Giving Compass' Take:

• In a brief at Smart Cities Dive, Jason Plautz outlines a recent report's strategies to drastically reduce carbon emissions with changes to inefficient transportation.

• Why is it so difficult to change Americans' mindsets about public transit? Would you support the effort to regulate personal transportation methods?

• Gain a more in-depth understanding of green transportation solutions in education.

With transportation as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., a new report from Environment America Research & Policy Center and the Frontier Group outlines "achievable" strategies to clean up the sector. ​

The "Destination: Zero Carbon" report calls transportation "climate enemy #1" due to oversized vehicles, subsidized driving, inadequate transit, poor pedestrian infrastructure and car-dependent land use.

It highlights three main targets to reach zero-carbon transportation: all new light-duty vehicles sold after 2035 are electric vehicles (EVs); all transit and school bus fleets are electrified by 2030; and the number of people who travel by walking, biking or taking transit is doubled by 2030.

"A lot of our system has been set up to prioritize driving, with subsidies like tax incentives to parking to insufficient taxes on gasoline. These add up to make the cost of driving pretty cheap, without looking at the actual impacts," Folger, director of Environment America's Clean Car Communities program, told Smart Cities Dive. "One of the ways we can change this is to subsidize sources that are better for the climate and to stop funding roads and highways that we don’t need."

Read the full article about cleaning up climate-killing transportation by Jason Plautz at Smart Cities Dive.