A breakdown of provisions and funding requirements for mass transit in The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The Dig ~ Infrastructure of the stimulus plan: $8.4 billion in Mass Transit | Blueprint America.
(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: AP via Yahoo News)
A good Samaritan who helped push three people out of the path of a pickup truck before being struck and injured has gotten a strange reward for his good deed: A jaywalking ticket.
Family members said 58-year-old bus driver Jim Moffett and another man were helping two elderly women cross a busy Denver street in a snowstorm when he was hit Friday night.
Moffett suffered bleeding in the brain, broken bones, a dislocated shoulder and a possible ruptured spleen. He was in serious but stable condition Wednesday.
The Colorado State Patrol issued the citation. Trooper Ryan Sullivan said that despite Moffett’s intentions, jaywalking contributed to the accident.
Moffett had been driving his bus when the two women got off. In the interest of safety, he got out and, together with another passenger, helped the ladies cross.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: MSNBC)
An overwhelming majority of Americans believe restoring existing roads and bridges and expanding transportation options should take precedence over building new roads, according to a survey sponsored by the National Association of Realtors® and Transportation for America.
The 2009 Growth and Transportation Surveydescribes what Americans think about how their communities are handling development and how the transportation needs of communities can best be met.
“Realtors® build communities and know how important an organized transportation structure is in supporting neighborhood growth,” said NAR President Charles McMillan, a broker with Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage in Dallas-Fort Worth. “A well planned investment in transportation will help create more livable and vibrant communities.”
To accommodate future U.S. population growth, which is expected to increase by 100 million by 2050, Americans favor improving intercity rail and transit, walking and biking over building new highways. When asked what the federal government’s top priority should be for 2009 transportation funding, half of all respondents recommended maintaining and repairing roads and bridges, while nearly one third said “expanding and improving bus, rail, and other public transportation.” Only 16 percent said “expanding and improving roads, highways, freeways and bridges.”
(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
(Source: BusinessWeek)
Economic difficulty can inspire extraordinary innovation. We asked futurists what they’d like to see arise from these difficult times
“History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas.” As President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Feb. 24, he took a moment to look back, pointing to the innovations that have arisen from times of difficulty: the railroad tracks, laid across the country in the midst of the civil war; the public high school system that emerged from the Industrial Revolution; the GI Bill that sent a generation to college. Obama’s theme was clear: Times ofeconomic difficulty can inspire extraordinary innovation. And now, even as the markets continue their roller-coaster ride, he described a time “to put in place tough, new common-sense rules of the road so that our financial market rewards drive and innovation and punishes shortcuts and abuse.”
Of course, longed-for innovations don’t always make it to the market. Radically new ideas fortransportation were on most of the futurists’ wish lists, but the chances of a high-speed cross-country train within the U.S. still seem slim (we’re also still waiting on that flying car). But, as vehicle sharing and trackable, more reliable, and eco-powered buses gain popularity, chances are that better urban transit will become a reality.
(Source: Streets Blog)
Bogotá’s TransMilenio carries 1.4 million riders per day. This bus- and bike-only transitway operates in the historic city center. Photo: Shreya Gadepalli/ITDP.
New York City made a major public commitment to Bus Rapid Transit in 2006 when, after years of discussion, the MTA and DOT put forward plans for pilot routes in each of the five boroughs. In the meantime, the city’s BRT agenda has encountered a few setbacks in Albany and made a partial breakthrough on Fordham Road, with a service that incorporates some nifty bus improvements, but not enough to merit the BRT designation.
Perhaps no one knows the ins and outs of BRT better than Walter Hook (right). As director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, Hook has advised cities on four continents about BRT implementation, including Jakarta’s seven-corridor network, the first full-fledged BRT system in Asia.
Streetsblog caught up with Hook — in between trips to Cape Town and Mexico City — for an email Q&A about why New York City needs Bus Rapid Transit, common misconceptions of BRT in America, and what will make BRT succeed here. This is the first of four installments.
Streetsblog: Is BRT the right mode for New York City at this moment in time? A lot of folks think that BRT is no substitute for light rail or a subway system. How would you pitch the idea of BRT to New Yorkers?
Walter Hook: I was in Philadelphia a few months back, which is a real rail and streetcar-loving town, and I took a lot of heat for suggesting BRT had a place in U.S. cities like New York and Philadelphia, particularly from my friends in the sustainable transportation advocacy community. I understand why a lot of folks in the U.S. see BRT as some sort of marketing trick to pawn off low-quality bus improvements as mass transportation. I think it’s because we don’t really have a full BRT system in the U.S. Not very many people have been to Bogotá, or Curitiba, or Pereira or Guayaquil to see the best BRT systems. These are not exactly tourist Meccas.
Click here to read the rest of this interesting conversation.
(Source: Planetizen)
This announcement was posted by: Rail~Volution
Rail~Volution 2009: Boston October 30-November 1, 2009
Rail~Volution is a conference for passionate practitioners – people from all perspectives who believe in the role of land use and transit as equal partners in the quest for greater livability and greater communities. The success of the conference depends on the quality and diversity of presentations. Rail~Volution solicits your story-sharing expertise, experience, success and challenges.
THEME: This country is being reshaped by the economic crisis, suburban foreclosures, volatile gas prices, and concern about the carbon footprint of development—creating enormous momentum for change. The new administration is committed to change, and Congress is deliberating the bill that sets transportation policy and funding for the next six years. Livable communities near transit are more economically and environmentally sustainable and we need more of them now. Let’s rise to the challenge. The window of opportunity is opening wide.
Help us enliven the discussion! Give us your ideas now!
http://www.railvolution.com/CallForProposals_2009.asp
For more information contact:
Mary Simon
Rail~Volution
1120 SW 5th Avenue Suite 800
Portland, Oregon 97204
USA
Phone: 503-823-6870
Email: mary.simon@pdxtrans.org
Web: www.railvolution.com
photo: Richard via flickr
Indian Railways has already been running some of its trains on biodiesel. NowCalcutta Tramways Corporation has announced that it will be running its buses partly on biodiesel: A memorandum of understanding with Emami Biotech was signed last week for the supply of 250 kiloliters per month of biodiesel.
Click here to read th entire article.
