The Transportation Department also received $48.1 billion in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act for shovel-ready infrastructure construction projects.
The proposed 2010 budget includes a five-year, $5 billion state grant program for high-speed rail projects, which is above $8 billion set aside for high-speed rail projects in the stimulus package.
(Source: Creamer Media’s Engineering News)
All of Durban’s public transport projects, which are being funded by the national government to the tune of R1,2-billion, will be completed by the first quarter of 2010,Carlos Esteves, deputy head of the Road System Management for eThekwini, said ast week.
The city aims to promote public transport over private transport to make the city more accessible and to ease movement around the city centre for commuters and pedestrians.
Projects on target for 2010 include additional dedicated public transport lanes, an inner city distribution system, park and ride facilities using existing car parks and buses, upgrades to major intersections, a freeway management system, a closed-circuit television road monitoring system and a traffic call centre.
Durban’s King Shaka International Airport is expected to start operating in May 2010, just in time for the FIFA World Cup, and a shuttle service will be provided for passengers between the airport and a central transport hub in the city.
(Source: etrucker.com)
The American Trucking Associations this week opposed a federal recommendation for a vehicle miles traveled tax, saying it presents privacy concerns.
ATA’s comments come in response to the National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission’s report on highway funding challenges. The commission anticipates increasing problems with relying on fuel taxes to support infrastructure improvements because of increasing strides in fuel efficiency.
The commission’s solution – to migrate to a vehicle miles traveled tax – presents privacy concerns that not only are intrusive, but also could lead to new forms of fraud and identity theft, ATA argues. Also, the costs to implement and maintain the program would reduce the amount of funds available for infrastructure, ATA says.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: CNN)
Gone are the days, it seems, when executives can comfortably lounge poolside, expensing meetings and meals along with margaritas and massages.
As President Barack Obama, Congress and the financially anxious public continue to cry out for corporate responsibility, what does this crackdown mean to American cities and to industries that are fueled by business travelers, conventions and meetings?
“January was a disaster,” said Don Singh, a Las Vegas, Nevada, taxi driver, who added that he brought home about half of what he did the previous year.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source: Jalopnik.com).
TransportGooru adores the creative thinkers at Jalopnik and Gizmodo. And here is what our lovely friends at Jalopnik have to say about GM’s state of affairs, with a funny twist.
Jalopnik would like to hear your thoughts. So, if you got a minute to spare, register your comments here. Also, you are seriously encouraged to drop your comments under this post as well.
A breakdown of provisions and funding requirements for mass transit in The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The Dig ~ Infrastructure of the stimulus plan: $8.4 billion in Mass Transit | Blueprint America.
(Source – The Number Thirteen Line blog, hosted by PBS’ Blue Print for America)
Welcome to the inaugural issue of The Number Thirteen Line, a monthly blog about transportation in New York and around the world. This month’s topic: The Stimulus Package and its impact on transportation.
Seven hundred and ninety billion dollars, as designated in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is a lot of money. Frankly, we had hoped that most of it would go toward public works projects; after all, good infrastructure projects have been shown to produce five times the GDP impact of broad-based tax cuts. Nonetheless, we understand reality doesn’t always play out the way we’d like. So we are reasonably pleased to see that $130-billion, of the $790-billion bill (16%), is intended for construction projects.
The really good news from a transport perspective is that high-speed and existing long-haul rail will receive more than $9 billion. Urban transit gets a nice sized boost as well. So what can we, as New Yorkers, expect and what should we demand?
Approximately $1.3-billion of the funds are being directed to on-going capital transit programs in the New York City metropolitan area. This means that projects such as the Fulton Street Transit Center and the No. 7 Subway Extension will finally be built. There’s little left for much else, so we must be thrifty in advancing other new projects. We are also limited in our imagination by the requirement that projects be “shovel-ready.” In an upcoming blog we will let our imaginations go wild.
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) has been lauded worldwide as the one of the cheapest, most easily-implementable forms of mass transit (read “shovel-ready”), widely popular among riders and similar to light rail transit in its ability to carry people. And it fits perfectly into the objectives of the stimulus package as it can be planned, designed, and constructed in just one year. We recently planned and designed a BRT line on Fordham Road in the Bronx (disclosure: we are consultants to the New York City Department of Transportation and Metropolitan Transportation Authority on BRT) which was quickly implemented and has been enjoying wide success. We should demand a network of BRT solutions city-wide
(Source: Greenwire via New York Times)
A blue-ribbon federal transportation panel called today for a temporary gas-tax hike followed by a move toward charging drivers directly for every mile they travel — two ideas that have been soundly rejected by the White House in the past week.
The controversial road-pricing scheme would become the dominant funding mechanism for road construction and maintenance by 2020, with drivers being charged an average of 2 cents per mile, according to the report released by the 15-member panel created by Congress in the last highway bill authorization.
The National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission says the shift is necessary because the current funding mechanism — federal fuel taxes — has failed to raise the necessary revenue for needed roadwork and runs counterintuitive to national environmental and energy goals.
“The more successful U.S. transportation policy is at increasing fuel efficiency and reducing both foreign oil dependency and carbon emissions, the faster its primary funding source, the gas tax, becomes obsolete,” said Texas state Rep. Mike Krusee, a commission member.
Increases in fuel economy, coupled with the fact that the current federal tax on gasoline has remained stagnant at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, have already taken their toll on federal revenues to fund road construction and maintenance. The Highway Trust Fund, which receives the bulk of its money from federal fuel taxes, would have run empty late last year if it were not for an eleventh-hour transfer of $8 billion by Congress to keep it solvent.
“With the expected shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles, it will be increasingly difficult to rely on the gas tax to raise the funds needed to improve, let alone maintain, our nation’s surface transportation infrastructure,” said commission Chairman Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.
Click here to read the entire article.
(Source : Thanks to Robert Puentes @ The Brookings Institution for sharing this article)
Already, we have had not one—but two—national commissions on the topic, and the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently added transportation financing to its annual list of high-risk areas suggested for oversight by the current Congress.
Why the high anxiety?
Put simply: the money flowing out of the federal transportation trust fund (often referred to as the “highway” trust fund) is greater than the money flowing into it. This past September Washington was forced to shift $8 billion from the general fund to cover a shortfall in the transportation account. Estimates for how short the fund will be this summer hover around $9 billion.
Despite the sharp, and perhaps simplistic, rhetoric of late, the origins of the shortfall are the result of multiple trends converging.
For one, the federal gas tax—generating nearly 90 percent of the federal transportation revenue—has not been raised in nearly 20 years, not even to keep pace with inflation. So, as the rate effectively declines, so does the purchasing power of the trust fund. The current 18.4 cent per gallon tax in the U.S. is far less than in European competitor nations.
Click here to read the antire article.
(Source: Business First)
The U.S. Department of Transportation budget, within the framework of the federal government’s Fiscal 2010 budget outlined Thursday by President Obama, calls for the federal government to provide $800 million for the implementation of the Next Generation Air Transportation System.
The system, which has been beta tested by Louisville-based UPS Airlines since 1996, is an effort to improve the nation’s air traffic control system by using a satellite based surveillance system rather than the current radar surveillance system.
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration in November approved the deployment of the system, also known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B.
UPS Airlines, a subsidiary of Atlanta-based United Parcel Service Inc. (NYSE: UPS), tested ADS-B on 107 Boeing B-757 and 767 aircraft, Business First reported in August 2006.
Click here to read the entire article.
