A new video from the Office of the President-Elect features a group of individuals working on Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan discussing how the plan will help stimulate the country, focusing on infrastructure, education, the environment, and health care. The video (at the bottom of this post) is meant as a preview before the coming public release of the plan’s text, and there’s good news in this video for transportation activists.

In the video, Madhuri Kommareddi, a member of the Economic Policy Team, discusses mass transit directly:

“[People] also probably see their drive times significantly increase as congestion has increased dramatically across the country, especially in a number of growing population centers.”

“Infrastructure is a part of his plans for a number of reasons. First, it can help simulate an immediate job creation, which is a central component of the President-Elect’s economy recovery plan. Second, it’s an opportunity for us to meet a lot of those unmet needs that have really grown over the past several years, and in some cases several decades. The President-elect very much wants to look at forward-thinking investments. How can we expand our public transit systems?“

The video includes a clip of a congested highway, followed by a subway train entering a station, while she’s talking. Like the video released a few days ago, this clip provides us a heartened reprieve from the incessant “roads and bridges” rhetoric of Mr. Obama himself, which seemingly precluded any interest in alternative transportation. This clip, on the other hand, implicitly suggests that investment in mass transit is a good alternative to the congestion in our cities.

This video’s content bodes well for the bill’s language.