Federal Highway Administration

Phineas Baxandall is a senior analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

“There’s an inverse proportion of the size of a transportation program to the amount of transparency,” says Deron Lovaas of the Natural Resources Defense Council. While anyone can easily find in granular detail anything they would ever want to know about where bike/ped money goes, and they can get a pretty good idea of what's going on with transit capital investments, highway spending is a black box -- and that's 80 percent of U.S. transportation dollars.

The Federal Highway Administration has come out with a handy report [PDF] for communities thinking about getting into the bike-sharing game. Based on a study of 12 planned and existing bike-sharing systems from around the U.S., the report is intended to help explain the basics of bike-share and guide cities through the choices they'll face when launching a system. While the specific advice isn't exactly groundbreaking, the mere fact that the FHWA has produced the guide indicates that bike-sharing is becoming increasingly common in America.

Tearing down highways, as New Haven, Connecticut is planning to do to a short section of Route 34, is a rare (though increasingly sought after) outcome in American transportation policy. Some highway removals are unintended consequences of neglect or disaster, like the collapse of New York's Miller Highway and the damage caused to San Francisco's Embarcadero Freeway by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Others are planned interventions, like Milwaukee's removal of the Park East Freeway. But the New Haven project is the first planned highway teardown to receive funding from the federal government, which awarded the project a TIGER grant in 2010.

If you ever doubted whether a small investment in biking and walking could have a large impact, here is your proof.

As part of an application for a $2 billion federal loan to help pay for a replacement Tappan Zee Bridge that would double the width of the current bridge, the Cuomo administration has put forward a new and much-higher estimate of the project's cost: $6 billion. That's $800 million higher than previous press reports had stated, and $1.4 billion more than the state put forward in its draft environmental impact statement. The loan application also suggests that the administration will use toll revenues to repay the feds, meaning potentially huge toll hikes for Tappan Zee drivers without providing any effective transit option as an alternative.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) and his Finance Committee have been looking high and low for a $12 billion patch to fund the transportation reauthorization bill that passed the Senate EPW Committee a few weeks ago. According to Politico’s transportation reporters, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, has already rejected several of Baucus’s ideas.

A powwow between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, President Obama, and House Speaker John Boehner last night failed to yield a compromise that would put a budget in place before the government shuts down at midnight tonight. The failure of yet another attempt to negotiate makes a government shutdown all but inevitable.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials' Urban Bikeway Design Guide was 20 years in the making, and already it's having an impact, says the organization's Mia Birk.