Tanya Snyder

With all due respect to my vehicular-cyclist friends, I’m a big fan of separate facilities for bikes. They keep bicyclists safer and encourage more people to ride, and I know I make a lot fewer risky moves when I’m riding in a lane built for my two wheels and not a two-ton, 200-horsepower steel box.

Now that the dust has settled, we have a few more notes on the Senate transportation bill that passed the EPW committee yesterday. Bike and pedestrian advocates are understandably shaken at seeing some major changes to the primary programs that fund their work. But here are some reasons to take heart:

Out of 11 transportation-related measures that were voted on Tuesday, seven represented a victory for transit, two were losses to learn from, and two more aren’t really a win one way or another but are worth noting. According to the Center for Transportation Excellence, these numbers bring the year’s total to an impressive 79 percent win rate for transit. Especially impressive is the fact that most of these measures involved a tax of some sort, and people were willing to pay it if it meant better transit service – even in tough economic times.

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted unanimously this morning to pass a two-year transportation reauthorization bill, moving the bill one step closer to passage by the full Senate.

If you live in Durham County, North Carolina, Montcalm County, Michigan, Cincinnati, Ohio, or anywhere in Washington state, today is Election Day – and you’ve got decisions to make about transit.

“In the coming weeks, House Republicans will formally introduce an energy & infrastructure jobs bill, and hope to move the legislation through the House before the end of the year,” House Speaker John Boehner announced yesterday.

Two competing versions of a transportation-related job creation bill went down yesterday in the Senate. The first, the Rebuild America Jobs Act (S.1769), was a Democratic proposal, modeled on President Obama’s job creation bill, to invest $50 billion for infrastructure and another $10 billion as seed money to create a new national infrastructure bank.

Earlier this week, the California High-Speed Rail Authority released its new business plan [PDF]. The transportation establishment, the government, and the media issued a collective gasp: $98.5 billion? Thirteen years’ delay?

This morning, the Senate is debating two transportation-related bills: the Rebuild America Jobs Act (S.1769) and the Long-Term Surface Transportation Extension Act (S.1786).

The full Senate passed a major appropriations bill yesterday, including funding levels for transportation and housing. The Senate put the kibosh on Sen. Rand Paul’s attempt to strip bike/ped funding from the federal transportation program, as we reported yesterday. Here’s the lowdown on the bill as a whole.