John Hennessy III,
P.E.
PIKE RESEARCH
During the last couple of years, the global economy has been dealing with the impacts of the Great Recession. The construction sector has been among the hardest hit areas in almost all regions. New construction, both residential and commercial, has been way below the levels seen earlier in the decade. However, one building-related field has continued to grow: retrofits tied to improving the efficiency of facilities.
U.S. PIRG
Highways do not—and, except for brief periods in our nation’s history—never have paid for themselves through the taxes that highway advocates label “user fees.” Yet highway advocates continue to suggest they do in an attempt to secure preferential access to scarce public resources and to shape how those resources are spent.
The Illinois Department of Transportation has reached a cooperative agreement with Union Pacific and Amtrak that will permit the release of a $1.1 billion federal high-speed rail grant to the state of Illinois to fund passenger rail improvements between Chicago and St. Louis. The agreement was proclaimed by state and federal officials as “historic” and hailed as “one giant step closer to achieving high-speed passenger service between Chicago and St. Louis.” But stripped of its rhetoric, the announcement only reveals how inadequate and cost-ineffective the Administration’s “high–speed” program is turning out to be.
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“Almost all of these projects have two things in common,” said T4 America director James Corless. ”They will all create desperately-needed jobs while building critical transportation infrastructure, and they have a hard time getting funded under the outdated structure of the current federal transportation program.”
-James Corless, Director, T4America
Innovation NewsBriefs Vol. 21, No. 32 Remarks by Kenneth Orski, Editor-Publisher of Innovation NewsBriefs before the Transportation Leaders session at the National Conference of State Legislatures, Phoenix, AZ, December 9, 2010 Broadly speaking, we can expect the changing balance of power in the next Congress to manifest itself in two ways: a strong push to […]
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TRI-STATE TRANSPORTATION CAMPAIGN
With some of the oldest infrastructure in the country, New Jersey has its work cut out maintaining the state’s roads and bridges. More than 9,500 bridges cross the state’s numerous waterways or lift traffic over roads, highways, and railroad tracks. The state currently spends hundreds of millions annually in federal, state, and local funding to maintain those bridges and ensure that they remain safe to cross, with the state portion coming out of the primary state transportation funding source, Transportation Trust Fund.
The White House asked and job seekers answered! We were so pleased with the responses we received on job growth and recovery efforts, and have provided the White House with the questions that were “liked” the most by our Facebook community and sparked the most engaging conversation. Austan Goolsbee, Chair of the Council of Economic […]
View this complete post...The future Republican House leadership is determined to retrieve whatever remains of the unspent and uncommitted stimulus (ARRA) funds. So has stated Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the prospective House Appropriations Committee chairman, as he introduced a bill (H.R. 6403, the “American Recovery and Reinvestment Rescission Act”) to rescind any unobligated ARRA funds and return them to the U.S. Treasury. Even already obligated ARRA funds may be at risk. Congressional GOP aides are reported to be closely reviewing agency records to identify particular stimulus-funded projects that could still be “reasonably” halted because work on them is only beginning.
View this complete post...Last month we conducted an informal survey among colleagues in the transportation community about the outlook for the federal surface transportation program in the year(s) ahead…One comment from a veteran transportation insider summed up concisely the collective mindset: “There will be nothing ‘transformational’ about the future program,” he opined.
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RECONNECTING AMERICA
The past few months have been an exciting time as large and small communities, representing all corners of the country, have worked on developing collaborative planning processes that will address the unique conditions in their region and which will improve the quality of life for the diverse people that live, work and play there…The impetus for this has been competition for grants springing from the unprecedented partnership announced last year between the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation and the Environmental Protection Agency.
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