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1. Introduction Federal involvements with air quality control started in 1955 with the Air Pollution Control Act. Subsequent federal legislations, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969, Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1963 and 1970, CAA Amendments of 1977 and 1990, the Acid Precipitation Act (APA) of 1980, gradually established the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS), NAAQS nonattainment designations, and the air quality conformity rule in state and local transportation planning and investment. The 1993 conformity regulation (58 Fed. Reg. 62188) linked transportation planning to air quality with various procedural requirements, performance standards, and consequences of not conforming. To attain the NAAQS, state and local planning agencies are primarily responsible for developing State Implementation Plans (SIP) and long-range transportation plans, which demonstrates attainment through air quality modeling. Many transportation control measures for improving air quality should also reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in theory. Clean Air Act (CAA), Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP) and the Congestion Mitigation Air Quality (CMAQ) Improvement Program included in both the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21), and the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, and Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) have paid lots of attention to reducing VMT. The CMAQ program, created in 1991 and jointly administered by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA), was reauthorized in 2005 under SAFETEA-LU, which provides over $8.6 billion dollars in funds to eligible projects that reduce air pollutants regulated from transportation-related sources over a period of five years (2005-2009). The current CMAQ program funding is available for areas that do not meet the NAAQS (nonattainment areas), as well as former nonattainment areas that are now in compliance (maintenance areas). The formula for the distribution of CMAQ funds considers an area's population by county and the severity of its ozone, CO and particulate matter (PM was not considered before 1997) problems within the nonattainment or maintenance area. The apportionment formulas in SAFETEA-LU for the National Highway System (NHS) Program, Interstate Maintenance (IM) Program, and the State Transportation Program (STP) are based on lane miles and VMT. It is not clear if air quality control and the associated funding preference and state/local planning efforts to attain NAAQS conformity have indeed led to reduction in VMT or VMT growth rates. The impact of nonattainment designation on VMT should and can be evaluated with rigorous statistical methods and observed data. The importance of analyzing the effect of air quality nonattainment designation on VMT with empirical data is further highlighted by the proposed USDOT Multimodal Transportation Analysis System (MTAS). In this research, we develop statistical models to analyze the relationship between air quality nonattainment designation and VMT between 1978 and the present. The models employ different statistical methods, including hypothesis testing, multiple regression, and simultaneous 2 TRB 2012 Annual Meeting Original paper submittal - not revised by author.
