Maybe it doesn’t matter what President Obama says in his State of the Union. According to a Washington Post analysis, his batting average for last year’s SOTU proposals was a .208. In 2013, the president pleaded for tax reform, an American Jobs Act, $50 billion for a Fix-It-First infrastructure repair binge, a “Partnership to Rebuild […]

In addition to some recent high-profile spins through the revolving door, we now have a new example of ethically questionable influence peddling in Washington: A powerful Congressman’s brother working to bring down a transit line in Maryland. Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA) wields the gavel of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — a post his […]

When former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced earlier this month that he was going to co-chair Building America’s Future, I thought, “well that seems like a good place for him, but it’s not going to make his wife happy.” Mrs. LaHood has famously been needling him for years to get out of public office and […]

A new bill introduced by Senators John Hoeven (R-ND) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) would further entrench rules that make it difficult for crash investigators to access black box data from cars. Nearly all light passenger vehicles have event data recorders (EDRs) installed in them, which record everything from speed to seat belt use, though the data is […]

The best thing about hosting a Streetsblog podcast is getting to call on other Streetsblog reporters for the lowdown on the biggest news of the week. In this case, Jeff Wood and I called Ben Fried, Streetsblog’s editor-in-chief based in New York, to provide some context for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s big announcement […]

It’s the last thing you would expect to hear at the Detroit Auto Show from the CEO of Ford Motor Company. But last week, Ford’s Alan Mulally showed some ambivalence about the role of cars in major cities. “I think the most important thing is to look at the way the world is and where […]

“Highway people like highways, transit people like transit, rail people like rail,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said yesterday at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board. “But our transportation system should be greater than the sum of its parts.” Foxx wasn’t the first to lament the atomization of the various modes at the federal level. […]

Pedestrian crash statistics aren’t just numbers to Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. He himself was the victim of one of those crashes once, while out jogging. “I got lucky,” he told a packed room at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board today. “But there are lots of people out there that aren’t so lucky.” […]

In a rare instance of Congress producing some halfway decent news, funding for the federal TIGER program, which issues grants for multi-modal projects, will increase after the House and Senate unveiled the details of an omnibus budget bill yesterday. For the past few years, Congress has been unable to agree on a budget, so funding […]

Readers, rejoice! Perhaps you feared that you would never get to sit in on nearly an hour of transit talk between world-renowned brainiac straphangers Jeff Wood and Yonah Freemark. But ho! Fear no more. This week, podcast co-host Jeff Wood and I got to chat with The Transport Politic’s Yonah Freemark about the outlook for […]

About 350 pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are killed each year by large trucks in this country. Big freight trucks are incompatible with cities in many ways, bringing danger, pollution, noise, and traffic congestion. They park in bike lanes and have shockingly big blind spots, putting everyone around them at risk. And yet, most cities haven’t […]