That need for speed, urged on by a leadership that wants to get a bill to the floor soon, means that Senators will be under tremendous pressure to keep the bill moving along quickly. Already, vested interests are attacking the critical provisions that would set new, 21st-century objectives for our investments, rather than perpetuate a status quo that benefits fewer and fewer Americans.

Those critical provisions were passed in December by the Senate Commerce Committee. The committee approved legislation that would establish national policy objectives and goals for the transportation system. It would hold all levels of government accountable for congestion levels, road conditions, environmental impacts, the reliability of freight movement, increasing access to transit, and reducing fatalities across all modes, among other measurements of progress. However, some in Congress are fighting against these critical reforms.

With the ball starting to roll downhill fast, your senators need to hear from you that these are just the types of reforms we need included in a transportation bill. Tell your Senators you’re counting on them to support and defend a more transparent and accountable system for spending our transportation dollars.

In these times of shrinking state budgets and financial downturns, it’s more important than ever to know exactly what our scarce transportation dollars are buying. After spending of billions of dollars each year, taxpayers want to know:

“Are we better off now than last year? Are we safer on our roads? Are our bridges in better condition than ten years ago? Can more people get from A to B quickly, reliably and affordably? Is our transportation system creating more pollution or less? Using more or less oil?”

Americans we’ve talked to all across the country are 100 percent fed up with spending billions each year without a way to demonstrate that we’re making progress. It’s crucial that your Senators hear today what’s important to you in the transportation bill, before the hearings and floor debates heat up next week.

Take just a minute and tell your Senators you’re counting on them: no more blank checks for transportation without accountability, goals and objectives.

Stay tuned — it’s going to be a busy February here in Washington.

As Congress works to craft an economic stimulus that can help get our economy out of a rut, will the spending just dig a bigger ditch?

The numbers for the proposed economic stimulus package keep increasing. Congress and the incoming administration both expect that tens of billions of dollars in the package will be targeted for transportation. Where does your state want to spend the money? We’re starting to get a picture, and at the moment, many of the answers don’t match what’s needed.

As part of developing the stimulus, states have been asked to develop lists of transportation projects that could be “ready to go” if funds were available. Transportation for America has gathered a handful of these lists from state departments of transportation, and the lists thus far suggest some real problems.

(Note: The lists we have received are not all complete, and some other projects may be funded directly by Governors or from other budgets. Refer to your state directly for the final word.)

Tables at the bottom of the post.

With commuters crowding into overburdened transit systems in record numbers and our elected leaders calling for investments in green, 21st Century transportation, we should prioritize investment in things like expanded public transportation, rail projects, and streets safe for walking and biking. Polls have shown that Americans favor those investments, and Americans voted for them again this November in huge numbers.

Consider also the fact that our current system has a tremendous backlog of repair and maintenance that has been neglected or underfunded for decades. With 12% of our nation’s bridges deemed “structurally deficient” in 2007, there’s a pressing need to repair our road and highway network we’ve spent the last 50 years building.

The lists we have, while perhaps incomplete, are not all headed in that direction. The state lists display a striking imbalance between these desperately needed repairs and brand new roads.

Florida’s list is 75% highway expansion and 10% maintenance and repair; Utah’s list is almost exclusively populated with highway expansion projects; Missouri’s list is two-thirds expansion; Kansas’ three-fourths.

It’s important to remember that highway expansion comes with the added cost burden of future maintenance and repair. Where will the money come from for those costs ten years from now? Because the recovery package will be a one-time infusion of cash, repair and maintenance of the existing network should be a top priority for these critical stimulus dollars.

Of the current state lists that do show public transportation or rail projects, the majority show 10 percent or less of stimulus spending in those areas.

This is not because road projects are “ready to go” and others are not. Local governments and public transportation agencies have identified scores of shovel-ready transit, sidewalk, and local road repair projects. The need for bridge maintenance and repair alone is about $17 billion annually for the next 50 years. The current lists would leave that repair backlog largely untouched.

Our state governments need to do a better job of identifying the best projects for the stimulus — and doing so with your input. Be sure to urge your state officials and representatives in Congress to release their list of projects, address their crumbling roads and overburdened public transportation systems, and help us craft the clean, green recovery our country needs to compete and thrive for decades to come.

Using the economic stimulus package to write blank checks to the states with zero accountability would be a poor use of precious national resources. If the states are given taxpayers’ federal money, we need to ensure there are measurable goals for what the money must accomplish.

Truthfully, the onus will be on Congress and President-elect Obama’s administration — not the states — to make sure the money in the package is allocated with some accountability.

Giving billions in stimulus funds to states without measurable goals for what constitutes success means there’s no guarantee that we’ll meet our pressing national goals for immediate job creation or our longer term goals for economic growth, reduced oil dependence and climate emissions, or greater access to the middle class for millions of working Americans.

NOTE: As we said, states have their lists in many different forms, so the tables below do not have consistent categories. Nor do we know where the lists are complete, and where they are not. Use these tables as a start, not an end; ask your state DOT and governor about the status of your state’s list, and urge a balance that if it is not evident. As we get in more state lists and more data, we’ll be analyzing the lists not just for what, but where: urban? Rural? Stay tuned.

In an excellent article in this week’s New York Times, writer David Leonhardt reminds us that we can’t simply face these challenges by throwing billions of dollars at new highway construction projects without a coherent set of goals or a system for measuring gains. We need to look at what we’re getting with the money we already spend — and then ask ourselves why the results aren’t better.

A lack of adequate financing is part of the problem, without doubt. But the bigger problem has been an utter lack of seriousness in deciding how that money gets spent. And as long as we’re going to stimulate the economy by spending money on roads, bridges and the like, we may as well do it right.

It’s hard to exaggerate how scattershot the current system is. Government agencies usually don’t even have to do a rigorous analysis of a project or how it would affect traffic and the environment, relative to its cost and to the alternatives — before deciding whether to proceed. In one recent survey of local officials, almost 80 percent said they had based their decisions largely on politics, while fewer than 20 percent cited a project’s potential benefits.

Without accountability at the state, local, or federal level, rigorous data collection to prove results, or coherent national goals that articulate the purpose of our investments, it comes as little surprise that Americans are faced with endless traffic jams, overburdened mass transit systems, and rising costs of transportation.

As Rob Puentes, a transportation expert at Washington D.C. think tank The Brookings Institution, makes clear, the system is broken in part because we don’t think about what benefits our transportation program brings; we just “send a blank check and kind of hope for the best.”