Image Courtesy: ARTBA

(Source: Bernie’s TCN – Aug. 26, 2009)

One longtime observer calls the American Road & Transportation Builders Association’s (ARTBA) Annual “Public-Private Ventures (PPV) in Transportation Conference” the “de facto voice of the transportation community” on issues relating to private financing of transportation infrastructure projects.

It’s a reputation that’s been hard-earned – 20 years in the making. This September 24-25, in Washington, D.C., ARTBA will host its “21st Annual PPV Conference” at the L’Enfant Plaza Hotel. If you or your organization is involved or interested in the P3 market, this is an event you won’t want to miss!

This year’s PPV Conference will be special… because there is a lot happening… and a lot at stake!

What role will P3s play in this year’s important rewrite of the federal surface transportation law? More importantly, what’s happening out in the state legislatures, where the “rubber meets the road” on transportation financing choices?

Once again, ARTBA is assembling key experts and leading voices from on and off Capitol Hill to give you the latest intelligence and “heads up”!

This year, ARTBA plans to produce the largest and best conference to date. Don’t miss your opportunity to attend this incredible event!

Who Should Attend?

The PPV Conference owes its success to its blend of public and private sector participants. Conference attendees have included individuals from the following industries…

Why Should You Attend?

Attendees of previous PPV conferences will attest to its most distinguishing-and valued-feature…

(Source: NPR)

Image Courtesy: NPR - Click to visit Project website

When politicians and the media mention Main Street, they evoke one people and one place. But there are over 10,466 streets named Main in the United States, and they tell all kinds of stories. Once you start looking, you’ll notice Main Streets are everywhere and tell all kinds of stories. There’s a Main Street in San Luis, Arizona that dead-ends right into the Mexican border. The Main Street in Melvindale, Michigan runs through a trailer park in the shadows of Ford’s River Rouge plant, once the largest factory in the world. Main Street is small town and urban center; it is the thriving business district and the prostitution stroll; it is the places where we live, the places where we work, and sometimes, it is the places we have abandoned.

Mapping Main Street (MMS) is a collaborative documentary media project that creates a new map of the country through stories, photos and videos recorded on actual Main Streets.  The goal is to document every street named Main in the country by going to each of these over 10,466 places, taking a photo, recording a video or writing a brief story.

The MMS team already got a head start. In May, the MMS team packed into a 1996 Suburu station wagon and started a 12,000 mile journey across the country to visit Main Streets. In the process, the team took photos, shot videos, and interviewed people. On Main Street in a small town in West Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains, the team met a retired man who is fixing up a boarded-up house that was once a hotel for jazz musicians like Ella Fitzgerald and B.B. King during segregation. In New Hope, PA, we sat down for beers with a cop on Main Street who talked about strangest fetishes he had come across in his line of work.  The team talked with farm laborers and business owners, people out on their porches and people on park benches. They even stood in empty fields…all on Main Streets across the country.

Now the Mapping Main Street team invites you to contribute stories and images of your Main Street on the Mapping Main Street website.  Anyone can contribute to this project. The only requirement is that all photos and videos must be taken on a street named Main.  MMS team is using Flickr to gather all photographs for the project.You can upload any videos you would like to submit for the project to YouTube or Vimeo. Just tag your video with “mappingmainstreet” and MMS team can include it in the project.

For more detailed instructions for uploading your images (photos and videos), visit the Project’s awesome website.  While you are there don’t forget to checkout the latest collection of photos and videos sent in from the Main Streets around the country.   Also, if you are a Facebook-er show your support by becoming a “fan” of this project and if you like to follow the updates on Twitter,  here is the team’s Twitter handle: @mappingmainst).

(Source: USDOT & Green Car Congress)

Preliminary reports from the State Highway Agencies show travel during June 2009 on all roads and streets in the nation increased by 2.0% (4.9 billion vehicle miles) resulting in estimated travel for the month at 256.7 billion vehicle-miles, according to the US Federal Highway Administration.

This total includes 89.6 billion vehicle-miles on rural roads and 167.1 billion vehicle-miles on urban roads and streets. Cumulative Travel changed by -0.4 percent (-6.1 billion vehicle miles).  Cumulative estimate for the year is 1,446.1 billion vehicle miles of travel.

