DC Streetsblog

Public interest journalist Stuart Silverstein at FairWarning.org has uncovered the fact that red states (defined as those that went for Mitt Romney in the last election) have higher traffic fatality rates than blue states (those that went for Barack Obama). The correlation is striking, Silverstein says, but he's at a loss to explain it:

On Friday, we put this question to our readers: Who should be the next Transportation Secretary? And lucky for us, 323 of you had nothing better to do with your weekend than answer our poll.

Congress has seven weeks to come to some sort of agreement on the so-called "fiscal cliff," with two of those weeks devoted to photo ops and turkey dinners. The consequences are real: Transportation programs paid out of general fund transfers to the Highway Trust Fund, rather than gas tax receipts, are not exempt from the automatic spending cuts that are part of the fiscal cliff. Non-Trust Fund programs (Amtrak, New Starts, TIGER) are also vulnerable, and are expected to get a 7.6 to 8.2 percent cut taken out of them, according to Larry Ehl at Transportation Issues Daily.

This is the first of two posts examining Rep. Bill Shuster's candidacy for the chairmanship of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. We'll post the second one, focused on his positions on bike/ped programs and funding issues, tomorrow.

Nonprofit reporting group California Watch recently looked at how Californians travel to work and concluded that free parking provided by the state's employers is leading to a lot of street-clogging solo car commuting.

Some readers took issue with yesterday's post that characterized a carbon tax as a terrific but politically unlikely proposal, after the Obama administration shot down the idea last week. Putting a price on carbon emissions is, after all, generating renewed interest from across the ideological spectrum. Notably, the libertarian American Enterprise Institute is co-sponsoring a forum on the issue today with the left-leaning Brookings Institution, Resources for the Future, and the IMF.

About 12 hours after President Obama won re-election, Bloomberg News ran this tantalizing headline: "Obama May Levy Carbon Tax to Cut U.S. Deficit, HSBC Says."

In addition to some of the high-profile measures that we covered already, Election Day brought many successes on some smaller ballot initiatives. According to the Center For Transportation Excellence, pro-transit campaigns had an 80 percent success rate this year at the ballot box, with more ballot measures coming up for a vote than any previous year.

UPDATE 1:47 p.m.: Speaker Boehner just sent out an email to reporters, highlighting media reports of his comments that assert that he doesn't intend to raise tax rates. It clarifies his position that the election doesn't equal a "mandate for raising tax rates” on the American people.