John Hennessy III,
P.E.
MINETA TRANSPORTATION INSTITUTE
This report presents the preliminary results of the second year of a random-digit-dial public opinion telephone survey investigating support among members of the public for a variety of transportation tax options at the federal level. The survey results show that a majority of Americans would support higher taxes for transportation—under certain conditions.
URBAN LAND INSTITUTE
In 2011, “the U.S. effectively shrugs off infrastructure” in the face of escalating government deficits and cash-strapped taxpayers. Despite a welcome wave of political rhetoric about its importance to the country’s economic future and related worries about falling behind global challengers, a proactive U.S. infrastructure agenda remains buried underneath a long list of other budget imperatives—health care, Social Security, defense, public safety, and education, as well as the need to service the swelling government debt. No matter how desirable, ongoing investment in systems to keep the country competitive and functioning easily can get cast aside in the rush to plug budget leaks.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers opened the first bay at the Morganza Floodway on May 14th. Photos by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Public Affairs, USACEpublicaffairs on flickr. “Intended to operate during emergency flooding, the purpose of the Morganza Floodway is to divert excess floodwater from the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya […]
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BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
Transportation leaders should make access to jobs an explicit priority in their spending and service decisions, especially given the budget pressures they face. Metro leaders should coordinate strategies regarding land use, economic development, and housing with transit decisions in order to ensure that transit reaches more people and more jobs efficiently. And federal officials should collect and disseminate standardized transit data to enable public, private, and non-profit actors to make more informed decisions and ultimately maximize the benefits of transit for labor markets.
CENTER FOR TRANSIT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT
This report explains why TOD is not only about housing, and conscious planning for employment is important in thinking about the effectiveness of transit investment and the market for transit-oriented housing.
“My Water’s On Fire Tonight” is a product of Studio 20 NYU (http://bit.ly/hzGRYP) in collaboration with ProPublica.org (http://bit.ly/5tJN). The song is based on ProPublica’s investigation on hydraulic fractured gas drilling (read the full investigation here: http://bit.ly/15sib6).
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PEW CENTER ON THE STATES & ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
In fiscal year 2010, states spent an estimated $131 billion in taxpayer dollars on transportation. Yet many policy makers cannot answer critical questions about what results this investment is generating…he goal of this assessment of the 50 states and Washington, DC, is to identify which are doing the best in terms of having essential tools in place to make cost-effective transportation funding and policy choices—and to help lawmakers understand how to use these tools to do a better job with limited dollars.
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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Accessibility is the ease of reaching valued destinations, such as jobs, shops, schools, entertainment, and recreation. As such, accessibility creates value. Capturing some of this value would allow state and local governments to invest in the operations, maintenance, and in some cases expansion of their transportation networks. Accessibility, as an outcome-oriented metric, can effectively assess transportation’s economic impact, and capturing the value of accessibility would help states and metropolitan areas develop sustainable transportation funding streams.
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