This is the first iteration of these state fact sheets, and they’ll be expanded upon in the coming months. So check back often for changes and new facts.

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(Or, if you prefer, you can just grab one of the snippets of code from the boxes below and paste it into your web site or blog post. Any questions? Ask them in the comments and we’ll help you out.)

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The chorus of organizations calling for a bold new vision for transportation continues to grow rapidly, with more than 350 signing on with Transportation for America as of August 1.

The diversity and breadth of the coalition also are expanding, with recent signatories including business groups such as CEOs for Cities and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group; mayors like Shirley Franklin of Atlanta and R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis; large and influential membership organizations such as AARP; and groups representing both rural and urban areas, including the Center for Rural Strategies and the Metropolitan Planning Council of Illinois.

“As one of the first mayors to sign on in support of Transportation for America’s vision for a new transportation system, I’m thrilled to see how much our coalition has grown,” said Mayor R.T. Rybak of Minneapolis. “As a mayor, I see firsthand the result of a failed federal transportation policy that’s been allowed to linger for far too long. Real change will come when we stand up and work together and that’s exactly what is happening with this effort.”

“The National Association of REALTORS believes that the timely provision of safe, convenient and efficient transportation infrastructure enhances the quality of communities, supports property values, and mitigates the effects of traffic congestion that accompany growth,” said Bob McNamara of NAR. “NAR has joined Transportation for America to pursue these goals in coalition with other groups representing the diverse users of the nation’s transportation system.”

“The current transportation system doesn’t work for older Americans,” said David Sloane, AARP senior vice president for Government Relations and Advocacy. “Without reform, the 71 million people reaching age 65+ by 2030 will risk being stranded at home in old age. We need comprehensive restructuring of our nation’s transportation policies to address changing needs for alternative transportation and paratransit services, safer roadways and vehicles, and more livable and sustainable communities. AARP commends Transportation for America on its success in forging partnerships with diverse organizations across the country, from neighborhood to national, and particularly for reaching the milestone of adding its 350th partner.”

“Healthy transportation options and networks not only accommodate access and mobility needs but are a key determinant of quality of community life,” said Melanie Reynolds with the Lewis and Clark City-County Health Department and the Association of Montana Public Health Officials. “We need federal leadership to help make the critical link between health, safety, and transportation policies and create communities that promote active living, reduce pollution levels, increase accessibility, and ensure safety for all transportation users.”

“America’s 60 million rural residents need a voice in transportation policy. The coalition has offered us a way to bring rural concerns into an important national conversation,” said Tim Marema, vice president of the Center for Rural Strategies. “Good transportation policy will improve prospects for all of us – rural, suburban, and urban. The coalition provides a way for all Americans to work together to build a stronger nation.”

The Transportation for America campaign is working to help reform the nation’s transportation policies and investments to preserve the existing network while promoting the transition to a clean, efficient, energy-independent future. Currently the campaign is focused on the authorization of the six-year expiring federal transportation bill and securing investments that fix crumbling bridges and highways as well as increase support for the cleanest forms of transportation — public transit, high speed rail, walking and biking.

“Transportation for America is thrilled to lead such an impressive group of organizations, elected officials and businesses with the shared goal of building a modernized infrastructure to support livable communities where people can live, work and play,” said James Corless, director of Transportation for America. “This groundbreaking grassroots movement will change our federal transportation policy to make our communities, safer, healthier and more prosperous.”

If you are a coalition partner, a member of the Streetsblog Network, one of our 25,000+ individual supporters, or pretty much anyone with a website, a blog, or anything else published online, don’t forget to get one of our badges to show your support for Transportation for America. They come in a range of sizes and styles, and you can stick them in your blog’s sidebar or on your organization’s home page to show your support for the T4 America campaign and a 21st Century transportation system.

Visit http://t4america.org/badges to download one today.

You can also get the Streetsblog Network Action Widget there, which automatically pulls the latest featured stories from the Streetsblog Network and urgent action alerts from Transportation for America. Post it on your site, and it automatically updates in real-time with no maintenance required.

But what about the looming transportation crisis? Will they be spending much time back at home talking about that?

This summer, as you’re stuck in traffic, squeezing into your carpool, feeling the minutes tick away as you wait for the always-late bus, or pedaling your way through dangerous intersections to put in a hard day’s work, too many legislators are unaware of what commuting each day means for their constituents.

