Tanya Snyder

Just this morning, Politico was reporting that the House would introduce the legislative text of its transportation proposal on Monday, but just a few short hours ago, House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica gave a speech at the University of Virginia in which he said there would be no movement on the bill until next year. He also sent some encouraging signals that his committee won't draft a bill that's all about highways.

UPDATE: Corrects the post to say that the map reflects all ongoing projects, not just those in the final engineering and construction stages.

Did TIGER spend too much money on bicycle and pedestrian programs? That's the question Larry Ehl at Transportation Issues Daily is asking. After all, Congress appears to be encouraging USDOT to spend TIGER grant money on something -- anything -- other than bike/ped.

Leave it to the Brits to create an incredible tool for examining America’s own crisis of traffic fatalities. Behold this somber map, made by ITO World, a UK-based transportation information firm. Each dot on the map is a traffic-related death. The entire eastern United States is blanketed with them.

House leaders did not unveil a bill at their press conference this morning.

Remember those radically different appropriations bills passed by the House and the Senate? And how I said they’d never come together, and they probably would never pass a 2012 budget anyway because all Congress ever does anymore is extend previous budgets because they can’t agree on anything?

First Ray LaHood tells us he's not sticking around as Transportation Secretary much longer. Now his number two, Roy Kienitz, has announced he's gonna bounce too -- and he's not even going to wait around as long as LaHood. Kienitz will be out by next month.

In Indiana, the state DOT wants to build a 142-mile extension of Interstate 69, but the Bloomington metropolitan planning organization won’t allow it – the group had written the road out of its three-year transportation plan and members are standing firm, refusing to write it back in. The MPO in Charlottesville, Virginia, similarly, long fought the construction of a $245 million, six-mile bypass the state plans to build to accommodate freight traffic.

With all due respect to my vehicular-cyclist friends, I’m a big fan of separate facilities for bikes. They keep bicyclists safer and encourage more people to ride, and I know I make a lot fewer risky moves when I’m riding in a lane built for my two wheels and not a two-ton, 200-horsepower steel box.

Out of 11 transportation-related measures that were voted on Tuesday, seven represented a victory for transit, two were losses to learn from, and two more aren't really a win one way or another but are worth noting. According to the Center for Transportation Excellence, these numbers bring the year’s total to an impressive 79 percent win rate for transit. Especially impressive is the fact that most of these measures involved a tax of some sort, and people were willing to pay it if it meant better transit service – even in tough economic times.