While traffic volumes have shown some year-over-year gains earlier this year, June marks the first month when driving was higher in all regions of the United States and on all types of roads. US traffic volumes started declining in November 2007 as oil prices rose and experienced dramatic drops in 2008.

Image Courtesy: USDOT

Click here to read the entire article.

(Source: Autoblog;  Detroit Free Press; US Infrastructure;  Autoblog Green)

Cash for Clunkers over, dealer deadline for filing extended indefinitely

The website has been down since yesterday morning, and the Transportation Department has officially extended the deadline for dealers to file their reimbursement requests twice now – once yesterday to noon today and again late last night. The second extension is open ended until the site comes back online and is able to handle the influx of dealer submissions.

The government website went down at some point before noon on Monday morning, presumably when dealers nationwide began submitting their final reimbursement requests from last weekend’s bonanza sell-a-thon. All the government is saying right now is that dealers will have any time lost while the site was down to submit their final paperwork.

The U.S. Department of Transportation said as of this morning 665,000 deals had been entered, for claims totaling $2.77 billion. That would mean about $130 million remains of the $3 billion set aside for the program, after $100 million the government expects to spend overseeing the program.

After thousands of dealers complained of being unable to enter deals before Monday’s 8 p.m. deadline, federal officials said the system would not be fully functional until today, and that dealers would be given additional time to submit papers. Click here to read the entire article.

Most fuel efficient cars available in the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ scheme (Not sure how useful this is anymore for buyers since c4c expired)

However, if you’re more environmentally conscious, you may want to know which are the most fuel-efficient cars available under the program.  To qualify as ‘eco-friendly’, new vehicles must get at least a EPA rating of 22 MPG combined to be eligible. Now that’s pretty bad, but it’s not like there’s a ton of car choices that get great MPG (at least in America). Click here to read the entire article.

Image Courtesy: US Infrastructure (click to enlarge)

Dealer poll calls Cash for Clunkers a ‘Nightmare,’ four out of 10 didn’t want program extended

A recent (admittedly unscientific) survey conducted by Automotive News shows that 44% of the 800 dealers polled wouldn’t want C4C to be extended again, even if the program was modified. Only 3% felt that the program should have been extended without being modified. The biggest issue dealers have with C4C is, unsurprisingly, its lack of timely payment. Some multi-store dealers have millions invested in the program, while little or no money has come in yet. An alarming 23% of dealers say they have had to borrow money to cover the cash crunch left in the wake of the Clunkers program, while an additional 10% say the program has actually sucked enough cash from the coffers that it has put the dealership at risk.  Click here to read the entire article.

Sen. Bill Frist uses Cash for Clunkers, junks Suburban for Prius

Apparently, it’s a common misconception that all Prius drivers are Democrats. Not true. In fact, recently retired Senator Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) just got himself a shiny new hybrid hatchback from Toyota. The former senator even got a few thousand dollars off the price of his new eco-friendly ride courtesy of the just-concluded Cash for Clunkers program here in the United States.  In an interview on Larry King Live, Frist responded to King’s quip that “You don’t see a lot of Republicans driving a Prius” with the response that the hybrid’s 50 miles per gallon along with the fact that “the taxpayer gave me $6,000 to do it” as reasons for the Prius purchase.  Click here to read the entire article.

Contributing Sources: CNN Money; Jalopnik ; LA Times & Autoblog Green)

This post is sponsored by LemonFree.com

Finito!  Finished! Over! Gone! Done! End of the Road! Swan Song!  Whatever the buzz word you would like to use for marking the end of the “successful” Cash for Clunkers Program, please feel free to do so.  Many buyers made it out of the dealers with a sigh of relief while many dealers are still left wringing their hands over the delays in the Government’s administrative machine that processes the vouchers.

Amdist all this madness and hype surrounding the C4C,  for many of us in the transportation business might take a couple of days (or even weeks) to understand the full impact of the program’s final days.  Hopefully it is all good.  In the meanwhile,  TransportGooru went looking for the statistics on how the programs as well as the vehicles tallied up so far and found it for you from the reliable sources in our Automotive web reporting sphere (including Autoblog, Jalopnik, etc).

The ever popular Website, Jalopnik reports that as of Friday morning the number of transactions submitted numbered 489,269 with a dollar value of $2.04 billion. This morning the number reached 635,186 transactions with a dollar value of $2.65 million.  So far (as of 7:47 AM August 24, 2009) the number of vehicles purchased have overwhelmingly been passenger cars (283,104) and category 1 trucks (166,686), with just a few category 2 (31,862) and category 3 (1,300) trucks. On the other end, the majority of vehicles turned in are category 1 trucks (318,249) and category 2 trucks (81,599) with just 78,265 passenger cars. Was there a surge of sales over the weekend? How successful has the program been?  Once the deadline has passed, it’ll be interesting to see where the final MPG improvements and rankings of purchased and clunked cars end up. Shouldn’t have to wait long.

It would be hard to have a popular program without any drama, right?  The New York Times reports that auto dealers swimming in applications for the “Cash for Clunkers” program now have a little extra time to fill out those forms.   The Web site that dealers use to submit rebate applications crashed this afternoon, the Department of Transportation said. As a result, dealers can file for rebates until noon on Tuesday, though the deadline for sales is still 8 p.m. Monday. Car shoppers flooded sales lots this weekend after the announcement Thursday that the program was ending.

The Transportation Department said that despite a large increase in the system’s capacity, the website was down temporarily Monday. By then, dealers had submitted 625,000 applications worth more than $2.5 billion.

The department’s website, which has had problems throughout the program’s short life, was down for at least six hours Monday amid a last-minute rush to submit rebate applications, said Bailey Wood, a spokesman for the National Automobile Dealers Assn.

Glitches aside, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood spent Monday taking a victory lap.   “This program has been a lifeline to dealers,” Mr. LaHood said in Norristown, Pa. “It’s been a lifeline to the scrapyards who are getting these cars and can sell water pumps, and batteries and other parts. It’s also been a lifeline to the credit unions and banks processing all these loans. It’s been a win-win-win all around.”

AutoNation (AN, Fortune 500), the country’s largest dealership chain, stopped doing Cash for Clunker transactions after Friday. AutoNation had completed over 12,000 deals, according to spokesman Mark Cannon.

“It’s been a great run,” Cannon said.

Under Clunkers, which launched July 27, vehicles purchased after July 1 are eligible for refund vouchers worth $3,500 to $4,500 on traded-in cars with a fuel economy rating of 18 miles per gallon or less.

here is an updated list of traded-in and purchased cars  (curtesy of our friends at Jalopnik).

Top 10 New Vehicles Purchased

1. Toyota Corolla
2. Honda Civic
3. Ford Focus FWD
4. Toyota Camry
5. Hyundai Elantra
6. Toyota Prius
7. Nissan Versa
8. Ford Escape FWD
9. Honda Fit
10. Honda CR-V 4WD

Top 10 Trade-In Vehicles
1. Ford Explorer 4WD
2. Ford F150 Pickup 2WD
3. Jeep Grand Cherokee 4WD
4. Jeep Cherokee 4WD
5. Ford Explorer 2WD
6. Dodge Caravan/Grand Caravan 2WD
7. Chevrolet Blazer 4WD
8. Ford F150 Pickup 4WD
9. Chevrolet C1500 Pickup 2WD
10. Ford Windstar FWD Van

This list is subject to change as the final numbers come in.  So stay tuned for further updates.

(Sources contributing to this hybrid report:  BBC, Rediff, & Economic Times)

A group of students travelling without tickets in an air-conditioned railway coach in the northern Indian state of Bihar were recently asked by the ticket examiner to vacate their seats.

Image Courtesy: haywards_pk@rediffmail.com via Panoramio.com

Nothing unusual about that, but, in this case, the students took umbrage, and set four coaches on fire.

Panic-stricken passengers on the train travelling between the Indian capital, Delhi, and Rajgir in Bihar, ran out with their bags at Bihta station while the police and railway security looked on helplessly.

Railway authorities totted up the losses: each air-conditioned coach costs eight million rupees ($161,000; £98,000) to manufacture, and the losses from the Bihar incident cost the railways nearly $650,000.

The Economic Times reports that students’ grouse was that one of them had been beaten up by members of the Railway Protection Force when he refused to vacate the AC coach for which he did not have a ticket! The TV footage showed uninjured students proudly proclaiming their ‘achievement’ of setting fire to the train.

“Such things happen” was the reaction of Union railway minister Mamata Banerjee who had stated that no action would be taken against those who had set a train ablaze when it did not stop at their home town in Bihar a few weeks ago. The latest incident where a train was set on fire by students who were not allowed to travel with-out tickets in the AC coaches only demonstrates how a casual ministerial attitude to the destruction of public property encourages more and more mindless mayhem.

The minister needs to pause and think whether her casual attitude to the repeated burning of railway coaches contradicts the oath she took to preserve and protect the nation, its people and property. Her commitment should at the least match that of the RPF personnel who insisted on August 18 that reserved coaches be occupied only by those who bought tickets.

The footage on TV channels of burning trains would have convinced not just Indians but foreigners that India is not a safe place to travel in. A few months ago, when the Australian tennis team refused to play a Davis Cup tie in Chennai in the wake of 26/11, the Union sports minister condemned Tennis Australia for what he perceived as a slur on India’s reputation.

More recently, the Union home minister bought a ticket for the World Badminton Championship in Hyderabad and sat in a non-VIP stand to make the point that the British team was not justified in pulling out of the tournament. “My blood boiled,” he was quoted as saying while reacting to the British team’s stand that it was unsafe to play in India.

Those passengers of the Shramjeevi Express who had to flee on August 18 would be justified in wondering why the Union home minister’s blood did not boil when he saw the footage of the burning train.

In Bihar, people routinely hop on to trains from such illegal “halts” where trains are forced to stop.

Last October, a mob burnt down two air-conditioned coaches of an express train connecting Bhagalpur with New Delhi at Barh railway station.

But why do people in Bihar vent their ire on trains and set them on fire?

A senior police official, Neelmani, says people think authorities will take note of their grievances if they burn important public property like trains.

“When you target railways, you disrupt movement of trains for several hours and then your voice reaches the concerned authorities,” he said.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is dismayed by the train burning spree in his state. “Railways are our lifeline and a government asset. I have asked my officials to go through station video footage and arrest the vandals,” he told the BBC.

The Danapur-Buxar rail section and Danapur-Mokama rail section witnessed five train burning incidents between June 1 to August 18. On the day the Shramjeevi train was burnt, a mob of students set fire to the Kiul Gaya passenger train at Lakhisarai railway station.

In first incident on June 1, students had torched four bogies of two trains at Khusrupur, 32 kilometres east of Patna after the railways withdrew a stop for the Shramjeevi Express there. On July 14 local people set ablaze an AC coach of the Kosi Express at Athamgola railway station.

Earlier this month, students protesting the murder of an owner of a private teaching institute ransacked the Lakhisarai railway station and disrupted the movement of trains.

In fact, trains are attacked in Bihar over every other issue.  Then there is the problem of illegal “halt stations” where trains are forced to stop by local people – there are more than 100 of them in the state, many with actual names: some are named after local politicians and one even after a former president.

And yet while rail travel is unsafe in Bihar, seven federal railway ministers have come from the state.

Click to continue reading the BBC article or the Economic Times Opinion piece.

(Source: Daily Mail, UK)

Millions of motorists are being ‘legally mugged’ by cowboy clampers whose antics are ‘out of control’, a damning report by the AA reveals today.

Growing parking enforcement in private car parks and the huge amounts of money being taken from drivers has reached ‘epidemic’ level, says the AA. More than one in 10 drivers say they have been issued a private parking ticket over the last year* and tens of thousands of people have had their car clamped or removed from private car parks.

An ‘epidemic’ has seen nearly £1billion being taken from half a million drivers a year in private car parks by an army of 2,000 clampers.

Motorists routinely pay in excess of £500 to retrieve their clamped and towed away cars with no way to challenge the fines independently except expensive battles in a county court.

Private parking enforcement is riven with ‘bad and immoral’ wheelclamping practices that are ‘frightening and often bordering on criminality’, says the AA, with women motorists in particular feeling ‘menaced’ and intimidated.

The organisation adds that anyone may set himself up as a parking enforcer and ‘start to cash in’.

Alarmingly, clampers are allowed to exploit the Government’s supposedly confidential DVLA database to get drivers’ names and addresses at £2.50 a time.

The AA wants the Government to make it illegal in England and Wales to clamp on private land, as it is in Scotland where it has been considered ‘extortion and theft’ since a 1992 court ruling.

About one in 17 motorists have been clamped, says the RAC Foundation, which also believes the law to be ‘suspect’ and open to legal challenge.

The Government estimates there are between 100 and 200 clamping companies. Some 1,900 individuals have valid licences from the Security Industry Association (SIA). Since May 2005 only 16 have been revoked and 233 refused.

