A TIGER grant in Orlando, Florida will help extend a popular circulator bus transit service into a historically underserved neighborhood, connecting more residents to jobs and opportunities and helping to bridge the divide in the city caused by Interstate 4.

A divided small town in rural Minnesota will be made whole again with a new bridge for all users over a highway and railroad tracks, supported by a grant from the innovative TIGER program. This project will construct a new crossing over a busy railroad and U.S. Highway 10, where a pair of at-grade crossings — the only two in the city and less than 300 feet apart — receive an average of 52 trains per day, resulting in an average of 3.7 total hours when the route is blocked each day.

The Tower 55 rail intersection in Fort Worth is one of the biggest national freight bottlenecks, frequently resulting in a backlog of freight trains stretching across the county and forcing some Fort Worth children to crawl under or in-between the idling trains en route to school. A $34 million TIGER II grant will help local officals address these problems and others at once.

Residents of the San Francisco East Bay won big in last week’s TIGER grants, with $10.2 million slated to go toward giving the East Bay the largest bike path network in the United States and giving residents not only top-notch recreational trails, but viable new options for regular daily travel in the region.

The city of Moline, Illinois was a big winner in last week’s TIGER grants, receiving $10 million to convert the historic O’Rourke building on the downtown Moline riverfront into the Moline Multimodal Station, serving the community as a transportation hub that will reconnect the Quad Cities with Chicago; and ultimately Iowa City, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska.

Earlier this week, the USDOT gave out $600 million in grants for innovative transportation projects across the country that address economic, environmental and travel issues at once. Not everyone was praising the TIGER program, with at least one critic blasting them as “anti-mobility grants.” It begs the question, though: did they actually read through the list of winners? Also, we launched a new interactive map of all TIGER grant winners from February and October.

In a program whose competitive and merit-based project selection should serve as a model for the next transportation authorization, the USDOT today announced 75 winners for $600 million in competitive grants for innovative transportation projects that address economic, environmental and travel issues at once.

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.

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.