NewVA Moves

Google Transit Live in the Region

Blacksburg Transit, Valley Metro and the Smart Way are now live on Google Transit. You can go there directly, or use the newly embedded trip planner on the RIDE Solutions site. Just like Google driving directions, you enter your starting and ending address, and Google tells you where to catch the closest bus stop, which route to take, and where to transfer to a different bus.

If you have a chance, play with the trip planner and look for any goofy routing you may encounter. I’ll collect any issues that come up and send them to their respective transit agencies so they can make sure all the kinks are worked out at Google. Send any routing issues you have to jholmes@rvarc.org, or leave them in the comments below.

More on Regionalism

I want to take a moment to clarify and expand upon the remarks I made in the recent vlog regarding the intersection of regionalism and transportation – particularly, sustainable transportation strategies.
My comments stemmed, essentially, from Stuart’s opening statement:

Oftentimes people say, “What will it take to create more regionalism in the Roanoke and New River Valleys?” And everything ultimately comes down to transportation. We need to get more people living in one region and working in the other, and vice versa.

At which point I responded with several meandering thoughts about public transit, rail, and employer support of transportation alternatives. What I don’t think I emphasized enough is that, to the extent Stuart is right about the live/work pattern he’s describing, I think expansion of public transportation options, and employer support of those options is key, I am not entirely convinced that the premise is feasible nor necessarily desirable from a practical standpoint.

Of course, I am coming at this from the perspective of a transportation and air quality planner, not an economic developer; my area of expertise and priorities are different, but I want to play with Stuart’s premise for a bit and see if that’s really the best solution.

The reality is that people are moving closer to, not farther from, work right now, and both Roanoke the NRV are exhibiting development patterns that support this. Roanoke’s downtown residential development is booming, and brownfield projects like the Carilion biomedical research center, the continued revitalization of downtown, and an emphasis on “village center” development like Grandin and Crystal Spring all point to increasingly live/work/play density. This is happening in the NRV, too; residential development in Christiansburg is way up, despite the challenges in the housing market, and neighboring areas like Riner are seeing significant growth. It wasn’t too long ago that the NRV suffered a dearth of shopping – this is no longer the case, with major retail chains having locations in both Roanoke and Christiansburg, a new shopping development along Main St. in Blacksburg that could rival Valley View Mall, and a reconfigured transportation infrastructure that brings visitors and residents more easily into the New River Valley Mall area as well as Downtown Blacksburg. Combines these local phenomena with the broader national trends of lower vehicle miles travelled and transportation behavior that continues to move away from driving long distanced even as gas prices retreat from their record levels, and you have a pretty convincing case that people simply don’t want to drive.

Given that fact, I think that it will be pretty difficult, even with attractive public transportation options, to convince people to make the 30-some-odd mile trek between the regions. And from a transportation perspective, I’m not sure that’s desirable. Do we want to increase traffic on I-81? Do we want to increase the amount of time people spend on a vehicle? Do we want to increase vehicle emissions, even from relatively benign sources like buses? Do we want to encourage development in largely undeveloped area along the corridor? From my perspective, we should be discouraging all of these things – take vehicles off the road, every chance we get. When we can’t do that, make sure they are driving as short a distance as possible. Invest in density, which not only encourage walking and biking as viable transportation options, but also creates efficient public transit systems with the least amount of public funding. Reinvest in blighted and neglected neighborhoods that improve the quality of life for everyone, rather than develop new areas.

Stuart also touched on the issue of topography in listing some of the challenges to development along the I-81 corridor. I don’t think this point can be understated. The mountainous terrain between the regions make development of any kind difficult and expensive. What’s more, the terrain creates some enormous perceptual barriers. Thirty miles is really not that much, but when you actually have to travel across and up a mountain to get to the next major region, it is difficult to think anything other than you are leaving one place and going to another, rather than across a single expansive region. What’s more, the difference in elevation actually makes for different weather patterns – Blacksburg often gets snow when Roanoke doesn’t, for example, and more snow when it does. It seems like a small thing, perhaps, but there’s an difficult mental leap in believing then when it’s snowing in Blacksburg and dry as a bone in Roanoke, that we’ve actually got much in common.

All that said, it sounds like I’m arguing against regionalism, which is not what I want to do. Quite the opposite – I think that both the Roanoke and New River Valleys have much to gain from each other, and without regional cooperation we will likely miss out on enormous opportunities to advance the area. That cooperation is not going to come, however, from commute patterns – it’s going to come from business relationships - like those between Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic that have resulted in the new medical school being built at the Riverside Center - and cultural opportunities. Virginia Tech and the Corporate Research Center are only going to grow as the regional center for technology and research, drawing students, researchers, and tech-savvy young professionals to an expanding list of cutting edge technology companies and research opportunities. Roanoke, meanwhile, has an established base of technology, manufacturing, and other industries, not the least of which is health care with both Carilion Clinic and HCA leading the way. It’s also got a thriving downtown, a stable population base unaffected by the wild variations that Blacksburg’s student population causes, and enormous public and private investment in arts and cultural amenities, as seen in the recent opening of the Taubman Museum of Art.

In many ways, it’s going to be up to businesses to take advantage of the respective competencies of each region – cooperative efforts taking advantage of Tech and the CRC’s research capabilities and applying them in Roanoke businesses and other endeavors. It’s going to require connecting people to amenities in each region rather than encouraging long commute times – providing access to educational opportunities through growth of efforts like the Higher Education Center, and making sure that NRV residents have access to arts and cultural activities through public transportation, way-finding, and other creative efforts. It’s going to require us to look at phases of life and recognize that it might make more sense for twenty-somethings to live/work/play in Blacksburg with their peers, but come to Roanoke when they’re ready to start a family, and building policies and incentives that take advantage of this. It will also require looking much farther in the future – as, to their credit, the City of Roanoke has done – to recognize that the idea of living one place and working another is going to change drastically as the knowledge-based economy grows and technology gives workers access to their job no matter where there are. Roanoke and the NRV can also be desirable home for people working in DC, Manhattan, or Silicon Valley.

I do not, I admit, have good specific solutions. But to the extent that transportation is one of those solutions, there are major challenges facing the two regions that probably won’t be easily overcome. I think it’s important to keep an eye on technology, the environment, and some of the remarkable demographic changes that are occurring right now and recognizing that old patterns and concepts of how people live and work are on the verge of a major upheaval in the next ten to twenty years. Whatever the answers are to improving regionalism, that future is where we need to start looking for them.

Vlogging Regionalism

Stuart Mease, with the City of Roanoke posted a short video on YouTube about regionalism. Check it out, and then see my video response.

Dodging a Bullet

According to a recent study, it's a good thing the Roanoke region is compliance with current EPA air quality standards:

Lowering air pollution in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley would save more lives annually than ending all motor vehicle fatalities in the two regions, according to a new study.

The study, which examined the costs of air pollution in two areas with the worst levels in the country, also said meeting federal ozone and fine particulate standards could save $28 billion annually in health care costs, school absences, missed work and lost income potential from premature deaths.

Now, Roanoke is not - nor has been, in terms of air pollution - Southern California. I grew up in San Diego in the 80s, and I remember how thankful we were that we didn't live in L.A., where the smog was so thick you couldn't see into or out from from the city. Where Roanoke may have been just over the EPA standards, Southern California left them a couple of miles back on the side of the highway, without even access to a bus to get a ride home.

It's also worth noting that even at it's worst Roanoke had a relative few number of days in excedence of ozone standards. This site shows that L.A. saw 141 Orange days, 26 Red days, and 7 Purple days in 2008, while Roanoke saw 0 air quality violations. So, certainly, the length of exposure to poor air quality is probably a more important factor than simple exposure.

The point is not, ultimately, that the air quality in our region will kill you as quickly as it will in California. The interesting point I glean from the study is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that these externalities of air quality are having a significant effect both on public health and on economic activity, and there is a larger and larger amount of data that quantifies these impacts. As the country, and the Roanoke region, face a number of economic and quality-of-life challenges, we would do well to take these externalities seriously. As we deal with the growing costs of healthcare, for example, we can't expect to solve the problem by finding creative ways to expand coverage if we're not prepared to deal directly with as fundamental an issue as the health of the air we breathe. And if air quality in major metropolitan areas can have this big an economic impact, rural and mid-sized localities are going to end up subsidizing those costs through higher insurance premiums and taxes, particularly if the U.S. implements some form of universal health coverage or insurance. In other words, we'll not only be helping to pay for Northern Virgina's roads, we'll be helping to pay for Nothern Virginia's asthma treatments.

Gray Day for the Star Line Trolley

It would have been nice if Mother Nature cooperated a bit, but I'm still excited about today's inaugural run of Roanoke's new Star Line Trolley. I attended the maiden run yesterday morning and was glad to see the remarkable media coverage was very positive. The trolleys are gorgeous on the inside, all wood paneling and benches, with small LCD screens displaying event information for the city. I think the Jefferson Street corridor will be well-served by the trolley, and I'm happy to see the City and Carilion work together to connect, and reduce the number of vehicle traveling between, downtown and the growing Carilion campus.

I was asked by one reporter whether I thought that service will or should be expanded into the Grandin Village and other areas. Certainly, I think such expansion will be welcome, but it's also important to note that most of the major village, shopping, and employment centers of the city are already connected via Valley Metro. If the Star Line Trolley will get people thinking about alternative ways to get around, then it will be all the more successful.

Funding Conundrum

This past weekend I was drawn into a brief email exchange discussing one of the proposed changes for transportation funding - moving away from a gas tax to a per-mile tax. You're probably aware that the Highway Trust Fund, which funds federal and state transportation projects and draws on gas taxes as its revenue source, is nearing backruptcy. This is in part because the gas tax has not kept pace with construction and maintenance projects, nor with inflation - the gas tax is a flat amount, rather than indexed to the price of gas, and has been unchanged since 1993 when it was raised to 18.4 cents per gallon (though it's important to note that not all of that money goes towards the HTF - some goes to deficit reduction). However, this year has also seen the first drop in vehicle miles travelled since records started being kept in the 30s; less fuel burned means less gasoline sold which means less tax revenue. There is also some concern that as high gas prices drive up the market for more efficient vehicles and encourage mode-shift to high-occupancy modes, revenues will continue to drop sharply.

Some states have played around with the idea of switching to a per-mile tax - charging cars for the actual miles of road they use rather than how much fuel they burn. As far as funding goes, this makes sense - it ties the charges to what the government is really concerned about: funding road maintenance. This makes sure that all vehicles pay their fair share of the highways they drive on, no matter what kind of vehicle they drive. Of course, not unlike the gas tax, drivers wishing to avoid paying the tax can simply drive less, take transit, and so forth, this has the dual benefit of saving drivers money as well as reducing demand on (and wear-and-tear on) the roads. In addition, the technology that would be required to make this work could also be used to implement congestion pricing not unlike what they do in London and have considered doing in Manhattan - charging a higher tax rate (or flat fee) to drive during the peak times of day. This would do even more to encourage either mode shift or flexible scheduling.

There are downsides, of course, to a per-mile tax. First, there is some suspicion that the technology used could be diverted for nefarious purposes. It would require placing some kind of transpoder or GPS device on every vehicle that would record where and how far a vehicle traveled. Drivers are concerned with privacy, and I think it's a valid concern; safeguards would need to be put in place to make sure this information couldn't be abused, and I'm not sure that anyone has figured out a good way to do this. Second (and this is what sparked the brief email flurry over the weekend), moving away from a gas tax reduces some of the pressure for vehicle efficiency - a behemoth SUV and a Prius now both pay the same tax, despite the fact that the SUV is burning four times as much fuel, emitting four times as many pollutants, and weighs significantly more and is not down doing more that its share of damage to the road (I suppose the latter could be corrected by basing the per-mile tax rates on vehicle weights, though I'm not sure if this has been considered yet). One of the benefits of having the tax tied to gas is that it also gets at the hidden costs of driving, namely the environmental impacts of air pollution, lung health, and climate change. The argument goes that moving to a per-mile tax and charging the SUV the same as the hybrid gives the SUV a pass on these hidden costs.

