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House infrastructure committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN), facing steep political odds in his push to pass a new six-year federal transportation bill this year, has begun to pitch an outside-the-box solution to the financing shortfall that is still stalling congressional action: Treasury bonds.

At an event in Minneapolis today, House transportation committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) announced his support for giving urban transit agencies more flexibility to spend federal transportation formula money on operating -- a change in the current law that has already won the backing of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood but has split the transit industry.

Due to Los Angeles City Council leadership and community advocacy, bike corrals may soon be coming to Los Angeles. The April 14th meeting of the city's  Transportation Committee is scheduled to hear a council motion on implementation of a pilot corral in Northeast Los Angeles. Here's the backstory on how that came to pass.

A contentious congressional dispute over $932 million in transportation funding remains unresolved this week after the Senate approved a one-month extension of federal aviation law rather than a three-month version of the bill that included a fix to the provision at issue.

It's no secret that Livable Streets advocates are big fans of the theories of Donald Shoup.  The Shoupista that introduced him on Saturday referred to him as "Shoup Dogg," and Streetsblog prefers to sing "Shoup there it is."  These kind of salutations for an Economics professor who dresses the part of the academic activist from his tweed jacket to a t-shirt that reads "All may park, ALL MUST PAY" may seem silly; but his message for Angelenos is not.  Our parking policy doesn't just make bad economic sense, it's also playing a major role in holding our city back.  The UCLA professor is considered one of the foremost expert at parking policy, and when it comes to his host city; he doesn't like what he sees.

The move to speed up Los Angeles' streets continues unabated.  Less than a week after hundreds of people gathered at the L.A. StreetSummit to discuss how to tame traffic and make Los Angeles' streets more livable, the City Council Transportation Committee is expected to hear, debate, and pass three speed limit increases in the San Fernando Valley at 2:00 p.M. this Wednesday in City Hall.  In a way, its kind of a sobering crash back to reality.  After a week of being reminded of what could be, activists are back to where we are...fighting speed limit increases that represent the exact opposite kind of thinking to what we talked about all weekend.

For anyone that missed last night's talk and won't make it tomorrow or just can't get enough of LA Streetsblog's rock star coverage, I've downloaded the audio from last night's speech.  With apologies to Professor Gottlieb and the rest of the speakers from Occidental College, I'm just posting the parts where Sadik-Kahn is speaking.

Last night, the L.A. StreetSummit kicked off with a rousing keynote address and slide show by the groundbreaking New York City DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn.  Three levels of Occidental College students, bike advocates from around the county, and others interested in Livable Streets packed the auditorium to hear Sadik-Kahn show the changes that have come to New York City's streets under her and Mayor Michael Bloomberg's leadership in the past three years.