Efforts to protect water, habitat and other natural resources are often divorced from regional and local land use decision making and infrastructure investment.   Planners and conservation advocates are meeting this challenge by working across political jurisdictions to establish landscape conservation initiatives that protect watersheds, ecosystems and other landscape-scale processes by identifying and responding to the broader threats of regional land use and infrastructure investment decisions.

The United States could soon have, for the first time, an official federal policy on freight if a bill introduced this week in the Senate becomes law. Three Senators, lead by Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, introduced a bill that would make it the policy of the United States "to improve the efficiency, operation, and security of the national transportation system to move freight." The bill, titled Focusing Resources, Economic Investment and Guidance to Help Transportation (FREIGHT) Act of 2010, enumerates five primary objectives to achieve this policy goal:

•    Reduce delays at international points of entry
•    Increase travel time reliability on major freight corridors
•    Reduce by 10 percent the number of freight related fatalities by 2015
•    Reduce national freight related CO2 levels by 40 percent by 2030
•    Reduce freight related air, water, and noise pollution

The bill establishes within the Department of Transportation an Office of Freight Planning and Development, and gives the DOT two years to develop a National Freight Transportation Strategic Plan that would guide federal investment to achieve these goals.

The bill also establishes a competitive grant program to provide funding for capital investments for freight projects. These grants could go towards projects such as port or intermodal facility improvement, freight rail improvement or capacity expansion, and Intelligent Transportation Systems to reduce congestion.  It also mandates that the DOT develop new tools "to support an outcome-oriented, performance-based approach to evaluate proposed freight-related" projects.

Click here read the complete text of the bill. 

Earlier this month America 2050 sponsored a two-day planning charrette in Portland, Oregon with stakeholders along the Pacific Northwest Rail Corridor - stretching from Vancouver, British Columbia to Eugene, Oregon to develop a vision for an integrated Cascadia megaregion enabled by high-speed rail.

Building on America 2050's research on Where High-Speed Rail Works Best the workshop sought to explore the economic, land use, urban design, and transportation strategies and investments necessary to fully leverage federal, state, provincial, and local investments in high-speed rail in this binational corridor. The workshop was an opportunity to broaden the focus of regional leaders on how high-speed rail can help advance larger goals for Cascadia as a more interconnected, sustainable, and prosperous megaregion.

To learn more, you can download the detailed briefing book of background information prepared for workshop participants. You can also access America 2050's original map of the Cascadia megaregion prepared for the workshop, which synthesizes transportation, land use, and the regional planning strategies of the entire megaregion on the America 2050 Maps Page (scroll to the bottom of the page.) A summary of workshop proceedings and next steps will be posted here soon.