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Archive for the ‘Tax’ Category

Guest on The Infra Blog: Samuel Schwartz, P.E., President, CEO & Founder, Sam Schwartz Engineering

Monday, October 25th, 2010
Sam Schwartz

Sam Schwartz has nearly 40 years of experience in the field of Transportation Engineering and Traffic Safety. He is considered a worldwide authority in traffic, highway, bridge, transit and parking systems. He was New York City’s traffic commissioner and the chief engineer for highways, bridges, ferries and other New York City infrastructure. Schwartz specializes in development of urban traffic programs utilizing his expert knowledge in traffic demand management, transit systems management, traffic calming and transportation planning and engineering. He has been in the vanguard of Intelligent Transportation Systems development and wrote the seminal paper, Intelligent Traffic, which received the International Institute of Transportation Award in 1985. Schwartz is also the author of Gridlock Sam, a popular New York Daily News column addressing traffic matters in New York City. His links with multimedia networks are extensive, spanning radio, television and the internet.

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Living in Denial

Monday, October 18th, 2010

The reaction of various advocacy groups to President Obama’s recent call for a $50 billion stimulus spending plan for transportation infrastructure was predictable. They applauded the President’s initiative and thought that Congress should promptly approve the spending request…But convincing the next Congress of the need to act, whether to fund the infrastructure “down payment” of $50 billion or to authorize a proposed $500 billion multi-year surface transportation program, will not be easy.

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AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
Figure 1

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TREASURY & COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISORS
On Labor Day, President Obama announced a bold plan to renew and expand America’s infrastructure. The plan includes a $50 billion up-front investment connected to a six-year reauthorization of the surface transportation program and the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank to leverage private capital and select projects of regional and national significance. The Department of the Treasury, with the Council of Economic Advisers, has conducted an analysis of the economic effects of transportation infrastructure investment. Our analysis found four key reasons why now is an optimal time to increase our investment in transportation infrastructure…

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Obama’s $50 Billion Infrastructure Proposal

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

“Today, the average American household is forced to spend more on transportation each year than food. Our roads, clogged with traffic, cost us $80 billion a year in lost productivity and wasted fuel. Our airports, choked with passengers, cost nearly $10 billion a year in productivity losses from flight delays. And in some cases, our crumbling infrastructure costs American lives. It should not take another collapsing bridge or failing levee to shock us into action.”
-President Barack Obama

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The Miller Center Proposes a New Transportation Agenda

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

In the relentless 24/7 news cycle of the news media, the release of another policy report by a group of experts causes hardly a ripple. At best it earns a perfunctory mention by the news services and in a few trade publications, only to be buried and forgotten in the next day’s avalanche of fresh news. The report “Well Within Reach: America’s New Transportation Agenda,” published by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia on October 5, deserves a more considerate treatment. The report not only stands out because it is the product of a distinguished bipartisan group of national thought leaders in transportation but also because it shows a keen grasp of the issues surrounding contemporary transportation policy.

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Guest on The Infra Blog: Denise Richardson, Managing Director, General Contractors Association of New York

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
richardson-denise

Denise M. Richardson is the Managing Director of the General Contractors Association of New York, a trade association that represents New York City’s unionized, heavy construction/public works contractors. Richardson has over 25 years of construction contract and financial management administration experience in both the public and private sectors.

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Transportation Funding in a Changing Political Environment

Monday, October 4th, 2010

A series of events toward the end of September addressed the challenge of inadequate transportation funding, a quandary that has long bedeviled transportation advocates. Collectively, these events paint a picture of a transportation community that is eager to increase investment in infrastructure but struggles in vain to find the means to pay for it — and probably can expect little help from the next, more fiscally conservative Congress, bent on reducing spending.

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Looking Past the November Midterm Elections

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

In a guest commentary, Richard G. Little, Director of the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy at the University of Southern California, offers his own reflections on how the reality of constrained resources and greater spending discipline in the next Congress might affect our future transportation policy.

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Breaking the Impasse

Monday, September 13th, 2010

Writing in last week’s Innovation NewsBrief we wondered if the intent behind the White House September 6 proposal to invest an extra $50 billion in transportation infrastructure was primarily a political gesture — to give the economy a short-term pre-election boost — or whether it was a belated but genuine change of heart about the need to act, and act convincingly, on a multi-year surface transportation program. In conversations we held during the past week, we sensed that the transportation community, including senior officials of U.S. DOT, would clearly prefer the $50 billion to be part of a long-term reauthorization effort.

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Another Stimulus Bill or a Down Payment on a Bold New Infrastructure Plan?

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Marking the beginning of an intensive pre-election campaign, President Obama unveiled what he called “a bold new vision to renew and expand America’s investment in transportation infrastructure”…The plan would: (1) abolish modal “silos” by combining roads, transit, railways, airport development and the air traffic control system (NextGen) in a single consolidated transportation infrastructure investment plan; (2) integrate high-speed rail (HSR) into the surface transportation program thus ensuring a sustained commitment to a national HSR program over the next six years; (3) establish an Infrastructure Bank to fund investments of national and regional significance; (4) streamline the surface transportation program by consolidating the many different programs and use analytical measures of performance to identify and prioritize investments of critical importance to the nation’s economy.

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