State of the Union 2012: What Will Obama Say About Transportation?

Place your bets! The State of the Union address is on Tuesday, and Transportation Nation has put together an interactive chart that displays how many times Obama has used words like “trains,” “roads,” and “bridges” in his speeches over the last year.

In last year’s State of the Union, you may recall, Obama announced his intentions to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail within 25 years. (You may also recall that at that time very few people had heard of the debt ceiling.) Since then, his speeches have focused more on repairing damaged infrastructure in order to generate jobs, devoting many more words to roads and bridges than to transit.

There was a flurry of activity in September and October, when Obama was stumping for his jobs bill. There’s also a noticeable blip in April, when Obama was asking for a long-term surface transportation bill that bolstered America’s “roadways, runways, and railways.” So far, Congress has given him neither.

Transportation Nation helpfully provides a link to the underlying data so you can make your own chart.