On Monday, June 29th the Minnesota Coalition of Transportation for America welcomed community, city, and state leaders to learn more about the T4 America vision for the next federal transportation bill — and how Minnesotans would benefit from a reformed federal transportation program.

We’re in desperate need of an overarching strategy that determines when, how, and where transportation dollars are spent. As of now, we have no firm plan. No vision. No goal for what the billions in taxpayer dollars should accomplish. That can all change with the National Transportation Objectives Act of 2009 introduced last week by three members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Russ Carnahan (D-MO), Rush Holt (D-NJ), and Jay Inslee (D-WA). Tell your representative to support this piece of legislation today.

While it’s hard to predict how our country will change in the coming decades, one thing we can say for sure is that our population won’t look anything like what it does today. The number of seniors in the U.S. is projected to jump by 36 percent from 2010, outpacing the growth of the overall [...]

In our continuing series, we examine the third of our six national objectives for the transportation bill. Transportation for America believes that the push to make our country less dependent on oil begins with a smarter, cleaner transportation system, and for this reason we’ve made one our top national transportation objectives to promote energy efficient and achieve energy security.

On Tuesday, we looked at the second of our six National Transportation Objectives and two corresponding performance targets. This second objective describes our goal for how the federal transportation program should address climate change, preserve the environment and protect people — by protecting the environment that we all inhabit.

We continue our series on the Transportation for America Blueprint this week with a look at the second of six core objectives we believe Congress must embrace in the next transportation bill — environmental protection, climate stability, and environmental justice. Our country needs a transportation system that keeps our air clean, helps us fight climate change, and protects all Americans — no matter who they are or where they live — from dangerous environmental pollution.

Earlier this week, we talked with you about Transportation for America’s national objective for a healthier, safer transportation system, and showed you the performance targets needed to measure our progress towards these goals. Today, we’d like to talk about just how we hope to reach these goals through some of the policies and reforms that [...]

When we think about our daily commutes to work, walks to the grocery store, or bus rides our kids take to school, there are few things more important than making sure these activities keep us healthy and safe. After all, the numbers related to these issues are simply staggering — more than 37,000 people killed [...]

Last week, the Transportation for America campaign took a huge step by releasing The Route to Reform: Blueprint for a 21st Century Transportation Policy, a comprehensive, detailed set of recommendations for Congress and the Obama administration as they lay the groundwork for the upcoming transportation bill. Since then, we’ve held a big event on Capitol [...]

U.S. Senators Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) and John D. Rockefeller (D-WV) took a big step forward today in the fight to build a 21st Century transportation system by introducing “The Federal Surface Transportation Policy and Planning Act of 2009″ — a bold bill laying out clear guidelines for exactly what the next five-year federal transportation spending plan should accomplish, and Transportation For America’s proposals were clearly echoed in the legislation.