April « 2011 « The Transport Politic

The New Congress Makes Its Claim on the Budget

April 10th, 2011 |

» A compromise on the budget signals that the White House is not fully committed to an expansion in infrastructure investment.

The agreement between Republicans and Democrats last Friday kept the federal government from shutting down for a short period, but it did not provide for longer-term fiscal stability in Washington nor did it do anything to tone down the increasingly shrill complaints from conservatives over the size of the national budget.

One thing it did indicate, though, was that of all federal funding commitments, those that affect cities most directly — in transportation and urban development — are most likely to be cut. Of the $2 billion pulled from the nation’s Fiscal Year 2011 budget last week, every cent was taken from either the Department of Transportation or the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Once final decisions are made for the rest of the year’s budget, and

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Atlanta Transit Expansion Comes Closer as Region Prepares for Tax Referendum

April 6th, 2011 |

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» Hopes for regional transit funding are lining up.

When it was originally proposed in 1965, MARTA was supposed to be the transit authority serving the entire Atlanta region, then splayed out over five counties. Yet the system required funding to be put in place, and when asked to devote some of their sales taxes to the cause, only people in Fulton and DeKalb Counties — the most central of the region — agreed to pony up. So the rail system that began operations in mid-1979 remains constrained to those counties’ borders. Lacking needed funds, the original system plan has yet to be completed.

That’s in spite of the fact that the ten closest-in Atlanta region counties now house more than 4.1 million people and have grown significantly over the past half century. Partially because of the failure to expand MARTA, the region’s transit mode share of work trips

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