Tanya Snyder

Today, both President Obama and Republican House Ways and Means Chair Dave Camp unveiled plans to pay for transportation with corporate tax reform. Few details have emerged about exactly how Camp plans to do this, but Politico has heard from Capitol Hill staffers that it would push $100 billion to $125 billion to transportation over an unspecified time frame.

Jeff Wood of the Overhead Wire (now working with NRDC's crack transportation team) and I talk to Randy Simes in this week's podcast about the streetcar movement in Cincinnati -- and how they finally grabbed the long-elusive gold ring.

You would be lucky to get half as much information about a $5 million transportation project in your state as you can get from a toothpaste tube about how to brush.

This week, Jeff Wood and I get indignant about Miami-Dade County's misuse of transit funds for roads, and we speculate about why -- with the current success of pedestrian projects like Times Square -- old-style pedestrian malls are still going belly-up. And then we peek behind the curtain at an exciting new frontier for urban planning: connecting urban form with the feelings they inspire.

Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, who led Copenhagen's turn away from car-domination toward streets and public spaces for people, is on a U.S. tour. I got to sit down with him this week in Washington.

Enforcement of jaywalking doesn't improve pedestrian safety. So what will? Tom Vanderbilt, best-selling author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, gave a succinct answer in a New York Times op-ed this weekend. Our cities will be safer to walk in when we have "better walking infrastructure, slower car speeds and more pedestrians."

The day after President Obama’s State of the Union plea to improve economic opportunity for struggling Americans, New Jersey Democrat Albio Sires introduced a bill that he says will help meet that goal.

Maybe it doesn’t matter what President Obama says in his State of the Union. According to a Washington Post analysis, his batting average for last year’s SOTU proposals was a .208. In 2013, the president pleaded for tax reform, an American Jobs Act, $50 billion for a Fix-It-First infrastructure repair binge, a “Partnership to Rebuild America” to lure private capital to infrastructure projects, and an Energy Security Trust to use oil and gas revenues for technology to “shift our cars and trucks off oil for good.” None of that went anywhere.

In addition to some recent high-profile spins through the revolving door, we now have a new example of ethically questionable influence peddling in Washington: A powerful Congressman’s brother working to bring down a transit line in Maryland.

When former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced earlier this month that he was going to co-chair Building America's Future, I thought, "well that seems like a good place for him, but it's not going to make his wife happy." Mrs. LaHood has famously been needling him for years to get out of public office and make some money in the private sector.