Federal Stimulus Plan

Today is the deadline for state DOTs to allocate at least half of the transportation money they received under the economic stimulus law, and Smart Growth America marked the occasion with a study of what types of projects are getting that cash.

President Obama has signed into law a $106 billion war funding bill that includes a provision allowing local transit agencies to spend 10 percent of their stimulus money on operating costs.

As their committee's leaders butted heads with the Obama administration, a group of Republicans on the House transportation panel proposed to fill the $7 billion hole in the nation's highway trust fund with unobligated money from the economic stimulus law.

The nation's largest metropolitan areas -- which account for 63 percent of the U.S. population and 73 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) -- have received less than half of the surface transportation money allocated so far under the Obama administration's economic stimulus plan, according to a new report compiled for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The news coming out of Washington last week jacked up expectations for national transportation policy to new heights. Cabinet members Ray LaHood and Shaun Donovan announced a partnership to connect transportation and housing policy, branded as the "Sustainable Communities Initiative." The second-in-command at DOT, Vice Admiral Thomas Barrett, told a New York audience that "building communities" is a top priority at his agency.

In a sobering revision of the 25-year Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) at yesterday's Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) meeting, MTC staff explained that the elimination of the State Transit Assistance (STA) fund and much lower than expected sales-tax revenues forced the planning body to significantly revise down its projections for operational spending and expansion projects (PDF). The MTC revised down expected revenues by $8 billion (even despite over $3 billion in expected stimulus funds) and announced that BART's extension to San Jose is running a cool $1.5 billion over budget.

TransForm tells Streetsblog San Francisco that legislators in Sacramento have prepared draft legislation for how the state should spend federal stimulus money on transportation projects and that there is important advocacy that needs to be done to improve it.  AB X3 20 will be introduced imminently and debated this week. 

It's a good day to talk about the costs of car ownership on individuals and families and the need to integrate transportation and land use planning regionally.

Let's hope California rail passengers can look back on the drama playing out between the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) and the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) as a small hiccup on the way to building the nation's preeminent rail network into one of the most impressive rail stations in the world. And for our sake, let's hope Washington isn't paying too much attention to the infighting and will still award California the lion's share of the $8 billion in federal stimulus money slated for high speed rail.