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… more

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

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.

However, standing between your state highway department and all those federal infrastructure dollars is something far more dysfunctional than the local traffic… more

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.

But the real lesson of… more

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.

In the meantime, a… more

The collapse of the Minnesota interstate bridge, coupled with the explosion of a steam tunnel in Manhattan, should arouse the country to the need for massive infrastructure investment -- and reform of the way it’s financed.

It’s a miracle that more people weren’t killed and injured in the two instances...

Urgent attention will be paid for a few weeks to America’s highway bridges -- 15 percent to 25 percent of which are believed to be structurally deficient -- because of the collapse… more

The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach -- which together make up the nation's busiest harbor complex and one of the key engines of the Southern California economy -- are poised for an 18-Wheel Revolution. In April, they unveiled a plan to slash diesel pollution from the 16,000 trucks that haul goods to nearby rail yards and warehouses by 80 percent. And that's only the beginning.

The plan -- which still needs final approval -- also seeks… more

Luis Ceja’s orange Freightliner is rumbling down Ferry Street near the Port of Los Angeles, spewing diesel fumes.

As a tiny, plastic hula girl shimmies on the dashboard, Ceja starts fuming too -- about how hard his job is, about how little he earns and about the fact that he and his fellow truckers can’t bear the burden of improving the air quality here.

"I hate that my truck pollutes," he says. "But I don’t have the money to retrofit it or… more

You might think that holiday shoppers driving on the nation’s highways would have enough to worry about with bad weather and high gas prices. But unless there is a sudden about-face on the part of the Federal Highway Administration, Americans are about to receive an unwelcome gift that, unlike a wrong-color necktie or bad-fitting socks, could literally kill them.

The FHA, which oversees our nation’s highway system, is about to issue a regulation allowing 97-foot-long multi-truck monstrosities to roar up… more