I would be remiss if I didn’t note the launch of a campaign for a new federal transportation policy. The news about the launch of the Transportation for America campaign was noted on StreetsBlog, Greater Greater Washington, and a number of other sites. As I have written before, the federal law setting transportation policy will […]
Bank, Commission, Capital Budget, or Business as Usual?
My latest Planetizen post: Getting the Transportation Infrastructure We Need
Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Public Transit
From a speech to the annual meeting of the American Public Transportation Association: Last year, public transportation ridership reached its highest level in 50 years. While this upward trend is tremendously encouraging, it is overloading many of your systems, and making the need for infrastructure investment all the more pressing. The question is not whether […]
Calling for a New Eisenhower
In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower championed a program to construct a nationwide network of highways to connect the nation. As a young soldier he had personally experienced the poor condition of American roads, and had seen first-hand on German autobahns how important a system of modern roads was for national defense purposes. The […]
‘The genie is somewhat out of the bottle’
The “genie” a Bush appointee at the Department of Transportation is referring to is congestion pricing, or the practice of setting tolls high enough to keep traffic flowing. The quote closed a cover story in today’s Washington Post about both congestion pricing and privatization of the nation’s transportation infrastructure. Long discussed by economists as the […]
Fixing America’s Federal Transportation Policy
Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has been transformed thanks to massive investment in the interstate highway system. Funded in large part by the federal gas tax, the federal government has set policies and allocated funds to states to construct the national network under a series of bills starting with the 1956 National Interstate […]