DC Streetsblog

All eyes are on the House side of Capitol Hill today in anticipation of the Republicans' grand unveiling of their American Energy & Infrastructure Jobs Act at 3:00 p.m. But last night, some enduring questions about the Senate's transportation bill finally got some answers. Senators Tim Johnson and Richard Shelby, respectively the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, released a summary of the Federal Public Transportation Act of 2012, providing a preliminary guide to how the Senate will treat transit [PDF].

For the 112th Congress, the path to passing a new transportation bill has been full of starts and stops, partisan politics and low expectations. While Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood recently said he doesn't expect a multi-year bill to pass this Congress, livable streets advocates should still be on alert in the weeks ahead. Momentum is building behind bills in the House and Senate, and there are strong indications that the bills could advance quickly in the coming days.

There was no grand unveiling of the House’s five-year transportation bill today, but a summary of the bill has been kicking around for a few days. While there aren’t any hard numbers available yet, the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act looks like a return to 1950s-style transportation policy. It is particularly unkind to transit and bike/ped programs, and to cities in general.

If the Transportation Research Board annual meeting were a music festival, the headline act would have been yesterday's panel of six secretaries of transportation, including Ray LaHood (the incumbent) and Alan Boyd (the first to ever hold the post). As headliners go, they were a bit of a downer: They told a standing-room-only crowd that they're all pretty worried about America's ability to deliver the transportation policy the country needs.

There’s been plenty of buzz over the last few days surrounding Congress’s efforts to pass a multi-year transportation bill.

At the Transportation Research Board's 91st annual meeting here in DC, it's hard to miss the booth handing out copies of a bright blue pamphlet filled with illustrations of busy tree-lined streets, where bicyclists and buses work their way through a bustling urban bazaar. The booth is the Congress for New Urbanism’s “occupation” of TRB, and the pamphlet is their new illustrated Sustainable Street Network Principles, a document aimed at explaining in very basic terms what's wrong with America's streets -- and how to fix them.

Walkable development pays -- that's the conclusion of a study recently outlined in Planetizen. For cities and towns facing tight budgets -- just about everywhere in the United States right now -- the smart way to boost tax revenue is to encourage mixed-use, walkable development, as the above graphic amply illustrates.

This week marks the Transportation Research Board's 91st annual meeting, a time when thousands of experts and professionals from across the country descend on the nation's capital to share their ideas, discoveries, theories, and fears with their colleagues in the transportation field. This year, falling in line with political rhetoric from both parties that ties transportation to job creation, the conference's theme is "putting innovation and people to work." Presumably, "innovation" refers in part to the fact that there is little to no agreement on how to pay for transportation investments at the federal level.

A few weeks ago, Streetsblog wondered aloud if House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was coerced into riding a bicycle during a recent interview on 60 Minutes. It was a tongue-in-cheek question prompted by Cantor’s outspoken opposition to federal bike-ped programs. But it did not amuse Thomas L. Bowden, Sr., chairman of Bike Virginia and a board member of the Virginia Bicycling Federation. Bowden, a self-described “hard-core Republican bike commuter,” wrote an opinion piece in Saturday’s Washington Post calling out Streetsblog — which Bowden says is one of his favorite blogs — for our treatment of Cantor: