The $787 billion stimulus from 2009 included roughly $30 billion for transportation, and $8 billion specifically for transit. Also, large transit agencies had the flexibility to use a portion of their stimulus money to operate trains and buses, in many cases keeping already painful cuts and fare increases from getting any worse. So here’s the [...]

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin speaks in Normal, Illinois on the site of the new multi-modal transportation hub. Photo courtesy of the Bloomington Pantagraph. Just over two months after T4 America Director James Corless visited Normal, Illinois, that same town of 45,000 broke ground on a new transportation hub that promises to spur the economy and [...]

Last week, Transportation for America Director James Corless was in Normal, Illinois, a town of 45,000 and recipient of a $22 million grant for a new city transportation hub, touting the project as a model for smarter federal transportation spending in the next six-year transportation bill.

Secretary LaHood is (rightfully) touting the news on his blog this morning that the FTA met their deadline for distributing 100% of the transit grants from the stimulus package. That’s great news, but it should be accompanied by the sobering reminder that these public transportation systems that get people to work each day couldn’t use that money to keep from having to cut service at a time when it’s needed the most.

Rob Puentes of the Brookings Institution, writing for New Republic’s The Avenue, wrote a post this morning examining where transportation stimulus dollars have been directed. You can’t get too far reading the Brookings Metro Program without seeing a notable statistic: the 100 largest metro areas contain two-thirds of our population and produce 75 percent of [...]

The Obama Department of Transportation today broke historic ground in unveiling projects chosen in a first-ever program to award federal dollars on a competitive basis to innovative projects that address economic, environmental and travel issues at once. The 51 projects announced under the TIGER grant program, funded by $1.5 billion included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), meet a broad array of challenges.

The Economic Policy Institute ran the numbers on Transportation for America’s jobs proposal and concluded that our plan for increased transportation spending would create 480,000 jobs. Our proposed package for Congress directs $34.3 billion toward a mix of public transportation, highways and bicycle and pedestrian projects, closely resembling EPI’s own plan.

Although unemployment turned out worse than some forecasters anticipated, there has been some consensus among economists that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed earlier this year prevented even higher job losses while channeling much-needed relief to states. But spending money quickly often relies on formulas and methods that are outdated, or — as evidenced in last month’s report by the Transportation Equity Network (TEN) and Good Jobs First — inequitable. Minority-owned businesses have received only 10.2 percent of stimulus funds toward federal contracts, while women-owned businesses received 5.9 percent.

A new analysis of federal stimulus spending, co-authored by Smart Growth America, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and U.S. PIRG, reveals that during the first ten months of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), investments in public transportation produced twice the jobs per billion dollars as did highway projects.

A few hours ago, the House passed a $636 billion defense spending bill that included a two-month extension of the federal transportation law. Don’t count on two months as the final length of an extension though — House members are hedging their bets. Later today, the House will vote on a separate $174 billion jobs bill. Tucked inside that bill is a longer extension of the 2005 transportation bill that would extend SAFETEA-LU all the way to the end of September 2010.