T4America Blog

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Posts Tagged "passenger rail"

T4 brings mayors to Washington to tell Secretary Foxx about the importance of passenger rail

T4America brought together a group of mayors to visit with U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx — a former mayor himself — and deliver a message about the importance of passenger rail to the economies of those communities they represent.

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Key Senate committee recognizes the importance of passenger rail, TIGER, transit and repairing our nation’s bridges

Less than a week after the release of The Fix We’re In For — our report on the nation’s bridges showing that one in nine US bridges are structurally deficient — a key Senate committee passed a yearly funding bill that provides new money for repairing these deficient bridges across the country.

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Could another new passenger rail line be facing the ax?

Potentially following in the footsteps of Wisconsin and Ohio, the Republicans in the state legislature are considering the possibility of killing Iowa’s portion of a planned higher speed passenger rail line from Chicago to Iowa City that would pass through the Quad Cities and the new Moline (Ill.) multimodal transportation hub funded by a TIGER grant.

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Video: John Robert Smith on helping politicos see the importance of passenger rail

In this short video, Former Meridian, Mississippi Mayor and current T4 America co-chair John Robert Smith talks about the project to build a new multimodal train station in downtown Meridian when he was mayor, proposed cuts to Amtrak that happened shortly afterward, and how a few key Senators championed funding for Amtrak after seeing how ordinary people outside of D.C. depended on that service.

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States clamor for high-speed rail stimulus funds as applications pour into DC

When the stimulus passed in February, $8 billion for high-speed rail was added at the 25th hour, at the behest of the Obama administration. In the days since, states have scrambled to prepare their proposals to receive a share of the money, which will be distributed via a process of competitive grants. With states competing for their share of the $8 billion to start developing and building high-speed corridors, competition was sure to be tough. But did anyone expect this many applications for the funds?

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