. However, as of 2023, only three employers submitted plans to the state establishing their intent to develop alternative transportation options — in large part, several officials told the TLRC, because the state is still going through rulemaking needed to establish the program.
Carrot or stick?
Several environmental and alternative-transportation advocates suggested legislators’ attention should focus on mandates either in addition to or in lieu of incentive programs.
Mike Hughes, West Corridor Transportation Management Association executive director, suggested that after eliminating parking minimums for developers of some multifamily housing this year, the state should cap the maximum parking allowed for developments. He also suggested the state should consider requiring employer-assisted commuting like Washington does — an idea that Polis suggested in 2021 but scrapped after enormous pushback from employers decrying such an idea’s inflexibility for workers.
“When done right, it’s pro-worker and pro-employer,” Hughes said.
Miller suggested the state government should stop funding highway expansions and instead move that money — a substantial amount of which comes from the federal government — to boosting transit systems. She compared adding highways lanes to a “Ponzi scheme,” arguing that expanded lanes meant to reduce congestion quickly fill with new cars whose drivers decide to use those highways.
Colorado traffic in the mountains
Regional Air Quality Council Executive Director Mike Silverstein suggested that the state establish caps for mobile-source emissions, as it has for sectors like oil and gas, manufacturing and commercial buildings. Such caps manifest themselves as emission-reduction regulations like the Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Energy Management for Manufacturers (GEMM) rule approved last year.
What are indirect sources?
One of the most discussed ideas doesn’t involve attempts to get people out of their cars so much as efforts to reduce emissions from “indirect source” destinations where many trucks or other vehicles gather. These could include locations like industrial developments, entertainment venues or airports, but several advocates suggested that the Legislature consider requiring rulemaking specifically for warehouse sites that attract truck traffic.
Warehouses often concentrate in disproportionately impacted communities along highways already rife with emissions, and Colorado warehouse space is predicted to grow 40 million square feet by 2040, said Alexandra Schluntz, attorney for the group Earthjustice. The South Coast Air Quality Management District in Southern California established indirect-source emissions limits and has reduced nitrous oxide emissions one ton a day since 2021 and diesel particulate matter by nearly half a ton a day in that time, she said.
If Colorado were to establish a similar system, it could require warehouse areas and trucking companies operating within them to do things like use zero-emission trucks and install charging areas for these vehicles, officials noted. Any rules would need to come with flexibility, allowing, for example, for companies to pay into a mitigation fund that could pay for air filters at nearby schools and residences to achieve compliance, Silverstein added.
Legislators pushing for some kind of plan
Colorado state Rep. Tisha Mauro, D-Pueblo
Trucking companies are likely to put up opposition to any strict regulations, as industry leaders have noted in the past how difficult it is now to obtain heavy-duty electric vehicles right now and have said companies are trying instead to buy more fuel-efficient trucks.
But with transportation accounting for about 25% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to the NRDC, legislators who oversee that sector seem interested in doing something to bring down that pollution, even if they haven’t rallied around a single bill yet.
“From reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and improving our air quality to ensuring Coloradans can get to work and school without access to a car, it is important that the Legislature takes steps to create transportation systems that all Coloradans can rely on,” Rep. Tisha Mauro, D-Pueblo, said in a statement following the TLRC meeting. “I’m excited to continue these policy discussions so we can better support an efficient and equitable transportation system.”