DC Streetsblog

If today’s FAA vote in the House is a preview of the upcoming debate over funding for the nation’s surface transportation infrastructure, we can foresee fights between the House and Senate over funding levels and the loss of key public services.

Streetsblog San Francisco reported earlier this week that the Metropolitan Transportation Commission has made a $10 million funding commitment to a mixed-use affordable housing project in the Tenderloin neighborhood, a convenient two-block walk from the nearest Muni stop:

American households will spend more money on gasoline this year, in dollar and inflation-adjusted terms, than ever before. And middle-class Americans are more concerned about fuel prices than at any time in recent history.

Transit officials spent the day on Capitol Hill yesterday, meeting with Congressional offices as part of the American Public Transportation Association's legislative conference.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), along with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), just announced that they’re introducing the BUILD Act today, which would create a national infrastructure bank.

TIGER grants, announced last year, hang in the balance as the Senate debates the package of House-passed spending cuts. Congress is about to vote on another extension of the current budget, cutting another $2 billion per week. (Up until now, those "cuts" have mostly been budget items from 2010 that the Democrats weren't going to ask for in 2011.) But will Democrats agree to cut innovative transportation projects that rose to the top of a competitive national process? And more to the point -- will Republicans?

In suburban Maryland, the debate about transit has often been cast as a decision between a light rail "purple line" and bus rapid transit. Democrat Martin O’Malley and local environmentalists lobbied for light rail while Republican Bob Ehrlich’s push for bus rapid transit was largely seen as an effort to “obfuscate, alter, study and delay” the progress on light rail. So in the D.C. area, BRT is sometimes seen as the choice of people who don’t really want transit to succeed.

Last week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told state DOT officials gathered at an AASHTO conference in Washington that he was all in favor of tolling – but only to add new capacity.

The two houses of Congress were so much at odds over the Republicans’ proposed spending cuts that they needed two more weeks to bicker about it. So last week, they pushed off a little longer final passage of the budget for a fiscal year that started five months ago. But in order to even pass that measly two-week extension, Democrats needed to accede to $4 billion in cuts.