UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY Written by Daniel Wood, Data Integration Specialist Hi all, it’s your friendly neighborhood cartography and interactive graphics engineer here at Energy.gov. It’s been a fun year for us building maps and graphics that we hope have helped you explore new ideas (and age-old ones). Here are the top five maps and interactive […]
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Rail fans can still spot coal-laden boxcars from coast to coast, but today’s locomotives are increasingly likely to pull tankers full of crude oil. Largely stemming from the fracking boom in North Dakota, crude oil transportation by rail has reached unprecedented heights in past years. In response to a growing number of accidents–some on an apocalyptic scale, as in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec–ProPublica assembled an interactive map to let you know whose tankers carry crude oil, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going.
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Earlier this year I argued that the up-front cost of local transportation projects, like light rail and bus rapid transit, aren’t really comparable to the cost of California’s high speed rail system. While all of these investments are fighting for the same dollars to some degree, their long-term balance sheets look very different: Local transit typically requires a persistent operating subsidy, whereas even the low-ridership estimates for high speed rail forecast a consistent operating profit. As a result, longer time horizons favor high speed rail, as profits gradually eat away at the high initial capital costs required to build out the network.
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Mike Elmendorf was named President and CEO of the Associated General Contractors of New York State (AGC NYS), New York’s leading construction industry association, in February 2011.
“…there has been a number of bank settlements and other circumstances that have resulted in literally billions of dollars of found money arriving at the state treasury, and the result of that is that you’ve got a unique, really probably once in a lifetime opportunity to use those billions of dollars to make long-term significant investments in improving our infrastructure.”
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AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF STATE HIGHWAY AND TRANSPORTATION OFFICIALS (AASHTO) An annual investment of $120 billion for highways and bridges between 2015 and 2020 is necessary to improve the condition and performance of the system, given a rate of travel growth of 1.0 percent per year in vehicle miles of travel, which has been AASHTO’s sustainability […]
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Vol. 25, No. 16
Has the time come to reconsider the way we pay for transportation? Should the Highway Trust Fund and its fuel tax revenue continue as the main source of funding for the federal transportation program? If not, what are the alternatives? And more broadly, is the age of long term reauthorizations and of heavy reliance on federal funding, drawing to a close?
Kevin DeGood is the Director of Infrastructure Policy at American Progress. His work focuses on how highway, transit, aviation, and maritime policy affect America’s global competitiveness, access to opportunity for diverse communities, and environmental sustainability.
“To a certain extent we’re victims of our own success…For all of its problems, we have still a fundamentally sound and fantastic transportation system. Again, none of that means that we don’t need investment. None of that means that there aren’t real challenges, because there certainly are and that’s what we’ve dedicated ourselves to trying to solve.”
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By Rebecca Phillips, University Communications, Washington State University PULLMAN, Wash. – Ice-free pavement. “Smart snowplows.” Vegetable juice ice-melt. Cold-climate researchers at Washington State University are clearing the road with green alternatives to the salt, sand and chemicals typically used for highway snow and ice control. As a nation, “we are kind of salt addicted, like […]
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Want to learn more about water’s journey to reach your tap? Check out The Nature Conservancy’s massively informative Urban Water Blueprint.
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Robyn M. Boerstling joined the National Association of Manufacturers in April 2008 as the Director of Transportation and Infrastructure Policy. Robyn helps direct the NAM’s transportation advocacy agenda and works on legislative and coalition efforts that seek to repair and modernize the nation’s infrastructure.
“I think citizen engagement is absolutely critical and that’s one of the reasons why this issue is so important to our members. We also don’t just talk about issues at the NAM, we get our members engaged in talking on the Hill about the significance of these things.”
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