USDOT to America: We Need to Drive Less

When it comes to fighting climate change, few actions are more important than getting fossil fuels out of our transportation sector—which is the largest source of carbon pollution here in Minnesota and across the United States. 

A critical strategy for decarbonizing how we get around is reducing how much we drive, or vehicle miles traveled (VMT). After all, nothing is more energy efficient than simply not using the energy in the first place. But public discourse and public policy too often focus exclusively on the promise of vehicle electrification—a necessary but insufficient step to reduce climate pollution from transportation. 

This summer, in a significant shift, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) explicitly named the need to meaningfully reduce driving to meet the nation’s climate goals. The DOT stated that reducing driving rates is a necessity, not an option: “The U.S. will not be able to decarbonize the transportation sector by midcentury without addressing increased demand for vehicle travel.”

Move Minnesota joined hundreds of advocates, policy experts from around the country, and DOT leadership—including the Deputy Secretary of Transportation and the Executive Directors of the Federal Transit Administration and Federal Highway Administration—in Washington D.C. for the report roll out, and to coordinate strategies on how to actually shift transportation and land use policies to meet this moment. 

The D.C. report launch follows other institutional acknowledgements that we need to cut driving rates. In December 2022, the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) established a goal to reduce vehicle miles traveled by 20% per capita by 2050. This goal was mirrored in the Minnesota Climate Action Plan. Then, in 2023 and 2024, the legislature passed and the governor signed legislation to implement that goal.

Minnesota’s progress paralleled work by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that recognized the importance of VMT reduction and mode shift. The IPCC stressed that shifting from car travel to multimodal travel results in benefits beyond emissions reductions, including health, economic, and equity benefits.

The new DOT report explains how changes in how we get around and shifts in land use planning—and the reduced driving that results from these strategies—are “critical” for the U.S. to reach its commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement. 

It states that climate pollution results from three primary factors: the total amount of activity, the energy intensity of the transportation options, and the carbon intensity of the fuels used to provide that energy. Translated into plain language, this means: 

• traveling less or for shorter distances is more efficient
• energy efficient transportation modes (like transit, biking, walking) produce fewer emissions 
• some fuels (like electricity produced from wind power) are more efficient than others (like gasoline)

As advocates, we’ve been uplifting that logic for years. With this report, the USDOT acknowledges some important facts. First, it notes that “Historically, increases in driving and goods movement have canceled out the GHG emissions benefits of improved fuel economy in the U.S.” This is an enormously important, and vastly underappreciated, point: the U.S. has made little-to-no progress on transportation GHG emissions reduction because we are driving more and more. 

The report also notes that the benefits of reducing driving go beyond the tailpipe. These benefits include a reduced need for road construction; lowering emissions from pavement production and construction vehicles; fewer emissions from vehicle manufacturing because fewer vehicles will need to be manufactured; and fewer upstream emissions and environmental harm from resource extraction. 

The USDOT Report to Congress does not solve our transportation emissions quandary. We need to more aggressively take advantage of our ability to flex Bipartisan Infrastructure Law dollars to fund multimodal projects, and congress needs to pass a new federal transportation law in 2026 that directs more money to equitable and sustainable transportation options on the front end. But the USDOT Report to Congress represents an important acknowledgement that a paradigm shift is needed. 

Now let’s hold the federal government—and Minnesota—accountable to these goals.