Tanya Snyder

Jeff Wood and I are back with episode 8 of the Talking Headways podcast. We talk about Los Angeles Metro's decision not to extend light rail all the way to LAX (and what they're doing instead), plus some analysis of what rail can really do in a city as spread-out as LA. Then we head east to Princeton, New Jersey, where we debunk the thesis that low sales of luxury condos somehow equates to a rejection of walkability. And finally, back west to Seattle, which finds itself with a similar problem to LA: how to bring more density to settled single-family areas?

Rogoff Warns DOT Might Have to Slow Payments to States (Bloomberg) Congress Kicks Off Quest to Fill Hole in Highway Trust Fund (Trucking Info) 12 Labor Unions Urge Congress to Restore Transit Tax Break to Same Level as Parking (The Hill) Why Congress Needs to Restore Parity Between Transit and Parking Benefits (Wired) Hillary Clinton … Continued

In addition to some recent high-profile spins through the revolving door, we now have a new example of ethically questionable influence peddling in Washington: A powerful Congressman’s brother working to bring down a transit line in Maryland.

When former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced earlier this month that he was going to co-chair Building America's Future, I thought, "well that seems like a good place for him, but it's not going to make his wife happy." Mrs. LaHood has famously been needling him for years to get out of public office and make some money in the private sector.

Forbes Analyzes the Democrats’ Plan to Pay for Infrastructure By Cutting Corporate Taxes Virginia Hybrid Owners May Not Have to Help Pay for Roads After All (WaPo) Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed on Making Smart Transpo Decisions With Scarce Resources (HuffPo) On Heels of Oil-Train Crashes, FRA Issues New Safety Regs (The Hill) Iowa Has Already … Continued

A new bill introduced by Senators John Hoeven (R-ND) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) would further entrench rules that make it difficult for crash investigators to access black box data from cars.

The best thing about hosting a Streetsblog podcast is getting to call on other Streetsblog reporters for the lowdown on the biggest news of the week. In this case, Jeff Wood and I called Ben Fried, Streetsblog's editor-in-chief based in New York, to provide some context for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's big announcement of the campaign to eliminate traffic deaths in the city. Note that the podcast was recorded before the recent outbreak of jaywalking tickets in Manhattan.

Bixi, Which Makes Equipment for Several Bike-Share Systems, Files for Bankruptcy (Tribune) Therese McMillan to Take Rogoff’s Place, For Now, at FTA (PR) GOP Sen. Roy Blunt Takes Another Stab at an Infrastructure Bank (Blunt) Here’s What You Missed at TRB (Planetizen) Road-Binging States Experience Less Economic Growth (Planetizen) Tampa to Unveil Bike-Share Branding Today … Continued

Philadelphia’s Route 47 bus snakes along narrow, one-way streets down nearly the entire length of the city. It starts about a mile from the house I grew up in (just on the other side of the city boundary) and ends just north of the ballparks in South Philly. Along the way, it stops on every single corner.