People

As Transportation Reformers continue to wait for the Senate to join the House of Representatives with a sense of urgency for re-authorizing the federal transportation spending bill; Senator Barbara Boxer and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will hold a "Town Hall" type meeting at Metro Headquarters from 9:30 A.M. to 3:45 P.M.  The draft agenda for the day, available via the announcement on The Source, can be found here. 

After years of debates, threats of lawsuits, contentious community meetings and even heated discussion on Streetsblog message boards; there was a feeling that yesterday's meeting of the Expo Board to debate the certification of the environmental documents for Phase II would be a momentous meeting.  Predictions of a 4-3 vote either for or against certification seemed a safe bet; with the exception of the Transit Coalition's Bart Reed who predicted a "blowout," everyone I talked to thought it would be close.

Yesterday brought news of two grim transportation numbers from the Obama administration: 2 and $53 million.

As news continues to spread about Senate Bill 518, Senator Alan Lowenthal's legislation that passed the State Senate last week and would encourage municipalities to curb their addiction to free parking or lose out on state planning and transit grants; the reaction from the press has been almost uniformly bad.  And it's not just the conservative outlets such as Fox News that are piling on.  As we detailed yesterday, the Times is almost gleefully promoting the most inflammatory comments from their article.  Yesterday, the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Lowenthal's local paper, took an editorial stand against the legislation.

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In the years before partisan warfare became the norm in Washington, transportation tended to unite both ends of the ideological spectrum. Can rationality return to infrastructure policy debates that have become subsumed by culture clashes between cyclists and drivers, urbanists and suburbanites -- and, of course, Democrats and Republicans?

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said today that he sees "very bright" prospects for congressional approval of the Obama administration's $4 billion National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, the new iteration of the long-discussed National Infrastructure Bank proposal.

In a fiscal year 2011 budget that proposes to increase spending on several core transportation priorities, the White House also aims to eliminate a few infrastructure programs that may prove popular with lawmakers.

Later this morning, the Metro Board of Directors will meet for the first time in the 2010 calendar year, and is faced with its biggest challenge since the passage of Measure R...a quarter of a billion operating deficit.  While some issues on the undercard are interesting, such as the Board finally moving to find a contractor to construct rail cars ten months after their quixotic quest to hand the contract to AnsaldoBreda kicked off; the largest issues is going to be what to do about the budget.  After years of shifting budgets and tapping contingency funds, Metro has to make some hard choices to make.