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Innovation NewsBriefsVol. 24, No. 8 On Wednesday, May 22, the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Mayor Anthony Foxx, President Obama’s designated choice for the next United States Secretary of Transportation. Confronting Sec. Foxx during his tenure will be the challenge of steering the federal transportation program through another reauthorization, while facing [...]
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Innovation NewsBriefsVol. 23, No. 21 By a vote of 373-52 in the House and a vote of 74-19 in the Senate, the lawmakers approved a two-year reauthorization of the federal surface transportation program on June 29, just one day before the program was set to expire. In so doing, Congress passed the first multi-year reauthorization [...]
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Vol. 22, No. 34
A congressional oversight hearing, focused on the concerns surrounding the troubled California high-speed rail project, cast new doubts on the likelihood of the project’s political survival.
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On November 18, President Obama signed into law a bundle of appropriation bills for FY 2012 including appropriations for the U.S. Department of Transportation. The measure had been passed earlier in the House by a vote of 298-121 and in the Senate by a vote of 70-30.
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For California’s high-speed rail boosters including their chief cheerleader, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the month of May must have felt like a month from hell. First came a scathing report by California legislature’s fiscal watchdog, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO), questioning the rail authority’s unrealistic cost estimates and its decision to build the first $5.5 billion segment in the sparsely populated Central Valley between Borden and Corcoran.
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Pragmatic funding decisions have marked the third and final round of awards in the Administration’s $10 billion High-Speed Rail Program. The awards, announced on May 9, confirmed what critics, including this column, have long maintained: the White House high-speed rail initiative, stripped of its high-blown rhetoric, is in fact a program of modest incremental improvements to existing Amtrak passenger rail services. As such, the initiative represents a small but useful step in restoring more reliable intercity passenger rail service— but it hardly deserves the hype and exaggerated claims that have been used to characterize it. Rather, it is a “victory for incrementalism,” in the words of Scott Thomasson, policy director of the Progressive Policy Institute.
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An undated 498-page draft of US DOT’s legislative proposal for surface transportation reauthorization, the “Transportation Opportunities Act,” has been making the rounds in Washington for the past week. Its publication, however, has been largely ignored by the transportation community. What would ordinarily be an eagerly awaited event and the source of much comment, has passed virtually unnoticed…Partly, it is because the DOT draft contains no surprises: it merely restates the proposals already revealed in the President’s FY 2012 Budget request. But more importantly, the draft has been ignored by Washington stakeholders and political observers because it has been judged to lack political savvy and realism.
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InfrastructureUSA is a project of the nonprofit Open Space Institute, Inc. as part of its Citizen Action Program.