The AA’s Press Release points to some recent incidents, some of which are shocking nonetheless unacceptable to any motoring public (unless, you are not from a civilised part of the world, where anything and everything goes):

The prevalence of bad and immoral practices is now shocking and unacceptable. Whilst the AA accepts that some enforcement is justified, the scale of private enforcement and level of punishment meted out by an army of private enforcers is frightening and often borders on criminality.

In recent examples:

• An elderly pensioner and her sick husband who were wrongly ‘doubled charged’ £370 by a clamper/tower (who belonged to the ‘trade association’ and breached its code despite having declared it would abide by its rules) – they have now recovered their cash after threats of legal action.
• A lady who stopped, literally for seconds, heard a noise at the rear of her car. Someone said ‘I won’t be a moment’ and clamped her car while she sat in it with the engine running – before ‘double-charging’ her £300.
• A lady who was given a ticket in a free car park for straddling lines. The ticket could not be paid as there were no details on it, and then she was sent a ‘£100 Charge Certificate’ after the parking firm obtained her details from DVLA despite inadequate signing in the car park
• A lady, on her own, whose car was clamped and removed in Enfield at night and was charged £527 to get her car back – the clamper belonged to the ‘trade association’ and breached its code despite having declared it would abide by its rules.

Private enforcers can either wheel clamp and remove or issue ‘parking tickets’, usually by accessing the car owners name and addresses from the DVLA’s vehicle database.

Read more at Mail Online.  Also click here to read the entire AA press release.

TransportGooru Musings: It would be in the best of the Government and the Transportation officials to take a look at the interesting results from the online poll published on the Daily Mail’s website, which has almost 87% of the public showing their dislike for this practice.

(Source: NPR & SFChronicle.com)

Several hundred auto workers rallied near New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. in Fremont Thursday afternoon in support of an incentive plan, backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, designed to persuade Toyota to keep building cars at the plant.

The rally drew local business leaders and elected officials who are working with the governor’s office and state legislators, as well as with the Port of Oakland and PG&E, on a plan that includes tax breaks, improved transportation facilities, and lower electricity costs to make it economical for Toyota to stay in Nummi.

During the boom years of the U.S. car business, California was dotted with auto plants. Now the sole survivor may be on the verge of closing.

The New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMMI, was a unique joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, but the partnership is now history, and thousands of jobs are on the line in Fremont, which can’t afford to lose them.

The NUMMI plant sits in the middle of Fremont, a bedroom suburb of San Francisco. It has cranked out cars such as the Toyota Corolla and, until recently, the Pontiac Vibe for the past 25 years.

It is a point of pride among members of the United Auto Workers that their plant, which can produce abut 400,000 vehicles a year, is known for its high-quality cars. NUMMI began as an experiment tying unionized U.S. workers with Japanese management practices.

“It was a big question for both sides,” says Harley Shaiken, a labor expert at University of California, Berkeley. “The result was NUMMI, and the result was an extraordinary success story.”

Toyota could now decide, however, that the cost of going it alone is too much to bear.

Ever since GM went bankrupt, Toyota has been left negotiating with what’s left of the U.S. automaker. News reports in Japan say that Toyota is ready to pull out, though the company insists no decision has been made.

NUMMI is Toyota’s only unionized shop in the U.S. and also the only factory in North America where Toyota would have to deal with the UAW, and industry observers have suggested that union concessions would have to be part of any deal to keep the plant open and is widely believe that this fact could affect Toyota’s decision.

Click here to read the entire article.

(Source: Transit Wire & Progressive Railroading)

Amidst the flurry of negative publicity surrounding Washington, DC’s Metro rail system, there was some good news shining like a lone star in the dark sky! Metrorail passengers will soon be able to go online while underground. Four major cell phone providers have started to install the hardware that will enable riders to make calls, surf the Web, or send text messages from many of the Washington (DC) Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s busiest stations starting in October.

Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, AT&T and T-Mobile recently began installing hardware at the 20 below-ground stations and expect to complete work by Oct. 16. According to the WMATA press release, during the next two months, the companies will install a wireless network at the following Metrorail stations: Ballston, Bethesda, Columbia Heights, Crystal City, Dupont Circle, Farragut North, Farragut West, Federal Triangle, Foggy Bottom-GWU, Friendship Heights, Gallery Pl-Chinatown, Judiciary Square, L’Enfant Plaza, McPherson Square, Metro Center, Pentagon, Pentagon City, Rosslyn, Smithsonian and Union Station.

