John Hennessy III,
P.E.
Please contact your Representative, Senators, and President Obama, and tell them to fight this devastating budget proposal that would reverse decades of progress on vital passenger rail corridors all over the country. Visit www.StandUpForTrains.org today to send a message to your representatives that you want a stronger national passenger rail system.
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From CG/LA Infrastructure On October 11-13, 2011, over 500 executives from the public and private sector will gather in Washington, DC for the 3rd Annual North American Strategic Infrastructure Leadership Forum. The Forum is a dynamic 2.5 day conference, focused on infrastructure development in North America, designed to facilitate business and promote projects across the […]
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FEDERAL HIGHWAY ADMINISTRATION
FHWA’s FY 2012 budget requests $70.5 billion ($69.9 billion net of rescission) and represents a new paradigm in funding our nation’s highways. This request represents the first year of the Administration’s six-year surface transportation reauthorization proposal, which provides $336 billion from FY 2012 to 2017 for highway programs. The proposal reflects a 48 percent increase in funding for road and bridge improvements and construction from the $227 billion authorized in the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU).
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BUILDING AMERICA’S FUTURE
Rebuilding America’s economic foundation is one of the most important missions we face in the 21st century. Our parents and grandparents built America into the world’s leading economic superpower. We have a responsibility to our own children and grandchildren to strengthen—not squander —that inheritance, and to pass on to them a country whose best days are still ahead.
View this complete post...PEDESTRIAN OBSERVATIONS
House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) has finally come out explicitly in favor of privatizing the Northeast Corridor and letting private consortia bid for high-speed rail construction. Mica’s rationale is that Amtrak is an inefficient government provider, and its proposal for spending $117 billion over 30 years to build high-speed rail in the Northeast is deficient…Not mentioned anywhere in the article is the FRA, which is the real obstacle to modern rail operations. Mica has to my knowledge said nothing about the FRA, which is too bad, since it could feed into the Republican narrative of bad government and the need for privatization and deregulation.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA HIGH-SPEED RAIL STUDIO
The success of the United States has always depended on mobility. Without investments in canals, railroads, highways, and runways, this vast country would never have realized its creative and productive potential. In 2010, a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design presented a visionary plan to meet the Northeast’s mobility needs through a new mode: High-speed rail.
For California’s high-speed rail boosters including their chief cheerleader, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the month of May must have felt like a month from hell. First came a scathing report by California legislature’s fiscal watchdog, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), questioning the rail authority’s unrealistic cost estimates and its decision to build the first $5.5 billion segment in the sparsely populated Central Valley between Borden and Corcoran.
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LEGISLATIVE ANALYST’S OFFICE
California’s proposed high–speed rail project would link the state’s major population centers, including Sacramento, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Central Valley, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, Orange County, and San Diego…In this report, we describe a number of problems that pose threats to the high–speed rail project’s successful development as envisioned by Proposition 1A.
Pragmatic funding decisions have marked the third and final round of awards in the Administration’s $10 billion High-Speed Rail Program. The awards, announced on May 9, confirmed what critics, including this column, have long maintained: the White House high-speed rail initiative, stripped of its high-blown rhetoric, is in fact a program of modest incremental improvements to existing Amtrak passenger rail services. As such, the initiative represents a small but useful step in restoring more reliable intercity passenger rail service— but it hardly deserves the hype and exaggerated claims that have been used to characterize it. Rather, it is a “victory for incrementalism,” in the words of Scott Thomasson, policy director of the Progressive Policy Institute.
View this complete post...The Department’s Federal Railroad Administration selected 15 states and Amtrak to receive $2.02 billion for 22 high-speed intercity passenger rail projects as part of a nationwide network that will connect 80 percent of Americans to high-speed rail in 25 years.
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