Tanya Snyder

For the second time in history, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review a case about rail-trails. At stake is the public ownership claim of hundreds of thousands of miles of right-of-way around railroads, some of which has been converted into multi-use trails.

Soon after the government shutdown ended, we heard murmurs that the TIGER grant program for innovative transportation projects had been a casualty of the negotiations.

It’s been nothing but headaches for Texas State Highway 130. The road -- or rather, SH 130 Concession Company LLC, which operates the road -- got a credit downgrade to junk bond status in April, and now it’s been deemed even junkier with another downgrade from Moody's last week. Traffic projections for the road failed to materialize, and so did the expected revenue. Now, the road could end up defaulting on its debts -- including a $430 million federal loan.

There is a pernicious myth among some states that they give more to Washington in the form of gas taxes than they get back in the form of federal transportation funding. A recent rash of federal bailouts -- $35 billion between September 2008 and March 2010 -- ensured a windfall for every state in the union. And yet many still believe that federal bureaucrats are skimming off the top of their payments to give their hard-earned highway money to the liberal subway-riders in New York or something. It's a dangerous lie with serious repercussions.

LaHood, Chamber President Donohue Agree: Raise the Gas Tax (WAMU, CNN) Here Are (Just a Few) Things Transpo Experts Still Don’t Know About Commuting (National Journal) One Man Goes It Alone in Lawsuit Again “Unsafe” Georgia Road Widening (Telegraph) “Airpocalypse” Shuts Down an Entire Chinese City (NYT) And Beijing Considers Limiting Driving on Bad-Air Days … Continued

Reading this sentence in a mainstream publication just validated everything I feel about the kind of parent I want to be: "It doesn’t mean millennials put parenthood second, but their definition of what makes a good parent is Mom and Dad being happy, and exposing their child to all the things that they have enjoyed."

Two BART Workers Killed Doing Maintenance Work on Day Two of Strike (Bloomberg) Argentina Deja-Vu Train Crashes at Site of Last Year’s Crash That Killed 52 (BBC) Oil Train Derails, Ignites in Western Canada (Toronto Sun, Montreal Gazette) Five Years After Voting For It, Californians Wish High-Speed Rail Would “Go Away” (AP) In Some Places, … Continued

Where are the newest Bicycle Friendly Communities? Many of them are in the 'burbs.

Congratulations, gentle Congresspeople. You have come up with a deeply flawed solution to a problem only you would create. Never mind that it set up another showdown three months from now. The good news is the government shutdown is almost over, for the moment. More than 18,000 furloughed U.S. DOT officials can return to work.