(Source: Transportation for America)

With Congress preparing to write the bill that will determine the next six years of transportation spending, Transportation for America yesterday released a detailed plan to restructure the nation’s transportation program in order to build a smart, safe and clean transportation system that provides real choices to all Americans.

Image Courtesy: Transportation for America @Flickr

If our platform, released in February, lays out the vision and goals for America’s transportation system, then the Transportation for AmericaBlueprint contains the detailed directions for getting there.

The Route to Reform: Blueprint for a 21st Century Federal Transportation Program will serve as T4 America’s proposal for the policies and financing structures necessary to achieve real transformational change in America’s transportation system. (We’ll be highlighting and explaining pieces of the Blueprint here over the coming weeks — it’s a lot to digest at once.)

In the blueprint, Transportation for America recommends Congress include four critical reforms in the upcoming transportation authorization bill:

1. Articulate a National Vision, Objectives, and Performance Targets for the national transportation program and hold state and local transportation agencies accountable for demonstrable progress toward goals including safety, efficiency, environment, health and equity.
2. Restructure and consolidate federal programs for greater modal integration, with a focus on completing the second half of the national transportation system, providing more transportation options for all Americans and creating seamless transportation systems that meet the unique needs and connect metropolitan regions, small towns, and rural areas.
3. Empower states, regions, and cities with direct transportation funding and greater flexibility to select projects, using carrots and sticks to incentivize wise transportation investments and in return require demonstrated performance on meeting national objectives.
4. Reform how we pay for the transportation system and create a Unified Transportation Trust Fund that would achieve balanced allocations of federal funds in a portfolio of rail, freight, highway, public transportation, and non-motorized transportation investment

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell — a co-chair of the Build America’s Future campaign and one of the leading voices calling for a renewed transportation system – gave the event’s keynote speech in the same committee where the transportation bill will be written and considered first by Chairman Oberstar’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Gov. Rendell was followed by a panel that included James Corless, director of the Transportation for America Campaign; Elaine Clegg, Co-Executive Director of Idaho Smart Growth and and city council member in Boise; Astrid Glynn, former Commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation; Andrew Cotugno, the director of planning for Metro in Portland, Oregon; andRonald Kilcoyne, the General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority.

“This report couldn’t be more correct when it says this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Gov. Rendell said.

“If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity…nothing will change, and we’ll just bump along, funding some good projects almost by accident, some mediocre projects and some terrible projects. We won’t have national policy, we won’t move the ball forward, and we won’t do something that will improve our economic competitiveness – we’ll just keep moving along the way we’ve been moving along, and not solving any problems.”

(Source: The Infrastructurist)

Many of you heard through the grapevine (from Congress), particularly, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Jim Oberstar — that the new transportation bill would be passed this year. Oberstar even offered September 30 as a target date. Sen Mark Warner (D, Va.) is now saying he’s “not sure” that the estimated $500 billion authorization will happen until next year. According to a story by Terry Kivlan in CongressDaily, Warner thinks that “Congress might have too many big-ticket items on its agenda this year to take on a transportation package.” Speaking at an infrastructure-focused conference hosted by the Departments of Transportation and the Department of Commerce, the senator remarked: “I’m not sure you are going to see a full transportation bill put out this year.”

He’s specifically worried about funding availability in light the fact that revenue from the gas tax, which pays for highway and transit programs, is no longer sufficient to cover outlays.  He called this the “elephant in the room” with respect to infrastructure funding.

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2010 Opel Astra Gets “Full Lutz” Skirt-Lift [Spy Photos]…on the GM‘s Delta II architecture, the same as the Chevy Volt. But don’t expect the Astra to come as a plug-in or standard hybrid, at least, not at first. Do expect to see a new 1.4-liter, turbocharged gasoline/petrol engine with various power outputs. Opel will likely be reserving its 2.0-liter engine for an OPC version (or the Astra VRX for Va…

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(Source: TreeHugger)

The mayor of Copenhagen reckons Biking to Work in that city is as commonplace as brushing one’s teeth. But, as was evidenced by Utah’s plan to make cycling fashionable, much of the rest of the western world is well served by awareness-raising events like Bike to Work week. This week! In the US anyway. (In the UK Bike Week is 13 to 21 June and Australia’s Ride to Work Day is 14 October 2009)

But who needs some arbitrary date to get motiviated, huh? Dust off that racer, tourer, MTB or clunker in the garage, dig out the pant’s clips, or just tuck your duds into your socks and get pedalling.

 (Source: Autoblog)

Roger Taillon test drives a new at Vespa at Vespa of Newport Beach in Newport Beach, Calif., Saturday, April 18, 2009. Under the federal stimulus package, taxpayers can deduct sales and excise taxes on the purchase of a new motorcycle or scooter, and get a 10 percent federal tax credit if they buy plug-in bikes. (AP Photo/Chris Carlson)

“Even before we quote the price, we tell people how much they can get off the bike,” said Jeff Bosco Biafore, a salesman at the San Jose Motorsport Scooter Center in Northern California.

Under the stimulus plan, the same provision that lets taxpayers deduct sales and excise taxes on the purchase of a new car or truck also applies to a motorcycle or scooter. They also can get a 10 percent federal tax credit if they buy plug-in bikes.

Before the federal incentives kicked in Feb. 17, California offered a $1,500 rebate for certain electric scooters, but there were so many applications that funding for the $1.8 million program for alternative fuel vehicles ran out.

Recently, state air quality regulators approved an additional $5 million in grants for plug-in cars and motorcycles.

With a new job that stretched her commute from 10 to 40 miles a day, freelance film and television editor Cindy Parisotto says she is considering an electric scooter to reduce her commuting costs and carbon footprint.

She’s interested in an electric scooter from Vectrix Corp. that has a top speed of 62 mph and a range of at least 35 miles per charge. She would need to charge the bike everyday, but Parisotto says she figures her electricity bill will be lower than what she spends on gas.

The $10,000 bike also comes with a $450 rebate from the company, meaning she could save about $2,000.

(Source: via DC Examiner)

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(Source: Green Inc, NY Times)

Raising crops to produce electricity, which will in turn power cars, is more efficient, a new study says, than raising crops to create ethanol to use as fuel in cars.

According to a study by three California researchers, an acre planted with corn for ethanol will provide far fewer miles of transportation fuel as the same acre growing trees or switchgrass, which are then burned in power plants that provide the power to charge the batteries of electric cars.

In fact, even ethanol made from cellulose, a technology that does not now exist in commercial form, is not as efficient a use of biomass as burning it in a power plant would be, the researchers found.

In a paper published in the current issue of Science magazine, Chris Field, a professor of biology at Stanford and director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution, Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced, and David Lobell of Stanford’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, write that the size of the advantage would depend on many factors.

These include the number of miles per gallon any particular vehicle will go on ethanol, and what a battery weighs per kilowatt-hour of energy stored. As batteries get lighter, for example, it takes less energy to move them.

But the researchers estimated that a small battery-powered S.U.V. would go nearly 14,000 miles on the highway on the energy from an acre of switchgrass burned to make electricity, compared to about 9,000 miles on ethanol.

If one grows a tree or annual crop, for example, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the air, burns it in a power plant that captures and stores escaping CO₂, and then replaces it with another crop, which pulls yet more carbon dioxide out of the air, the process becomes carbon negative.

The “miles per acre” question, and the amount of farmland diverted for use in producing transportation fuel is a sensitive political question, with American use of corn for ethanol blamed in part for last year’s run-up in global grain prices.