Ray LaHood

If you live in Stamford, Connecticut and your walk to the train station gets safer next year, you can thank USDOT’s TIGER grant program. Or when your hometown of American Falls, Idaho suddenly gets complete streets downtown, accommodating people on foot, on bikes, on buses, in cars, and in wheelchairs, encouraging local shopping. Or when you realize that traffic congestion between Olympia and Tacoma, Washington has eased, not by adding lanes but by installing intelligent technology to manage traffic and encourage ridesharing.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced yesterday that 32,885 people lost their lives on our nation’s roads in 2010. While a staggering toll, this represents the lowest total number of traffic fatalities since 1949. "We're making historic progress when it comes to improving safety on our nation’s roadways," said LaHood in a statement, also pointing out that the decrease in deaths came even as Americans are driving more [PDF].

It's Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood's birthday, and he's spending it testifying before the House Transportation Committee. The hearing is on "Mistakes & Lessons Learned" from the high-speed rail program, but -- no surprise here -- LaHood and House Republicans have differing ideas about what "mistakes" have been made.

In its third incarnation, USDOT's TIGER program continues to be overwhelmingly popular.

Transit providers in Detroit, Miami, Seattle and Bloomington, Indiana were a few of the many winners in the latest round of Federal Transit Administration capital grants.

At Rail~Volution yesterday, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) -- also known as the godfather of the “rail~volution” -- said even he wouldn’t raise the gas tax right now.

House Transportation Committee Chair John Mica (R-FL) said this morning that getting permission from Republican leadership to find more revenues to fund the transportation bill was a “major breakthrough” but still won’t say where the money will come from.

If Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has anything to say about it, every transportation planner in the country should have a shiny new engineering guide on his or her bookshelf.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told the LA Times today that he's a one-term secretary. Don't expect him to serve during President Obama's second term, if there is one, or to run for any other public office in the future.