The Transportation Department also received $48.1 billion in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act for shovel-ready infrastructure construction projects.
The proposed 2010 budget includes a five-year, $5 billion state grant program for high-speed rail projects, which is above $8 billion set aside for high-speed rail projects in the stimulus package.
(Source: Atlanta Journal Constitution)
Some board members said they wanted her gone because new road projects had been choked. Others spoke of concern over the criticism that the department was ineffective. There were also budget issues and discontent over conflicting priorities within the department.
Pictured: Gena Evans, Picture by: Kimberly Smith / ksmith@ajc.com
But in reality, trouble had been fomenting almost since the day Evans was elected. Controversy tipped into rebellion last week after Gov. Sonny Perdue proposed a plan to gut the DOT board of most of its powers over the state’s $2 billion transportation budget. Evans, 40, who was Perdue’s candidate for commissioner, was perceived at times to be more attentive to the governor’s positions than the board’s.
“Obviously there’s been some criticism that apparently our leadership has been inadequate,” said board member Steve Farrow, who was previously a supporter of Evans but voted for the termination. “And when there’s criticism that your leadership’s been inadequate, I think you need to make a change in the leadership.”
Click here to read the entire article on this controversy in Georgia.
(Source: etrucker.com)
The American Trucking Associations this week opposed a federal recommendation for a vehicle miles traveled tax, saying it presents privacy concerns.
ATA’s comments come in response to the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission’s report on highway funding challenges. The commission anticipates increasing problems with relying on fuel taxes to support infrastructure improvements because of increasing strides in fuel efficiency.
The commission’s solution – to migrate to a vehicle miles traveled tax – presents privacy concerns that not only are intrusive, but also could lead to new forms of fraud and identity theft, ATA argues. Also, the costs to implement and maintain the program would reduce the amount of funds available for infrastructure, ATA says.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: Jalopnik.com).
TransportGooru adores the creative thinkers at Jalopnik and Gizmodo. And here is what our lovely friends at Jalopnik have to say about GM’s state of affairs, with a funny twist.
Jalopnik would like to hear your thoughts. So, if you got a minute to spare, register your comments here. Also, you are seriously encouraged to drop your comments under this post as well.
(Source: Ars Technica via Gizmodo.com)
An Italian programmer and over 100 other individuals, including public figures, policemen, and government officials, are currently being investigated for what seems to be a traffic-light-rigging conspiracy.
Stefano Arrighetti, 45, the engineer in charge for programming the T-Redspeed system which is used throughout Italy, is being accused of rigging traffic lights to have shorter yellow lights, causing more motorists to inadvertently speed through red lights. Because the system uses three strategically placed cameras around the intersection, the T-Redspeed system was able to capture exact 3D placement of where the motorists’ cars were the moment it illegally crosses through the intersection, instantly fining them with a €150 ticket.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source – The Number Thirteen Line blog, hosted by PBS’ Blue Print for America)
Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Number Thirteen Line, a monthly blog about transportation in New York and around the world. This month’s topic: The Stimulus Package and its impact on transportation.
Seven hundred and ninety billion dollars, as designated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is a lot of money. Frankly, we had hoped that most of it would go toward public works projects; after all, good infrastructure projects have been shown to produce five times the GDP impact of broad-based tax cuts. Nonetheless, we understand reality doesn’t always play out the way we’d like. So we are reasonably pleased to see that $130-billion, of the $790-billion bill (16%), is intended for construction projects.
The really good news from a transport perspective is that high-speed and existing long-haul rail will receive more than $9 billion. Urban transit gets a nice sized boost as well. So what can we, as New Yorkers, expect and what should we demand?
Approximately $1.3-billion of the funds are being directed to on-going capital transit programs in the New York City metropolitan area. This means that projects such as the Fulton Street Transit Center and the No. 7 Subway Extension will finally be built. There’s little left for much else, so we must be thrifty in advancing other new projects. We are also limited in our imagination by the requirement that projects be “shovel-ready.” In an upcoming blog we will let our imaginations go wild.
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has been lauded worldwide as the one of the cheapest, most easily-implementable forms of mass transit (read “shovel-ready”), widely popular among riders and similar to light rail transit in its ability to carry people. And it fits perfectly into the objectives of the stimulus package as it can be planned, designed, and constructed in just one year. We recently planned and designed a BRT line on Fordham Road in the Bronx (disclosure: we are consultants to the New York City Department of Transportation and Metropolitan Transportation Authority on BRT) which was quickly implemented and has been enjoying wide success. We should demand a network of BRT solutions city-wide
(Source : Thanks to Robert Puentes @ The Brookings Institution for sharing this article)
Already, we have had not one—but two—national commissions on the topic, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently added transportation financing to its annual list of high-risk areas suggested for oversight by the current Congress.
Why the high anxiety?
Put simply: the money flowing out of the federal transportation trust fund (often referred to as the “highway” trust fund) is greater than the money flowing into it. This past September Washington was forced to shift $8 billion from the general fund to cover a shortfall in the transportation account. Estimates for how short the fund will be this summer hover around $9 billion.
Despite the sharp, and perhaps simplistic, rhetoric of late, the origins of the shortfall are the result of multiple trends converging.
For one, the federal gas tax—generating nearly 90 percent of the federal transportation revenue—has not been raised in nearly 20 years, not even to keep pace with inflation. So, as the rate effectively declines, so does the purchasing power of the trust fund. The current 18.4 cent per gallon tax in the U.S. is far less than in European competitor nations.
Click here to read the antire article.
(Source: Business First)
The U.S. Department of Transportation budget, within the framework of the federal government’s Fiscal 2010 budget outlined Thursday by President Obama, calls for the federal government to provide $800 million for the implementation of the Next Generation Air Transportation System.
The system, which has been beta tested by Louisville-based UPS Airlines since 1996, is an effort to improve the nation’s air traffic control system by using a satellite based surveillance system rather than the current radar surveillance system.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in November approved the deployment of the system, also known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B.
UPS Airlines, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE: UPS), tested ADS-B on 107 Boeing B-757 and 767 aircraft, Business First reported in August 2006.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: New York Times)
In 1997, one of my proposals was greeted with the usual thunderous silence. I proposed creating the Piazza Broadway by banishing cars from the the Great White Way near Times Square. It wasn’t a strictly original idea — a similar scheme had been proposed in the 1970s — although I do believe I was the first to suggest decorating the plaza with a statue of a three-card monte dealer and a pedestrian bridge modeled on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, to be called the Ponte di Tre Monte.
Anyway, the idea went nowhere — until today. Mayor Bloomberg planned to announce that Broadway will become a pedestrian-only zone around Times Square and Herald Square, according to my colleagues William Neuman and Michael Barbaro. The experiment will start in May and could become permanent if if it works.
Will it work? I’m biased, of course, and I can’t claim I based that 1997 proposal on any rigorous analysis. But today there’s a new tool for examining the proposal: a spreadsheet called the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, or B.T.A.. Charles Komanoff, the economist who developed it, calls it the first transparent and publicly available tool to gauge the varying impacts of changing the transportation options in a city with a dense central core, like New York.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: Washington Post)
Good news for transit riders: Starting on Sunday, the monthly transit benefit allowance increases to $230 from the current $120, thanks to the recently enacted economic stimulus package.
The new federal legislation allows employers to subsidize their employees as much as $230 a month, or $2,760 a year, in public transportation benefits. Or, an employee can receive the benefit as a pre-tax payroll deduction, or some combination of the two.
In the Washington region, more than 189,000 employees from 400 federal agencies and 4,000 private employers use the benefit and participate in Metro’s SmartBenefits program. The Metro program allows employers to assign a dollar value of each employee’s monthly commuting benefit directly to their individual electronic SmarTrip cards. Employees take the cards to machines in Metrorail stations between the first and last day of the month to claim the benefit.
Click here to read the entire article
