Federal Funding

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi may be ready to bend over backward to work with Donald Trump on "infrastructure," but you can count Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego out.

You may have noticed that it's "Infrastructure Week" in America -- a time where engineering and construction industry groups beat the drum for more money, using big numbers and images of collapsing bridges.

Remember that time two Democratic presidential candidates had a nationally-televised debate in New York City and barely said anything about transit?

Rental assistance from HUD isn't enough to make the cost of living affordable when the subsidies go toward housing in car-dependent areas, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Utah. The study evaluated transportation costs for more than 18,000 households that receive HUD rental subsidies, estimating that nearly half of recipients have to spend more than 15 percent of their household budgets on transportation.

A good deal of the $46 billion the federal government pours into highway spending each year is going to waste, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report [PDF].

The White House released its 2017 budget [PDF] this morning, which includes more detail about the exciting but politically doomed transportation proposal President Obama outlined last week. Obama's plan doesn't have a chance in the current Congress, but it shows what national transportation policy centered on reducing greenhouse gas emissions might look like.

It may be "seven years too late," as tactical urbanist Mike Lydon put it, but President Obama has released a transportation proposal that calls for big shifts in the country's spending priorities.

Smart people are wading through the 1,300-page transportation bill that came out of conference committee earlier this week, and we're starting to get a clearer sense of how it will change federal transportation policy for the next five years.

They've done it. Representatives from the House and Senate have emerged from conference committee with a five-year transportation bill, which is expected to be quickly approved and become first "long-term" bill in more than a decade.