Transit

Senate titan Daniel Inouye passed away Monday at 88. The Hawaii senator was the longest-serving member in the chamber at the time he died.

OK, truth: Raise your hand if you find federal transportation legislation intimidating and incomprehensible.

On Friday, state legislators in the Michigan House of Representatives made a momentous decision to approve a regional transit system for metro Detroit.

Grand Rapids, Michigan. Fort Collins, Colorado. Savannah, Georgia.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article included Robert Dold as the fifth potential aisle-crosser. I've since been informed that Dold lost his re-election bid this year. Charlie Bass and Judy Biggert, named briefly at the bottom for supporting the Senate transportation bill and Amtrak funding, also lost their elections, making this list even shorter.

This morning, as lawmakers inside the Michigan statehouse heard testimony on the creation of a regional transit system for greater Detroit, supporters held a musical demonstration outside, singing "Ain't no mountain high enough to keep us from getting a regional transit authority." The singers, who hailed from the city proper and its suburbs, are hoping the divided metropolitan region can finally enact the transit unity that has long eluded it.

Supporters of livable streets may hear about the “flexibility” of transportation dollars and cringe – after all, that word often refers to the ability of states to use bike/ped money for road building. But flexibility can work both ways. Between 2007 and 2011, states devoted $5 billion in surface transportation funds -- known in some quarters as "highway money" -- to transit programs, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Remember those wizards of counter-intuition, the Freakonomics guys? You know, the ones who told their audience that it's safer to drive drunk than to walk drunk? Well, in his latest piece for NPR's Marketplace, which ran with the headline "Save the Earth, Drive Your Car," Stephen Dubner talks to Clemson University's Eric Morris and arrives at the ridiculous conclusion that driving is greener than transit.

Congress has seven weeks to come to some sort of agreement on the so-called "fiscal cliff," with two of those weeks devoted to photo ops and turkey dinners. The consequences are real: Transportation programs paid out of general fund transfers to the Highway Trust Fund, rather than gas tax receipts, are not exempt from the automatic spending cuts that are part of the fiscal cliff. Non-Trust Fund programs (Amtrak, New Starts, TIGER) are also vulnerable, and are expected to get a 7.6 to 8.2 percent cut taken out of them, according to Larry Ehl at Transportation Issues Daily.