The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (EPW) released a bipartisan outline today of its transportation bill, titled Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, or MAP-21. The outline highlights “key areas” of the legislation’s highway title but remains vague on details. The transit title and financing components of the bill are under the jurisdiction of other committees and are not included.

Yesterday, the leaders of California’s population centers issued a call to the incoming Congress to update the nation’s transportation program to address their citizens’ 21st-century needs, from upkeep of roads and bridges to a cleaner, more efficient transit network. As a new Congress prepares to take up a multi-year infrastructure bill, 65 California mayors, supervisors and other elected officials joined together to send a united message, releasing a signed letter sent to Senator Boxer.

Thousands rallied last Friday at the Los Angeles City Hall to tell Washington to help speed up LA’s 30/10 Plan –- a plan to build 12 major local transit projects in 10 years rather than 30. The plan would spur economic growth and protect the environment, create 166,000 jobs, ease congestion, and reduce air pollution and dependency on oil.

President Obama signed the HIRE Act this morning in the Rose Garden at the White House, and T4 America was fortunate enough to have been invited to the event. While this bill doesn’t contain the amount of money for transportation infrastructure like the stimulus had last year, it does have a few important provisions for transportation.

The long-awaited allocations in the Senate climate bill were released over the weekend, and the news is good for increasing access to cleaner transportation options. Late Friday evening, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee released the final numbers on where the revenues raised under a cap-and-trade climate bill would be directed. The Senate nearly triples the funding for clean, sustainable transportation over the House climate bill, which only set aside an optional one percent of funding. Take a minute and thank your Senator today.

A top-flight organization (and T4 America partner) representing more than 300 elite Silicon Valley businesses from Apple to Yahoo! sent a letter last week to Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, urging her to make sure the Senate climate bill adequately invests in clean transportation alternatives to reduce emissions in their region while keeping it mobile and competitive.

Fourteen-year-old Julia Lopez, a childhood wellness advocate from Los Angeles, CA, met California Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer in the Capitol yesterday. Lopez is in Washington, D.C. to participate in Transportation for America’s “health fly-in” to speak with Congressional representatives about the link between and health and transportation.

Last week, Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry unveiled a landmark climate bill that could set us on the path toward cleaner, safer and smarter transportation. But one piece still doesn’t quite add up: the funding. To truly address climate change, the Senate has to fix the serious funding gap in the House climate bill: The House bill directs only an optional one percent of the money it will raise toward clean transportation options, even though nearly one-third of our CO² emissions come from transportation. Tell your Senators: You can’t solve 30% of the problem with only 1% of the funding.