Ben Fried

(Aaron Naperstek over at NYC Streetsblog carries the news that it's official: Little known Congressman Ray LaHood will be the next Secretary of Transportation.  The post below lists some of the discussion surrounding LaHood from earlier today)

I spoke earlier today to David Burwell, founder of the Surface Transportation Policy Project and a strategic consultant with the Transportation for America campaign, about how the stimulus package is shaping up for transportation projects, why it might go wrong, and what can be done to set it on the right track.

A front page story in yesterday's Washington Post has the most thorough analysis to date of how infrastructure spending may be divvied up in an Obama stimulus package. Nothing is set in stone, but the dividing lines are increasingly clear: States and their DOTs are emphasizing road projects, while cities are looking for ways to reduce congestion. The emphasis on getting shovels in the ground quickly will also skew spending, says Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak:

Last week the Federal Transit Administration finally approved the Silver Line, a long-awaited addition to the capital region's transit system that will extend to suburbs in northern Virginia. There are still a few hoops to jump through to secure the necessary funding, but it looks like some relief is in sight for the area's crushing congestion.

Click through for the conclusion to this week's toon, which comes to us from Rick Smith of Shaker Heights, Ohio. Smith's strip, Yehuda Moon, is a serialized saga with daily entries going back to January. I'm still making my way through the storyline, but having biked the greenways of Lorain County, I had a soft spot for this installment.

Watch this instructional video from the Transit Authority of River City (that's Louisville, Kentucky), and trust me, you won't be able to dislodge the chorus from your head for days. I never thought of bus-mounted bike racks as the stuff of infectious music videos, but I was wrong -- egregiously wrong.

Clarence Eckerson rounds out Streetfilms' series on Boulder, Colorado with this long-form opus. Boulder was recently awarded a rare platinum rating from the League of American Bicyclists, and here we get a flavor for the city's bike network and the story behind it. I like this telling detail: When it snows, Boulder's bike paths get plowed first.

Economists and lawmakers are batting around increasingly large figures for the Obama admin's upcoming stimulus package -- 300 billion dollars, 500 billion, a trillion? Whatever the final sum, a big cut will get plowed into transpo projects. The question is whether all that money will perpetuate an outdated system or lead toward a future where cars and gas aren't seen as basic necessities for most Americans.

Via Transport Politic, some encouraging transit news from Iraq, where the mayor of Baghdad recently announced plans to move ahead with the city's first subway lines. The Guardian reports: