Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Recent Posts
Deficit Commission Pushes For Anti-Sprawl Reforms
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If political pandering and bad economic policies have encouraged sprawl and an autocentric transportation system, better incentives can start to correct past mistakes. Here’s one place to start: the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform report, released this Wednesday. The report has plenty to make anyone squirm. As co-chair Alan Simpson said when he […]
EPA Recognizes Small Towns and Big Cities For Smart Growth Efforts
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When Don White was young, his dad would drive him from the Boston area to Blue Hill, Maine up coastal Route 1. “In those days,” he reminisces, “the road wound through little, small towns. And some of that has been bypassed.” The bypasses have been “hugely controversial, hugely disruptive, hugely expensive,” according to Kate Beaudoin, […]
GOP Demands a Stop to Stim Spending. What Will It Mean for Rail Projects?
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The incoming Republican head of the Appropriations Committee wants to take back stimulus funds promised to states and localities for much-needed infrastructure programs, including more than $6 billion in transportation funding. High-speed rail projects would take an especially big hit under the plan. Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) has introduced H.R. 6403, the American Recovery and […]
Rahall Responds, Says His Transpo Record Is About More Than Just Highways
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Earlier this month, we reported that Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV) was in the running for Ranking Member on the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee in the House. We mentioned our alarm that his ideas about transportation seemed limited and road-centric – specifically, that his website’s issue page on transportation mentioned only highways, water, and broadband. Got […]
Earmark Ban Goes Down to Defeat in the Senate
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The Senate just voted down the Republican proposal to ban earmarks. The proposed ban was met with profound ambivalence in the transportation community. Some, like Rob Sadowsky, Executive Director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, worried that a ban would remove a primary funding mechanism for bike-ped projects. The day after the election, Sadowsky told BikePortland, […]
Another Day, Another Revelation That a Gas Tax Hike Is Necessary
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Add another vote in favor of increasing the gas tax to pay for infrastructure investment. A few weeks ago, a couple of senators proposed raising it 25 cents. Then the deficit commission came out in favor of a 15-cent hike. And now, three left-leaning think tanks – Demos, the Economic Policy Institute, and The Century […]
Livability and the GOP: A Conversation With HUD’s Mariia Zimmerman
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Perhaps the Obama administration’s greatest contribution to building more livable, less traffic-choked communities has been the new partnership between three agencies — DOT, EPA, and HUD — which are helping towns and cities grow more sustainably, using strategies from brownfield redevelopment to the provision of affordable housing along transit corridors. The agencies have collaborated to […]
GOP Wants to Bring Transpo Policy Back to the 1950s
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A top Republican transportation staffer gave some clues yesterday about the GOP’s plan to drastically restructure national transportation policy and reverse many reforms of the past 20 years. In an off-the-record luncheon with the Road Gang, a sort of “fraternity” of Washington highway executives, Jim Tymon gave the view from his seat as Republican staff […]
Bachmann: It’s Not an Earmark If It’s for Highways and Bridges
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The first phase of the lame duck ends today. Has Congress done the heavy lifting of finding consensus on extending tax cuts, or unemployment benefits, or Medicare physician payments, or the surface transportation authorization, or the federal budget? No. But they named a few post offices. And they re-elected their same leaders to keep on […]
Dutch Planners School U.S. Cities on Bikeability
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In the Netherlands, 30 percent of trips under five miles are by bike. I know, I know, Euro-envy can get a little old. So the Dutch are trying to give us a little less to be jealous of. What if our streets were as bike-friendly as theirs? We could get there. Our trip patterns aren’t […]
Seatbelts and Tickets Alone Won’t Cure America’s Traffic Death Epidemic
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Motor vehicle crashes caused 28 percent of all deaths among people 24 and under in the United States in 2006. In 2009, nearly 34,000 people died on America’s roads, and that was considered a big improvement over previous years. More and more, it seems, Americans are wondering why our country is so far behind on […]
Oberstar’s Final Words of Wisdom
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Outgoing Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Jim Oberstar (D-MN) just wrapped up a roundtable conversation with reporters. He looked back on his 36 years in Congress – starting in January 1963 as clerk of the the Rivers and Harbors Committee, which eventually morphed into the T & I Committee. He said the history of the […]