That’s why we’re asking our elected officials to give their drivers a week off, leave their first-class tickets at home, and join our Take Your Legislator to Work Challenge!

For the Challenge, T4 America and some of our 350+ local partners will be organizing to ask your member of Congress or other prominent state leaders to leave their cars and first class flights at home for a week and ride the same carpools, trains, buses, subways, or bikes their constituents use everyday to get where they need to go. Maybe once they’ve seen what things are like on the ground and how limited your options are, they’ll be ready to talk about a truly reformed transportation bill when they come back to Washington in September.

The T4 America campaign is also going to be asking some notable leaders and individuals here in DC that aren’t going anywhere for the summer to take part in our Challenge. Check back right here on the blog for latest news on legislators that are participating or what you can do to help persuade them to join up, and hopefully, we can get a few of them to write or tweet about their experiences for us.

Shelley Poticha, president of Reconnecting America and a co-chair of the Transportation for America campaign, has been appointed to be senior advisor of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

It’s a new office at HUD that would be created by legislation currently being assembled by HUD and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd. Among the other duties involved, she would be a HUD representative in the recently-announced EPA/HUD/DOT livable communities partnership.

From the Transportation for America statement:

“Shelley understands how transportation, housing, energy and environmental policies impact the real lives of people,” said James Corless, Director of Transportation for America. “She will be a powerful voice to ensure we make smarter investments at the federal level to make American communities safer, healthier and more prosperous.  We are sad to lose her leadership of our campaign, but are proud to see her take on this new and exciting challenge.”

We’ll have a full statement and press release up later today. UPDATED: Full T4 statement and release has been posted here.

• Read the Reconnecting America statement
• Read the HUD statement

24 hours later, on Thursday, June 18th at 11 a.m., he’s going to hold an open press conference (we’ll be there) to do the same thing all over again with everyone else.

We have heard that Chairman Oberstar is releasing a 12-page paper and a 100-page outline of the bill over the next two days and it’s likely that at least one of those — probably the shorter white paper — will be released Wednesday at 11 a.m for the first briefing.

As always, check in with our Twitter feed @T4America for the most up-to-the-minute news.

T&I Chairman to Release Blueprint for New Transportation Authorization Bill 6/17

WASHINGTON — House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James L. Oberstar (Minn.) will release a white paper next week (6/17) to outline plans for the new surface transportation authorization bill.

The news conference is scheduled for Wednesday, June 22, at 11:00 a.m. The event will be held in Room 2167 of the Rayburn House Office Building. The news conference also will be webcast live on the Committee’s website, http://transportation.house.gov.

The authorization bill is currently being drafted and will replace the current authorization, SAFETEA-LU, which is due to expire on September 30. Oberstar has promised that the new authorization will transform the way the federal government invests highway, safety, and transit funds.

WHO: House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James L. Oberstar (Minn.)
WHAT: News Conference to release blueprint for new surface transportation authorization bill
WHEN: Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 11:00 a.m.
WHERE: Room 2167, Rayburn House Office Building, Independence Ave. at South Capitol St. S.W., Washington, D.C.

Here is the full announcement from Aaron Naparstek, editor of Streetsblog:

We are excited to announce the official launch of Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

With major transportation, climate and energy legislation coming before Congress in the next year or two we felt that it was critical to have a talented journalist down in Washington D.C. covering the issues on a daily basis. With the financial support of the Surdna Foundation and the Wallace Global Fund, the Livable Streets Initiative has hired reporter Elana Schor to cover the federal beat for us. DC.Streetsblog.org (as it’s known to your web browser) will be her new home. Sarah Goodyear, editor of our national blog nework, and talented writers like Ryan Avent will be contributing to Streetsblog Capitol Hill as well.

Broadly speaking, we hope to do two things with this new edition of Streetsblog. First, we aim to make it a high-quality daily source for news and analysis of federal transportation policy and related issues. We want to create a blog that is a daily must-read for the advocates, lawmakers, Congressional staffers, urban planning practitioners, policy wonks and lobbyists who are working to shape the future of America’s transportation systems.

