Federal Transit Administration Unveils Capital Projects Recommended for Major Financing

» Denver, Honolulu, Minneapolis, and San Francisco to see major investments in new light rail. Ten bus rapid transit lines moving forward.

In its proposed fiscal year 2011 budget released yesterday, the U.S. Department of Transportation revealed which projects it would recommend for New Starts and Small Starts capital construction grants. There are a total of $1.822 billion in grants heading to cities across the country, with huge projects in Honolulu, San Francisco, and Denver getting the biggest boost.

The Federal Transit Administration is predictable in its choices of which projects will be awarded the multi-million dollar merit-based grants, which are announced annually with the President’s proposed budget. We’ve known for several years that Minneapolis’ $1 billion light rail connection to St. Paul and San Francisco’s $1.3 billion Central Subway were likely to move forward, simply because they’ve repeatedly scored well in FTA evaluations. The same could be said for Denver’s East and Gold line rail corridors, which are backed by the huge FasTracks expansion program, and which also received good news from the federal government yesterday.

But the decision to fund a new busway connecting Hartford and New Britain in Connecticut comes as a bit of a surprise. The project has been in consideration for a decade, and it has seen both positive and negative reviews from the FTA over the years. Recent legislative actions in favor of transit projects in the state, as well as a shoring up of local funds for the project, likely pushed the U.S. government into supporting it. It will be New England’s second major busway project after Boston’s mediocre Silver Line.

The FTA’s willingness to move ahead with the $5.3 billion Honolulu rail project indicates that it is willing to buck concerns about financing stability that have been recently expressed by Hawaii’s governor. The scheme, which will begin construction later this year and which could eventually attract almost 100,000 daily riders if implemented successfully, is a major commitment: the FTA will be funding more than one billion dollars worth of the corridor’s cost, with the rest covered by local sales tax revenues.

Using the Small Starts capital grants program, the FTA also funded eight small bus rapid transit projects and one commuter rail project in the Los Angeles region. New York City’s Nostrand Avenue BRT, San Francisco’s Van Ness BRT, and the West Seattle BRT will serve very dense corridors and have received very good marks from the DOT in the past; the real question for each is whether the respective cities will be able to assemble adequate community support to begin work. The FTA’s continued funding for the East Bay BRT, which would connect Berkeley and Oakland, suggests that the agency still considers it a priority. That may be news to Bay Area politicians, who have pulled funding for the line recently in favor of the poorly considered Oakland Airport Connector, which itself is under threat by the DOT.

The other funded BRT corridors are in mostly suburban environments with center city connections.

Several projects, including Orlando’s SunRail, New York’s Access to the Region’s Core, and Houston’s North and Southeast Corridors, were approved for New Starts Funding last year. They will each move forward in the coming months.

The FTA’s evaluations of each of these projects will be released later in the spring in the annual New Starts report.

Image above: San Francisco Central Subway Chinatown Station, from SFMTA