Ben Fried

Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton introduced a bill in the Senate to provide emergency funds for local transit agencies. Since then, the rest of the delegation from New York and New Jersey appears to have lined up behind the legislation. "We believe that Senators Schumer, Lautenberg, and Menendez support it," says Larry Hanley of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which helped to push the bill forward in both chambers of Congress (the House passed it in June). That leaves 56 votes to achieve a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

Today Transportation Alternatives released "Streets to Live By" [PDF], the report previewed last week in the Observer. It seeks to define what makes a street livable and to synthesize a broad range of data, culled from numerous cities, on the effects of policies that put pedestrians first.

When Barack Obama gave his big energy speech on Monday, his campaign released an eight-page fact sheet [PDF] to go with it. All the way at the end, at the very bottom of the last page -- after the parts about plug-in electric vehicles, oil shale, and clean coal technology -- there's this paragraph:

As the push for emergency transit funding moves to the Senate, syndicated columnist Neal Peirce pulls back the lens and sees a bright outlook for local rail systems. The key, he says, is whether cities and their suburbs can set up new revenue streams together:

Transit operators struggling to keep pace with demand as rising fuel costs strain their budgets received some welcome news on Friday. New York's junior senator has introduced a version of the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act. The bill, which would provide $1.7 billion for local transit agencies over the next two years (including $237 million for New York City), passed the House in June but lacked a Senate sponsor until now.

Here's an alternative to the "Drill Now!" mantra that doesn't involve ethanol subsidies or depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Earlier this month, Congressman Earl Blumenauer introduced the Transportation and Housing Choices for Gas Price Relief Act [PDF]. Blumenauer's hometown paper, The Oregonian, calls the measure a "smart bill":

Ever wonder how much New York stands to gain by making its streets more livable? Transportation Alternatives has been gathering evidence measuring the economic and social benefits that accrue when cities put pedestrians first. Their report is coming out next week, but the Observer published a sneak preview (headline: "The Woonerf Deficit") this Tuesday:

Saturday's Times delved into the history of the MTA's mounting debt burden, which, along with rising fuel costs and plummeting revenues from the real estate transactions tax, has severely squeezed the authority's finances:

DOT has unveiled plans for a Grand Street cycle track [PDF] that bear the fingerprints of Danish planner Jan Gehl. It would be Manhattan's first cross-town protected bike path.

As the drumbeat for domestic drilling grows louder, can the Democratic leadership come up with a better alternative than tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? Over at the Huffington Post, Shelley Poticha and Geoff Anderson of Transportation for America propose a few ideas that will actually pay dividends. Pols who are serious about reducing the impact of high gas prices should listen up: