Transit Openings and Construction Starts Planned for 2013

[marmar]

from the Transport Politic blog:




This year, more than $64.3 billion worth of transit expansion projects will begin construction, continue construction, or enter into service in the United States. It’s a huge investment, much of it the product of extensive state and local spending.

What is evident is that certain cities are investing far more than others. Among American cities, Denver, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington stand out as regions that are currently investing particularly dramatically. Toronto has the biggest investments under way in Canada. These metropolitan areas have invested billions of local dollars in interconnected transit projects that will aid in the creation of more livable, multimodal environments. Dynamic, growing cities require continuous investment in their transit systems.

Yet the federal government also continues to sponsor a number of these investments, contributing half and sometimes more of many of the projects’ costs. Washington’s involvement should not be downplayed.

Under the just-inked bipartisan compromise to head off the fiscal cliff, transportation funding will not be affected in the short term.* But an 8% reduction in federal discretionary spending (the “sequester”) — a threat that has yet to be neutralized — remains official policy and will be enforced on March 1st if no compromise is reached. That 8% cutback would reduce funding for the New Starts program, which funds most major new transit expansion projects, by $156 million in 2013 alone. Payments to the Transportation Trust Fund, which provides funding for transit maintenance programs and the purchase of new buses and trains (as well as money for highway projects), will decline by $471 million in the same period. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2013/01/01/openings-and-construction-starts-planned-for-2013/

[rbixby]

1. Transit is usually so popular

I'm just not sure what the opposition to it is.....I guess as transit usage increases, gas consumption goes down.

[nxylas]

2. Got it in one

The fossil fuels lobby invests a lot of money in opposing transit, aided and abetted by easily-manipulated teabaggers who they've managed to convince that mass transit is a socialist plot to take away their SUVs and make them sit next to "those people".

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. You've put it more succinctly than I can

If you see the names Randall O'Toole, Mel Zucker, and John Charles posing as transit "experts," beware. They're shills for the auto and oil industries, and their job is to criticize any and all mass transit and intercity rail projects. I have caught them in lies, most notably saying that no one rides the trains in Europe except American tourists.

[nxylas]

4. Even British anti-transit shills talk about "empty trains"

"Who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?"

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. Like the standing room only one

That I rode from Paddington to Great Malvern en route to Hereford because the young people were on their way to a music festival near Great Malvern?
If they were all American tourists, how did they pick up English accents so fast?
If all the people riding the trains in Scandinavia were American tourists, why were all except one couple from Chicago, speaking Scandinavian languages?