Our second goal for Streetsblog Capitol Hill is to help bring outsiders into the federal transportation policy-making process. For decades, transportation policy on Capitol Hill has mostly been an arcane, complex insiders game — a game that’s been played best by highway lobbyists. Streetsblog Capitol Hill will put locally-oriented livable streets advocates on the playing field and help them better understand the rules of the game.

As the 293 bloggers who are now members of the Streetsblog Network make clear every day, a vibrant, grassroots movement for sustainable transport, smart growth and livable streets is active and growing increasingly powerful in cities and states nationwide. Streetsblog Capitol Hill will help connect these local activists to the important action taking place inside the Beltway.

Use the share button below to let someone else know about Streetsblog Capitol Hill.

Join us as we discuss the connections between transportation and economic opportunity tomorrow, Friday, April 29 from 1-3 p.m. EDT.  Speakers will explore how the transportation sector drives the economy and creates employment opportunities for American workers. Topics will include the transportation sector’s ability to create good jobs and sustain global growth, and the use of transportation as a driver of neighborhood revitalization.

A panel of experts on economic opportunity will lead our discussion, including Carmen Rhodes, Executive Director of FRESC, Mac Lynch, Program Associate at Apollo Alliance, Peter Skinner, Director of Transportation & Land Use at Silicon Valley Leadership Group.  The session will be moderated by Dena Belzer, President of Strategic Economics.

Registration is free and open to the public — visit www.t4america.org/webinars to register today.

With Congress preparing to write the bill that will determine the next six years of transportation spending, Transportation for America today released a detailed plan to restructure the nation’s transportation program in order to build a smart, safe and clean transportation system that provides real choices to all Americans.

If our platform, released in February, lays out the vision and goals for America’s transportation system, then the Transportation for America Blueprint contains the detailed directions for getting there.

The Route to Reform: Blueprint for a 21st Century Federal Transportation Program will serve as T4 America’s proposal for the policies and financing structures necessary to achieve real transformational change in America’s transportation system. (We’ll be highlighting and explaining pieces of the Blueprint here over the coming weeks — it’s a lot to digest at once.)

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell — a co-chair of the Build America’s Future campaign and one of the leading voices calling for a renewed transportation system – gave the event’s keynote speech in the same committee where the transportation bill will be written and considered first by Chairman Oberstar’s House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Read the press release from this morning’s event.

Gov. Rendell was followed by a panel that included James Corless, director of the Transportation for America Campaign; Elaine Clegg, Special Projects Director for Idaho Smart Growth and and city council member in Boise; Astrid Glynn, former Commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation; Andrew Cotugno, the director of planning for Metro in Portland, Oregon; and Ronald Kilcoyne, the General Manager/CEO of Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority.

Governor Rendell kicked off the event by praising T4 America’s vision for the future while urging advocates and experts to fight tooth and nail to push for a 21st Century transportation system.

“This report couldn’t be more correct when it says this is a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Gov. Rendell said.

“If we don’t take advantage of this opportunity…nothing will change, and we’ll just bump along, funding some good projects almost by accident, some mediocre projects and some terrible projects. We won’t have national policy, we won’t move the ball forward, and we won’t do something that will improve our economic competitiveness – we’ll just keep moving along the way we’ve been moving along, and not solving any problems.”

Thankfully, Gov. Rendell echoed T4 America’s optimism in envisioning a brighter future for our national economy that could rest on a revitalized transportation system.

He called attention to a factory outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania that produces railroad ties and could build a second plant and double its workforce if the country committed to building an intercity rail system. Calling The Route to Reform a “very thorough, very thought-provoking, and very detailed report,” the Governor noted that all the great ideas for building a modern transportation system won’t go anywhere without a sustained and powerful campaign to back them up.

“Every one of us has to fight,” he said. “Let’s touch every media outlet, and get local support among mayors, and councilman and state senators, let’s get everybody talking about infrastructure and how this is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

BlueprintRelease20 Originally uploaded by Transportation for America

T4 America Campaign Director James Corless holds a hot-off-the-presses copy of The Route to Reform. View more photos from today’s event in the Flickr set.

After Rendell’s remarks, the panelists delved into the details of the report with a detailed discussion of the Blueprint, laying out the campaign’s proposals for a drastically reformed program with clear national objectives and concrete, accountable performance measures.

Download the full report, the executive summary, or the press release with more details about today’s briefing at t4america.org/blueprint.