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
High-Speed Rail: Do We Have the Will?
| | No Comments
Tomorrow morning, I’m getting on a train from Washington, DC to New York. It’s going to take me almost three-and-a-half hours to get there. Sure, I could pay more for an Acela and get there in less than three hours. But why can’t it take 90 minutes? Yesterday, Amtrak unveiled a plan [PDF] to build […]
Obama Admin Will Make Its Transportation Push… During the Next Congress
| | No Comments
President Obama is “going to throw his support behind a six-year reauthorization of the transportation program” in Congress. That was the word today from Roy Kienitz, who represented the Transportation Department today as he testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. In a meeting with transportation reform advocates last week, Secretary Ray LaHood […]
Barbara Boxer Questions Need for Infrastructure Bank
| | No Comments
California Democrat Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, expressed skepticism about one of the centerpieces of President Obama’s infrastructure plan today. As she tries to stave off an election challenge from the right, Boxer seems reluctant to embrace the creation of a national infrastructure bank to finance transportation projects. […]
Applications for TIGER II Funding Overwhelm What U.S. DOT Can Dish Out
| | No Comments
For every dollar awarded from the U.S. DOT’s TIGER II grant program, there are more than $30 that applicants are asking for but won’t be getting. That’s the word from the DOT, which announced on Friday that it had received about $19 billion in applications for nearly 1,000 projects “from all 50 states, U.S. territories […]
Will the Next Merit-Based Transpo Program Rock Harder Than TIGER?
| | No Comments
Experts are still trying to make sense of President Obama’s $50 billion plan for infrastructure spending, announced on Labor Day and later characterized as an upfront investment on a larger, multi-year transportation bill. More than a hundred people gathered at the Brookings Institution last Thursday looking to learn more about where the administration and Congress […]
Street Safety Projects Threatened as States Give Transpo $ Back to Feds
| | No Comments
It’s payback time again for state DOTs. The fine print on the jobs bill Congress just passed includes a $2.2 billion rescission from state transportation funding, and projects to make biking and walking safer are especially at risk of losing out. State DOTs have to return funding to the feds, and programs to improve biking […]
The Problems With Ports, or Why We Need a National Freight Act
| | No Comments
Maybe you commute by train, or maybe you’ve switched from driving to biking. But your stuff is still traveling the country by diesel truck. Containers at the Port of Oakland. Photo: NOAA Nearly a quarter of transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions come from freight. The movement of goods from port of entry to a store near […]