(Source: earth2tech via Reuters)

Cities have thrown down the gauntlet for electric car charging in recent months, and utilities are increasingly eager to tout infrastructure efforts. Among automakers, the Renault-Nissan Alliance has been out in front working to coordinate governments, utilities and charge station companies to develop regional networks of hardware and services that drivers will need to make the automakers’ upcoming electric cars practical for daily use. But what steps follow a big partnership announcement, after a utility, a vendor or an automaker says it’s done a deal to ready the power grid for an EV rollout?

For at least one of the 26 partners that the Renault-Nissan Alliance has lined up so far — utility San Diego Gas & Electric — the vision for how to support plug-in vehicles at even a pilot scale is just beginning to take shape. In an interview last week, SDG&E’s Clean Transportation manager, Bill Zobel, gave us a glimpse of what the utility has accomplished so far, and what it has in the works.

At this point, Zobel said, the company is still in the process of assembling its internal team for the project. When that group is fully established next month, it will help develop milestones and oversee outreach to customers and “integration across the broader utility.” By September, SDG&E aims to have commitments from fleet operators in the San Diego area to trial at least 100 electric cars coming from Nissan next year. Zobel said the University of California, San Diego is “ecstatic” about the program. The city and county of San Diego, several nearby cities and the U.S. military may also sign up to try the vehicles. SDG&E plans to have at least 15 of the cars in its own fleet.

(Source: TheTrucker.com & AP)

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood took exception to an Associated Press articlethat reported that counties suffering the most from job losses stand to receive the least help from President Barack Obama’s plan to spend billions of stimulus dollars on roads and bridges, an Associated Press analysis has found.  Although the intent of the money is to put people back to work, AP’s review of more than 5,500 planned transportation projects nationwide reveals that states are planning to spend the stimulus in communities where jobless rates are already lower.

Image Courtesy: AP - U.S. map shows amount of stimulus funds announced for transportation, by county

Altogether, the government is set to spend 50 percent more per person in areas with the lowest unemployment than it will in communities with the highest.

“At the DOT, we have $48 billion to rebuild roads, bridges, highways, airport runways, ports and transit projects,” LaHood wrote. “And we have already signed off on transportation projects in all 50 states. Just 12 weeks after President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law, we have approved 2,800 road projects and another 300 airport projects.”

LaHood said that amounted to over $10 billion “out the door and countless Americans going back to work.”

By this summer, LaHood wrote, Americans won’t be able to drive down the street without seeing people working at good-paying jobs.

He attributed those jobs to the Recovery Act money.

“Unfortunately, the AP’s analysis is misguided,” LaHood said. “Its reporters looked at 5,500 transportation projects from state lists and concluded that the transportation money is going to counties with low unemployment. But until the states make a request and the experts at the DOT certify that a project meets the criteria for Recovery dollars, those lists are not the final word.

 “Basically, their (the Associated Press’) work amounts to nothing more than an academic exercise.”

For people who are out of work and at risk of losing their jobs, this construction work is a godsend, LaHood said he believed.

“Sadly, unemployed workers can be found all over our nation in these difficult economic times — even in counties that don’t have the highest unemployment rates,” the secretary wrote

“Governmental boundaries are often arbitrary, and workers know that,” LaHood noted. “People who work construction jobs often drive to wherever they can find work in a metropolitan area or region. Our idea is to drive down unemployment, period.”

LaHood said he told Brett Blackledge, the Associated Press writer who authored the story, about a recent trip he took to New Hampshire for a groundbreaking on highway 101.

“I shook hands with men and women who are going back to work thanks to the Recovery Act,” LaHood said. ”One man told me that he drives all over New England for construction jobs. Another said he is the father of four children and was unemployed until this project began. Now that he has this job, he will be commuting from Wolfeboro.

“Unfortunately, Brett didn’t think it was worth quoting me when I told him that the point of the program is to put people to work. And that’s something I’m proud of.”

 (Source: The Infrastructurist & Reuters)

Reuters has done a lot of interesting interviews this week from its Infrastructure Summit. In thenews service’s latest dispatch, the Senate’s transportation pointperson, Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, who will marshal the bill through the Senate, discusses her plans for the highway bill.  

Snippets of the interview that would appeal to us are here: 

• “What I think is very important is to index the gas tax to inflation, because, obviously the gas tax is falling behind,”.
• “I also don’t want to increase the gas tax, but I want it to keep up.”
• Confident the bill would pass out of the Environment and Public Works Committee that she chairs and reach the full Senate by the end of the year.
• The Senate is also considering raising the tax on diesel, changing exemptions to the gas tax given to certain groups, taking a percentage of customs duties, relying on private finance, and charging drivers fees based on Vehicle Miles Traveled (The bill’s authors, though, have rejected attaching a small device to cars to measure VMT). 
• We’re looking at options. Are there ways for people to — an honor system, when they register their vehicles — just say, ‘This is the miles I had last year, this is the miles I have this year,’?

Related article:

Fear Growing Senator Boxer Won’t Deliver Progressive Transportation Act

(Source: Streetsblog)

(Source: Architect Online’s Federal Weekly Report,  Urban Land Institute  via, Planetizen)

IT’S NOT JUST U.S. INFRASTRUCTURE THAT’S OUTMODED, SAYS A NEW REPORT BY THE URBAN LAND INSTITUTE. THE WAY CITIZENS AND POLITICIANS THINK ABOUT IT NEEDS AN UPGRADE, TOO.

“We will not continue to be a major world power if we can’t get goods in and out of the country in an efficient, productive way,” ULI executive vice president for initiatives, Maureen McAvey, tells ARCHITECT. “And the more we waste time in congestion on our roads, in having inadequate ports and inadequate delivery systems, and having congested airports—that’s all loss of productivity.”

The ULI’s hope is for transit systems to be linked across jurisdictions and for transportation and land use to be integrated. Often, “there’s no easy way of getting from A to B, and those are all trips on the road,” McAvey says, which, in addition to causing congestion, means more carbon released into the air. “It’s a stupid way to run a country.”

Running throughout the report is the notion that the U.S. is at a tipping point, a moment when the country either shakes off the system it has been functioning under for decades and chooses to look at infrastructure, transportation, land use, and many other issues in a holistic and future-leaning way, or we continue to patch old problems, push solutions to the future, and hope to hold ourselves together. The latter, says the ULI, means the country will slide backward.

(Source: MSNBC)

Photo: Joe Raymond / AP file. In 2006, the 157-mile-long Indiana Toll Road was leased to a private operator for 75 years for $3.8 billion. Novel approaches to funding offer insights on how the U.S. will fund, build and manage its transportation infrastructure for years to come.

Click here to read the entire article.

Rick Karr, correspondent for Blueprint America, discusses his report on nation’s ailing freight-rail system airing on PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

Last week, President Obama announced an ambitious goal to build a high-speed passenger rail line in ten regions across the country. But even if President Obama’s plans for passenger rail materialize, it won’t necessarily help the entire rail system. America’s freight, the cargo that moves goods across the country by rail, is in big trouble. To look at the state of the rails, The Takeaway talks with Rick Karr, a correspondent for Blueprint America. His report on the nation’s ailing freight-rail system will air on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer tonight, offers insight into the  bottlenecks on America’s freight rail network and how they may be hindering the nation’s economic competitiveness.

In the Midwest, Chicago has been a freight rail hub for around a hundred and fifty years. In the old days, some lines brought raw materials to the city – like cattle to the stockyards – while others carried finished products to market. The city’s rails are still laid out that way: a couple of lines come in from the west and a couple of others from the east. Even though Chicago still handles about a third of the nation’s freight, a lot of it has to stop there – wait there – and shift from one railroad to another.

As a result, traffic on Chicago’s rails is even slower than traffic on its roads: A two-thousand-two study found that freight trains pass through the city at an average of just nine miles an hour.

But there is no agency in Washington, D.C. responsible for untangling, modernizing, or maintaining the nation’s freight rail system – or for paying for those improvements. And so, Federal support for improving freight has to come through the back door – tacked on to other transportation projects.

The Obama Administration’s plan announced last week for the expansion of high-speed passenger rail in several key corridors – including Chicago and the Midwest – is likely to improve the speed of freight as both kinds of trains share the same tracks in much of the country.

Click below to listen. 

(Source: AASHTO)

Photo: Zen Skillicorn@flickr

Washington, DC – “Are we there yet? The perennial question asked by kids on a long car trip is the same one all Americans should be asking about our entire transportation network,” said John Horsley, Executive Director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO). “Improving our transportation system must be a top priority for all of us since we are only investing half of what it would take to meet the needs of our nation’s growing population, demand for freight, and aging roads, bridges, and transit.”

 With the expiration date looming for the current federal transportation authorization, AASHTO has today launched a national campaign to build awareness and provide information on the critical needs of our nation’s transportation system.

Click here to explore the campaign.

(Source: Boston Globe)

Mass. officials say public works that would have the biggest impact – and create the most jobs – may be left out