U.S. DOT
Streetsblog Basics
One Year of Traffic Crashes Costs America $871 Billion
You can’t put a price tag on human life. But to address the scourge of traffic violence, it helps to measure how much harm it inflicts. And the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has done that by attaching a dollar figure to the economic loss and human suffering caused by traffic crashes.
May 30, 2014
How the Federal TIGER Program Revived a Cleveland Neighborhood
Cleveland doesn't look like a dying Rust Belt city these days in the Little Italy and University Circle neighborhoods. In fact, it looks like it's thriving.
May 15, 2014
How the GROW AMERICA Act Could Modernize Federal Transportation Policy
Yesterday, U.S. DOT did something it hadn’t done for a decade: submit a surface transportation authorization bill to Congress.
April 30, 2014
Obama Administration Sends Transportation Bill to Congress
The Obama administration today sent Congress its proposal for a multi-year transportation bill, which it's calling the GROW AMERICA Act. The bill, based on the budget proposal President Obama released two months ago, relies on corporate tax reform to raise $87 billion to fill the hole in the Highway Trust Fund. The four-year bill would cost $302 billion.
April 29, 2014
FHWA Proposes to Let States Fail Their Own Safety Goals With Impunity
Secretary Anthony Foxx has made clear that safety -- and specifically, safety for bicyclists and pedestrians -- is a priority of his administration. If that’s true, his administration sure has a funny way of showing it.
March 14, 2014
Anthony Foxx: Bicycle Infrastructure Can Be a “Ladder of Opportunity”
This morning, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx’s blog post is all about bicycling. He opens by touting the complete streets policy he helped implement in Charlotte (it passed before he was mayor) and the city’s bike-share system -- the largest in the Southeast.
March 5, 2014
Let’s Do the Time Warp Again: U.S. DOT Fails to Get Travel Forecasting Right
The U.S. Department of Transportation seems to be stuck in a bizarre time warp. For nine years in a row Americans have decreased their average driving miles. Yet U.S. DOT’s most recent biennial report to Congress on the state of the nation’s transportation system, released last Friday, forecasts that total vehicle miles will increase between 1.36 percent to 1.85 percent each year through 2030.
March 3, 2014
Secretary Foxx Pledges to Make Bike/Ped Safety a Priority
Pedestrian crash statistics aren’t just numbers to Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. He himself was the victim of one of those crashes once, while out jogging. “I got lucky,” he told a packed room at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board today. “But there are lots of people out there that aren’t so lucky.”
January 15, 2014
NHTSA Chief David Strickland Gets Caught in the Revolving Door
When David Strickland announced last month that he was stepping down as the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, he didn't give any clues about where he might be going. The news came out this week: The nation's top auto regulator is going to be a lobbyist at a law firm that deals with auto regulation, raising concerns that he's going through the revolving door between the public and private sector, more to the benefit of industry than the public.
January 10, 2014
Streetsblog’s Suggested Edits to U.S. DOT’s Seven Priorities for 2014
Just before we went on holiday break, U.S. DOT’s Inspector General’s office released a document [PDF] detailing the department’s top challenges for the year ahead. The document calls them “management challenges” but by and large it’s just a list of seven things the Inspector General thinks DOT needs to do to meet its mission of providing a “safe and well-managed transportation system” to strengthen the U.S. economy and improve “the quality of life for the traveling public.”
January 8, 2014