Posts Tagged "President Trump"
EPA rolls back CAFE standards, highlighting the need to reduce driving
This week, as the coronavirus crisis worsens, the Trump Administration finalized its rollback of clean car standards, a move that will undermine public health and place even more of a burden on finding ways to reduce driving to reduce emissions.
BUILDing Complete Streets
By now it’s well known that the Trump administration is no friend to transit funding. Even the BUILD grant program—which was originally designed to fund complex, multimodal projects—has been warped by the administration’s focus on roads. But there is one silver lining from the most recent awards: Complete Streets.
What’s inside presidential candidates’ transportation plans?
Our director Beth Osborne often jokes that transportation is the first agenda item on politicians’ second to-do list—which is why it never gets done. Most presidential candidates are no different, advocating for business-as-usual transportation funding or embedding transportation across multiple plans. Here’s what’s in them.
“This budget is disappointing but not surprising”: T4America statement on President Trump’s 2021 budget request
“With enormous potential to reshape the way Congress and the public think about transportation policy, the President’s FY 2021 budget follows his past budgets, cutting transit, rail and safety for those walking and biking while stressing highway funds require no accountability.”
In the Washington Post: Let’s skip the infrastructure spending spree
A new opinion piece in the Washington Post takes a contrarian view of all the talk about money during Infrastructure Week. Let’s skip the infrastructure plan and focus on policy, because without good policy more spending could actually do more harm than good.
If verbal gymnastics was an Olympic sport, USDOT would take a medal
A deceptive announcement by USDOT two weeks ago resulted in mistaken headlines across the country giving credit to USDOT and the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) for “awarding” funding to a number of transit projects. A closer read reveals that USDOT didn’t actually distribute or award a single dime to advance new transit projects.
A new countdown for USDOT transit funding
As Congress enters negotiations for the next long-term transportation bill and works to pass a new annual budget, our Stuck in the Station resource has been updated to provide a complete list of transit projects awaiting funding in 2019 and track USDOT’s progress towards meeting hard and fast deadlines imposed by an impatient Congress.
Federal transit funding delays grab headlines across the country
Since we launched Stuck in the Station this summer—which catalogues the egregious (and wholly avoidable) delays in transit funding under this administration—dozens of media outlets across the country have covered the news.
Trump administration has effectively halted the pipeline of new transit projects
Last March, Congress provided the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) with about $1.4 billion to help build and expand transit systems across the country. 142 days later and counting, FTA has obligated almost none of these funds to new transit projects. Our resource—Stuck in the Station—will continue tracking exactly how long FTA has been declining to do their job, how much money has been committed, and which communities are paying a hefty price in avoidable delays.
The TIGER program is no more….in name
The TIGER grant program is now being called BUILD. While the criteria are essentially the same, there’s one big caveat. Under BUILD, USDOT will now require applicants to provide evidence that they have secured and committed new, non-federal revenue for projects requesting funding. And there’s a whole list of reasons why that’s a problem.
It’s past time to elevate the national conversation about infrastructure beyond just the price tag. Learn more about T4America's three simple principles for federal transportation investment.
Read our new principles