Tanya Snyder

As we head into the Memorial Day holiday, and move from one congressional recess to another [PDF], Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) has given us something to do with our extra free time: Watch taxpayer subsidies to big oil climb higher and higher.

The data tell us that young people are driving less; that Americans are driving fewer miles -- and it's not just because of the economy. Now the Washington Post asks a more transcendental question: Is the spark gone?

Although Senate Republicans had hoped the carefully crafted compromise over the Transportation Enhancements program would stand, some House members are stating their insistence that the program be stripped out entirely in conference.

Hint to lonely hearts everywhere: If you're looking for some correspondence, join the transportation conference committee. Those folks are getting a lot of mail these days.

Last week, I published a list of seven questions I had as the Transportation Conference Committee started meeting. I was examining the politics, not the policy. Turns out some readers wanted to hear more about the policy.

The brilliant thing about car-sharing is that it leads people to drive less by providing access to cars. It allows people to give up their personal vehicles (along with the gas, maintenance, parking, and insurance costs they entail) without giving up the ability to use the car once in a while when necessary. It diminishes the need for parking spaces, since one vehicle can serve several households. And it makes people think harder about the trips they take, since each trip constitutes a higher cost than in a personal vehicle, which come with high upfront costs but low per-trip costs, encouraging more driving just to get your money's worth out of your investment.

The people behind Walk Score, the real estate rating service that goes by the slogan “Drive Less, Live More,” are out with a new rating system, based on hard data, that should prove useful to prospective city dwellers: Bike Score.

Everyone's trying to figure out why, after decades of consistent growth, the amount Americans drive is leveling off and even declining. The decline started during the recession, to be sure, but was more dramatic than in previous recessions. As the economy began to get back on its feet, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) just barely ticked upward -- and then fell again.

The first meeting of the transportation bill conference committee started today at 3:00. (To familiarize yourself with the participants, see Ben's reports on the House and Senate conferees.) We're live-blogging it, beginning to end, on Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

The Reason Foundation's "research" on high-speed rail is pretty predictable. We know what this oil industry-backed think tank is going to say before they've said it: Ridership will be lower than expected; costs will be higher.