The companies will build, operate, maintain and own the new wireless network, as well as establish a second wireless network that WMATA will own, operate and maintain. The wireless contract will generate a minimum of $25 million during the initial 15-year term and an additional $27 million during renewal terms, according to the transit agency.

Customers at those stations will begin to see large, cabinet-like enclosures that will house the hardware at the ends of station platforms or on mezzanines, in areas that will not impede the flow of customers or impact the safe operation of the Metrorail system. New cables and antennae also will be installed as part of this work, which will take place late at night when the Metrorail system is closed.

“This is the first phase of Metro’s effort to bring expanded cell phone carrier service to the entire Metrorail system by 2012,” said Suzanne Peck, Metro’s Chief Information Officer. “After we complete the first 20 stations this fall, the carriers will install service at the remaining 27 underground stations by the fall of 2010. Customers will be able to use these carrier-provided wireless services in tunnels between stations by October 2012.”

Riders can now receive cell phone service from multiple providers at above ground stations, but the current underground wireless network only supports Verizon customers and Sprint phones that roam onto the Verizon network. In 1993, Metro agreed to allow Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems, which later became Verizon Wireless, to build and maintain the current wireless network. In exchange, Verizon built a public safety radio communications system for Metro. Verizon also pays annual fees to Metro.

“Customers have been asking for expanded cell phone and Internet access in the Metrorail system for a long time,” said Metro General Manager John Catoe.  And now they are finally getting what they pleaded, fought and begged for years!

(Source: Washington Post, New York Times, Bloomberg, The Detroit News, Autoblog)

The federal government’s Cash for Clunkers program began with a bang on July 24th and, despite the original plan having it last until Labor Day, will officially end next Monday night (August 24th) at 8PM. The end date was announced today by U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and takes into account what he calls conservative sales estimates that have the pot running dry sometime over the weekend.

“This program has been a lifeline to the automobile industry, jump-starting a major sector of the economy and putting people back to work,” LaHood said in the statement.

As of today, C4C has recorded 457,476 sales worth $1.91 billion in rebates. The feds estimate about $400 million worth of rebates have yet to be submitted and are reserving another $100 million for administrative costs. That leaves $600 million left for what should be a very busy weekend on dealer lots.

After just a week, the program, which began July 24 and was expected to last until Nov. 1, ran out of the $1 billion originally appropriated by Congress. An additional $2 billion was approved two weeks ago, and it was supposed to last until Labor Day. Now that’s almost gone, too.

With the end in sight, many dealers are preparing for a flurry of last-minute customers over the weekend, and some are calling and e-mailing customers who were on the fence, perhaps threatening a surfeit of business.

“It’s not clear at all if there’s enough of the $3 billion to last through the weekend,” said John McEleney, chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association. “My concern is if we go past the $3 billion between now and Monday.” He said, however, that he had been assured that the government has done calculations to make sure there is enough money left to get through the weekend.

In the days leading up to Thursday’s announcement, dealers and dealer groups said that uncertainties about the program’s ultimate conclusion were creating financial hardships and confusion. Among the organizations pressing for a resolution to the program was the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), which warned its members that “dealers who accept additional ‘clunker’ deals face a growing risk that they may not be reimbursed.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, asked LaHood in a letter today to speed up payments, saying “dealers have been forced to effectively finance the CARS vouchers for buyers until the dealers are reimbursed by the federal government, placing a strain on dealers’ balance sheets that, if prolonged, could eventually offset some of the benefits of the program.”

More than 1,000 people are processing the applications, LaHood said yesterday. That compares with fewer than 200 when the program began. The agency is training more of its staff and is using Citigroup Inc. contractors to handle the paperwork.

Also late today, Chrysler Group LLC joined General Motors Co. in announcing they will advance funds to dealers who are awaiting payment from the government for clunkers deals. The administration disclosed that it has paid just $145 million of the $1.9 billion in vouchers submitted — or less than 10 percent of the funds requested.

LaHood has been holding two or three meetings daily on the progress of the program in an effort to ensure an orderly shutdown.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the trade association that represents General Motors Co., Chrysler Group LLC, Ford Motor Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and seven other automakers, praised the government’s handling of the program.

Click here to read the entire article.