Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) got a lot of play in the media for joining President Obama in Kentucky last week and unveiling his own plan to prioritize bridge repair by taking away a tiny amount of funding that helps improve safety for people walking or biking and redirecting it to bridge repair. But Senator Paul’s proposal is built on a series of false premises.

The Tuesday after Labor Day is like back to school day in Washington. Congress is back after a month-long recess and the sleepiest month of the year in D.C. ends with a long holiday weekend before Congress gets back in session. With that in mind, we thought it would be good to do a quick [...]

We’ve heard that the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is releasing their portion of the transportation bill next week. (Though as Tanya Snyder at Streetsblog pointed out, they promised it would be released in two weeks, three weeks ago.) There’s a vital piece of policy that must be included in the Senate bill next [...]

Gas prices in the U.S. continue to escalate and could hit $4.25 by Memorial Day, according to some projections. These spikes tend to hit smaller communities and rural areas particularly hard, as residents and businesses must travel farther and use more energy during daily activities. Senator Tim Johnson, a Democrat from South Dakota, has pledged to use his clout on the Banking Committee to fund rural transit systems in the next transportation bill.

Yesterday’s elections brought significant change to the political makeup of the Senate and especially the House, which flipped from Democratic to Republican control. Regardless of the changes in political makeup or committee leadership, Congress will need to pass a long-term bill in 2011, and if history is any guide, there’s a clear path forward, according to this statement from Transportation for America director James Corless…

The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs today approved Chairman Christopher Dodd’s (D-CT) Livable Communities Act, S. 1619. The Act would take unprecedented steps to help communities deal with a range of critical issues, from traffic congestion to housing affordability to neighborhood stability.

The Senate is on the cusp of moving an important bill forward that would help cities and towns across the country integrate housing with a safe, clean and smart transportation system. The Livable Communities Act, sponsored by Senator Christopher Dodd, is due to be voted on by the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in what’s called a “mark up” next Tuesday morning at 10 a.m.

When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced last week that he was unable to secure the 60 votes needed to move forward on comprehensive climate legislation, it put an end to any realistic chance of capping carbon emissions in 2010, making it more urgent than ever to pass a reformed transportation bill that can help us reduce emissions and oil use.

The new FREIGHT Act introduced by Senators Lautenberg, Murray and Cantwell would create a truly multimodal national freight program for the first time in the U.S. It recognizes that our freight system should move our goods from coast to coast while also being part of the solution for many of our most pressing problems: air quality, dangerous emissions, oil dependence, and congestion on our highways and interstates.

Today’s news brings great hope that the leak in the Gulf of Mexico is finally capped. But we still haven’t addressed the root cause behind the spill – the fact that our transportation system consumes 70% of the oil we use, driving us to riskier measures to obtain more oil. Will we respond to the crisis in the Gulf by starting to free ourselves from oil and finding ways to use less? Or will we resign ourselves to continued dependency and the inevitable risk of future oil spills resulting from that dependency?