Transportation

This proposal offers dramatic improvements in highway safety and public health, as well as much reduced highway maintenance and construction costs. It will also significantly reduce energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, traffic jams, and shipping costs while providing significant short- and long-term economic stimulus. If fully implemented, it could get as many as 83 percent of all long-haul trucks off our nation's highways by 2030, reduce carbon emissions by 39 percent and oil consumption by 15 percent. Call it the "Back on Tracks" project.

New America will be hosting two events with Steven Hill to discuss this book and Europes evolving leadership. Join us Thursday, January 21 at 12:15 p.m. and Friday, January 22 at Noon ET.

Washington, DC -- In a just-published cover story for the Washington Monthly, Phillip Longman proposes an idea that would make driving safer and more pleasant, reduce highway repair costs, mitigate the need to build or expand Interstates, d

Six days before Thanksgiving, a truck driver heading south on Interstate 81 through Shenandoah County, Virginia,ploughed his tractor trailer into a knot of cars that had slowed on the rain-slicked highway. The collision killed an eighty-year-old woman and her one- and four-year-old grandchildren, and brought traffic to a standstill along a ten-mile stretch of road for the better part of the afternoon.

A consensus is emerging to include billions of dollars for transportation projects in an economic stimulus plan to be taken up shortly after the presidential election.

Infrastructure investments may well be the best short-term stimulus available to policymakers. Supporters tout the two-for-one benefits of fixing crumbling highways and bridges while pumping money and jobs into a sagging economy. And there's no outsourcing a road crew.

Yesterday, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters announced new safety rules for school buses. Beginning in 2011, buses weighing 5 tons or less (smaller buses that generally seat 16-20 students) will be required to have a shoulder/torso seat belt in addition to the lap belt that is currently required.

That is the question of my blog this week. Watching Rudy Giuliani speak at the Republican Nation Convention last Wednesday and listening to thousands of people chant, "Drill, baby, drill," I realized how confused our country is on this, well, confusing issue. Somehow we arrived at a place where Republicans and Democrats are more divided than ever, and over issues like offshore drilling, which had once been off limits by both parties. I believe people are misinformed, because if the facts were understood, the choice would be clear, no matter what your party affiliation.

(By SASHA ABELSON, Guest Blogger to the Climate Program)

Let’s stipulate, up front, that there’s plenty of blame to go all around on Katrina.

Two years ago this week, and ever since, a Republican president, a Democratic governor and a Democratic mayor have all seemed to be competing for the prize of "most incompetent." And also, let’s just say it and get it out of the way: During the hurricane and its aftermath, some of the people of New Orleans haven’t acquitted themselves very well, either.

So now they tell us that 73,764 American bridges last year were rated "structurally deficient" -- the same rating as the Interstate 35 bridge that collapsed last week in Minneapolis.

That doesn’t mean all those bridges are deadly dangerous, but it does mean nobody really knows. One might think, after 7,000 years of civilization, that the governing class would have figured out how to keep bridges from killing its citizens, but evidently our betters have had other priorities.