Transportation Policy
Basics
House GOP’s 2012 Transportation Budget: Deep Cuts, Especially for Livability
In about an hour, Congressional appropriators will vote on how much money to allocate for transportation in the next fiscal year. It won't be pretty.
September 8, 2011
Post-Irene Open Thread: A Teachable Transportation Moment
Sometimes the best way to understand the ordinary is to examine the extraordinary. Watching Hurricane Irene wreak havoc on the entire transportation system from North Carolina to the Canadian border brought certain patterns and questions into high relief. Here's some of what we thought about while the power was down.
August 29, 2011
Absent a Transportation Bill, DOT Can Innovate All On Its Own
As Deron Lovaas said this morning on NRDC’s Switchboard blog, “If recent events are any indicator, it might take Congress a while to agree on a policy that will put our underfunded, inefficient, oil-dependent transportation program on the right track.”
August 10, 2011
Meet the Obscure Unelected Agencies Strangling Many U.S. Cities
Do you know the name of your local Metropolitan Planning Organization or Council of Government? Most Americans don't. In fact, most people probably have no idea these agencies even exist, let alone what they do. Yet they are surprisingly powerful and play a substantial role in shaping the places where we live and work.
July 21, 2011
NACTO: Feds Already Greenlighting Bikeway Design Innovations
The National Association of City Transportation Officials' Urban Bikeway Design Guide was 20 years in the making, and already it's having an impact, says the organization's Mia Birk.
March 10, 2011
Transportation 101: Cliff’s Notes for the Reauthorization Debate
A few weeks ago, I put together a little cheat sheet listing the last three transportation reauthorization bills, their dates of passage, and the dollar amounts. It helped me save some time I would have spent Googling.
February 28, 2011
Puppies and Peanut Butter: Brookings on State Transpo Mistakes
As transportation advocates adapt their messaging to a new, more conservative Congress, the language of fiscal conservatism has become the mother tongue of the movement. Smart Growth America and the Bipartisan Policy Center have recently used the fiscal responsibility argument to urge policymakers to invest more strategically, especially as infrastructure budgets shrink.
February 23, 2011
Retired Military Leaders, Corporate CEOs: Driving Alone Aids Terrorists
What do the president of FedEx, the former Director of National Intelligence, and 19 other business and military leaders have in common? They’re urging the U.S. to adopt less oil-intensive transportation habits. They say our national security depends on it.
February 10, 2011
Obama Finally Brings the Chamber a Fruitcake (It’s Called Infrastructure)
President Obama paid a visit to the Chamber of Commerce this morning, trying to make nice after a hot-and-cold couple of years.
February 7, 2011
How Obama Should Address Transportation in the State of the Union
Streetsblog Capitol Hill is pleased to publish this guest post from Deron Lovaas, Federal Transportation Policy Director for NRDC.
January 19, 2011