Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Transportation Policy

Hire a Construction Worker, Fire a Bus Driver?

By John Kaehny | Jan 23, 2009 | 25 Comments

Green-collar jobs are on the line in Barack Obama’s adopted hometown. Photo of CTA bus driver: goatopolis/Flickr It’s stimulus package logic: Lay off a bus driver now and hire a construction worker in a couple of months or a year. Congress and purported urbanist Barack Obama are fiddling with a 1950s-era stimulus package while America’s […]

Congress Sending Wrong Signals to State DOTs in Stimulus Draft

By Ben Fried | Jan 22, 2009 | 11 Comments

Gary Toth is director of Project for Public Spaces’ transportation program and an influential voice for transportation as a tool for making communities more livable. In this piece he tells us how state DOTs are taking cues from Washington as the stimulus bill takes shape. It’s going to be more of the same unless Congress […]

Wiki Wednesday: Transit and the Stimulus

By Ben Fried | Jan 21, 2009 | 6 Comments

Post-stimulus, will this analogy still seem fitting? Today we’ve got a work in progress started by Livable Streets member Adina Levin, who’s tracking the status of transit funding in the stimulus bill. The entry’s a little skeletal at the moment, but once it fills out, this should be one of the more significant additions to […]

Senate Set to Confirm LaHood as Transportation Secretary

By Ben Fried | Jan 21, 2009 | 1 Comment

Ray LaHood handles some softballs at his nomination hearing. Looks like Ray LaHood will sail toward an easy confirmation in the Senate. Members of the Transportation Committee were congratulating him before he opened his mouth at this afternoon’s nomination hearing, which just adjourned. Here are some bullet points: The livable communities plank in Obama’s campaign […]

Did Team Obama Gut Transit Funds From the Stimulus Package?

By Brad Aaron | Jan 21, 2009 | 10 Comments

Reporting on last week’s stimulus letdown — when a proposal by US Rep. James Oberstar’s Transportation and Infrastructure Committee for $17 billion in mass transit spending was slashed by the Appropriations Committee, while $30 billion in proposed allocations for roads and bridges remained the same — Grist got word that the then-incoming Obama administration may […]

Stimulus Draft, the Day After

By Ben Fried | Jan 16, 2009 | 5 Comments

For everyone hoping that an $825 billion stimulus package might advance a visionary national agenda for sustainable transportation, yesterday’s release of a draft economic recovery bill didn’t deliver the goods. Nor did it include some pretty easy lifts, like the $1.7 billion for transit operations that the House approved in an earlier bill last summer. […]

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