Tanya Snyder

Budget Deal Includes $15M for Rail Safety (Newsday) Existing Technology Onboard the Metro-North Train Could Have Prevented Crash (AP) Unanswered Questions Still Haunt Metro-North (Shelton Herald) CA High-Speed Rail Should Start Over With Shorter, More Efficient Route (LAT) What’s Next For Oklahoma’s Transit? (Tulsa World) What Do 40 Wasted Sandwiches Teach Us About Parking? (Grist) … Continued

Greg Hughes is the majority whip of the Utah State Legislature and the chair of its conservative caucus. He got a 100 percent score last year by the conservative Sutherland Institute, a Utah think tank. He also chairs the board of the Utah Transit Authority.

The House of Representatives is preparing to vote on that rarest of Capitol Hill treasures -- a bipartisan budget deal. If both houses approve the deal, negotiated by Democratic Senator Patty Murray and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan, it will be the first time since 2010 that Congress has passed a budget.

Jeff Wood and I talk about the news of the week that most tickled us or burned us -- the BBC's exposé of anti-social urban design features intended to repel people, San Francisco's social tensions over the Google bus, and the decision by Cincinnati's new mayor and City Council to "pause" construction of the streetcar. (Update: The streetcar might be salvaged!)

Congress Might Actually Pass a Budget! (WaPo) Bipartisan Lawmakers Launch Congressional Public-Private Partnerships Caucus (Transpo Issues Daily) Truckers Apprehensive About Blumenauer’s New VMT Bill (The Trucker) Blumenauer’s Plan to Raise the Gas Tax Is the Best and Least Popular Idea in Washington (Slate) If GM Is Now So Profitable, Why Did Taxpayers Lose $10.5 Billion on … Continued

I lived in Bogotá, Colombia, for about half of 2002. While I was there, a political party headquarters near my house was car-bombed, guerrillas attacked the presidential inauguration, and thousands of people were killed in routine violence. It was a stressful place to live.

Blumenauer’s Gas Tax Proposal Is Probably DOA, But He Has Plans to Go Further (Transpo Issues Daily) Metro-North Engineer Unlikely to Face Criminal Prosecution for Crash that Killed Four?  (USA Today) Two Senators Demand Cameras on Train Tracks (AP, NY1) NHTSA Announces New Plan for Safe Senior Driving Has Amtrak Abandoned Its Vision of 220-MPH Trains … Continued

In this week's podcast, Jeff and I discuss the impressive turnout -- and possible pitfalls -- of London's "die-in" demonstration for bike safety. We try to contain our envy (but not our amazement) at Paul Salopek's seven-year walk tracing the path of Homo sapiens from the Rift Valley to Tierra del Fuego. And we discuss why even passionate transit advocates know what it means to be embarrassed about taking the bus.

U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group are on a mission to explore the downward trend in driving. In a series of reports, they point to evidence that it isn’t just a temporary blip, but a long-term shift in how Americans get around. Today, the two organizations released a new report, “Transportation in Transition: A Look at Changing Travel Patterns in America’s Biggest Cities,” which shows that these changes are happening in regions all over the country.

In the late 1990s, an organization called Envision Utah brought together a broad spectrum of people to figure out how to plan for major population growth. They started by asking participants to mark out areas that shouldn't be developed -- wilderness, national parks, agricultural land. Then, they had to figure out how to fit future residents in the developable areas that were left. They concluded that the way to do that without massive congestion, soaring public costs, and environmental ruin was to build walkable development with good transit access.