Transportation Policy

Barack Obama's standing as an advocate for investment in US commuter rail looks to have gotten a boost with his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate. Whereas John McCain is the Senate's sworn enemy of Amtrak, his colleague from Delaware is known as a "Champion of the Rails." Notes Daily Kos diarist MissLaura (via George Washington University):

U.S. PIRG has picked a winner in its "21st Century Transportation" video contest, and it's this irony-soaked entry. Meet "Dan," a guy who just can't get enough stop-and-go time on the highway. He loves sitting in traffic, and the last thing he wants to see is adequately funded transit giving people an attractive alternative to car commuting.

Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton introduced a bill in the Senate to provide emergency funds for local transit agencies. Since then, the rest of the delegation from New York and New Jersey appears to have lined up behind the legislation. "We believe that Senators Schumer, Lautenberg, and Menendez support it," says Larry Hanley of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which helped to push the bill forward in both chambers of Congress (the House passed it in June). That leaves 56 votes to achieve a filibuster-proof Senate majority.  Paging Senators Feinstein and Boxer...

 

When Barack Obama gave his big energy speech on Monday, his campaign released an eight-page fact sheet [PDF] to go with it. All the way at the end, at the very bottom of the last page -- after the parts about plug-in electric vehicles, oil shale, and clean coal technology -- there's this paragraph:

The Los Angeles County Bike Coalition reports that A.B. 1358, The Complete Streets Bill, will be heard by the full Senate next week. The legislation would require that cities and counties to design roadways that safely accommodate all those who use them, including bicyclists, pedestrians, transit riders, children, the elderly and the handicapped, as well as motorists. While this might seem like pretty revolutionary stuff in Los Angeles, all it requires of municipalities to treat everyone equally when designing road projects.

Back in his Straight Talkin' days Senator John McCain acknowledged that offshore drilling wasn't a viable solution for America's energy troubles. In 2003, he broke with the Bush Administration and co-introduced legislation to reduce carbon emissions, by, in effect, imposing a price on them. McCain had a reputation for being a politician who told the American people the truth, even when the truth wasn't something that people particularly wanted to hear. But the past few weeks have seen a fundamental change in McCain, writes Elizabeth Kolbert in an outstanding piece in this week's New Yorker:

A Times’ editorial  lifted the curtain on some of the back room dealings endangering Metro’s sales tax proposal, hereafter referred to as Measure R, in Sacramento.  Apparently two Los Angeles County State Senators that sit on the appropriations committee, the same committee that passed on the proposal on Monday and is scheduled to vote on … Continued