House of Representatives

Last week’s stakeholder extravaganza in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee brought out the best and worst ideas about how to reform the transportation sector. We highlighted some of the good stuff earlier. Now for the bad and the ugly.

A government shutdown is looking like a real possibility as both sides dig in their heels in the budget debate for the year that's already half over. Funding for transportation, livability programs, and everything else remains a question mark as Senate Democrats try to moderate the House Republicans' budget cuts.

Editor's note: These are the highlights from this week's hearings on the upcoming transportation bill, where people made the case to Congress for sustainable transportation options. I'll follow up with the Bad and the Ugly, like those who want to kick transit out of the Highway Trust Fund.

Cutting edge transportation technologies like real-time bus trackers and intelligent parking systems could be coming to a city near you thanks to a new bill before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Lawmakers are considering establishing a pilot, competitive grant program that would bring time-, money- and pollution-saving technologies to six cities.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee just spent two days listening to 40 experts from different aspects of the transportation sector and advocacy community, from engineers to environmentalists to the Tea Party. Each person had just four minutes to speak and they crammed as much as they could into their time: observations, demands, recommendations for a better transportation bill. Their ideas were widely divergent on many points, but on one, they found unity: This should not be a smaller bill than the one that came before it.

Highways and Transit Subcommittee Chair John Duncan (R-TN) can't stop mentioning that this kind of hearing has "never been done before." The subcommittee is hearing from 20 witnesses a day for two days in an effort to satisfy every interest group's need to speak before the committee gets to work crafting the next surface transportation reauthorization bill.

If today’s FAA vote in the House is a preview of the upcoming debate over funding for the nation’s surface transportation infrastructure, we can foresee fights between the House and Senate over funding levels and the loss of key public services.

Cross-posted with permission from the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia.

As promised, the Transportation Committee (the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, to be precise) has sent the tentative witness list for its two-day hearing that purports to "Focus on Surface Transportation Bill and Streamlining Programs, Cutting Red Tape & Creating Jobs."