With multiple versions of two years’ worth of federal budgets flying around, some details are still emerging about what’s in and what’s out. At the end of last week we heard that the FY2011 budget, which has been sent to the president for his signature, includes $100 million for the Partnership for Sustainable Communities. According […]

By a vote of 235 to 193, the House approved the GOP budget proposal for 2012, which cuts $6.2 trillion more from the budget over 10 years than President Obama’s proposal. A big portion of that bite comes out of transportation. Compared to Obama’s plan, it spends $633 billion less for transportation. House Budget Committee Chair Paul […]

Like everyone else, Safe Routes to School advocates are scaling back. Last year, a bill introduced in the Senate asked for $600 million to enhance pedestrian and bike safety near schools. “We were working in a pretty different environment,” said Margo Pedroso, deputy director of the Safe Routes to School National Partnership. “Everybody was talking […]

It’s Monday morning, and the government is open for business. In a last-minute agreement just an hour before the current budget extension was to expire Friday night, Democrats and Republicans avoided the nuclear option of a government shutdown. They cut $38.5 billion from the 2010 budget; $78.5 billion from President Obama’s 2011 budget proposal. Some […]

The “Tom and Rich Show” continued on Capitol Hill yesterday. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue and AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka joined up for yet another event to show that business and labor, which don’t agree on anything, agree on a major infusion of federal investment for infrastructure. They weren’t the only strange bedfellows there. […]

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee just spent two days listening to 40 experts from different aspects of the transportation sector and advocacy community, from engineers to environmentalists to the Tea Party. Each person had just four minutes to speak and they crammed as much as they could into their time: observations, demands, recommendations for […]

If today’s FAA vote in the House is a preview of the upcoming debate over funding for the nation’s surface transportation infrastructure, we can foresee fights between the House and Senate over funding levels and the loss of key public services. The House will vote today on a proposal to bring aviation spending down to […]

I hope members of Congress had a nice, relaxing recess this week, because it’s about to get crazy on Capitol Hill. The Budget Congress isn’t any closer to consensus on the FY2011 budget than when they adjourned March 18 with a three-week budget extension to avoid a government shutdown while they duke it out over […]

“Transit alone is insufficient to make a real estate market,” said Dena Belzer, the president of Strategic Economics, an urban design consulting firm. Her group is a partner in the Center for Transit-Oriented Development (CTOD), which this week released a new report on the effects of transit expansion on real estate markets. Transit won’t, on […]