I suppose this is sort of true. The problem with the reasoning is that even now the gas tax only indirectly gets at the environmental impacts of driving - a very small percentage of highway money goes into transportation options, transit, or other air quality/environmental mitigation efforts. And since the gas tax is not currently indexed to the price of a barrel of oil, the increase in gas prices that finally encouraged people to get out of there cars this year were purely market driven. I imagine this will continue to be the case as worldwide demand continues to rise. Eventually, if we're smart, we'll begin moving away from the combustion engine altogether to hyrbids, electric, or natural gas vehicles, which will make the gas tax moot.

I think the move to a per-mile tax makes sense in terms of funding road-building, maintenance, and encouraging mass-transit and denser development. As a matter of fact, I think that this will be more effective in the long term than the gas tax. I believe, though, that there will still be a role for the gas tax, but mainly if we treated it as any other sin tax - use ther per-mile tax to fund infrastructure, but a reduced gasoline tax that went only to air quality and environmental mitigation efforts. In other words, tie the two taxes directly into their impacts. I think you could easily balance the two rates, and as we move away from an oil-based transportation system, both the tax and the need for it will diminish.

This is just thinking out loud, though, and I'm certainly no tax expert. It just seems to be that we cannot simultaneously try to move away from gasoline and expect to rely on it as a major funding source for infrastructure necessities.

The Roads Must Roll

I was recently introduced to Robert Heinlein's 1940 short story, "The Roads Must Roll" (the link goes to an old radio show version of the story from 1956; I can't immediately find a current anthology that includes the story). Like much of the science fiction of that period, there is much in it that is precognitive, at least in terms of how Heinlein saw the problem of transportation demand developing:

[T]he automobile, from its humble start as a one-lunged horseless carriage, grew into a steel-bodied monster of over a hundred horsepower and capable of making more than a hundred miles an hour. They boiled over the countryside, like yeast in ferment. In the middle of the century it was estimated that there was a motor vehicle for every two persons in the United States.

They contained the seeds of their own destruction. Seventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speed, are more destructive than war. In the same reference year the premiums paid for compulsory liability and property damage insurance by automobile owners exceeded in amount the sum paid the same year to purchase automobiles. Safe driving campaigns were chronic phenomena, but were mere pious attempts to put Humpty-Dumpty together again. It was not physically possible to drive safely in those crowded metropolises. Pedestrians were sardonically divided into two classes, the quick and the dead.

But a pedestrian could be defined as a man who had found a place to park his car. The automobiles made possible huge cities, then choked those same cities to death with their numbers.

As always, science fiction is interesting as much for what it gets wrong as what it gets right. For example, a recent analysis I did shows that car ownership in Roanoke is about 1.1 cars per person, which is pretty close to the national average. Only in the particularly rural areas of the region does it even dip below one. So, we're closer to 2 cars for every 3 people. There's also this:

The National Defense Act closed [the automobile's] era. This act...declared petroleum to be an essential and limited material of war. The army and navy had first call on all oil, above or below the ground, and seventy million vehicles faced short and expensive rations.

Not only was there no such Act, of course, but just think back to at least one of the ideas our political leaders considered to solve the crisis of dramatically rising prices:

Senator Barack Obama altered his position on Monday to call for tapping the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lower gasoline prices....

Bush is delaying this summer's deposits to the reserve -- an emergency stockpile of government-owned crude oil -- as he faces political pressure from campaigning members of Congress and anger from consumers about high gas prices.

So, the problem is - in some respect - worse than Heinlein predicted, and we've not come anywhere near finding a solution (and I'm please, frankly, that we didn't go with his story's premise of 100 MPH conveyor belts shuttling us back and forth between cities anyways).

The problem Heinlein presents, I think, is the inextricability of transportation from all other facets of modern life. His hero fights a labor insurrection that threatens to stop the roads from rolling, proving that the technicians who run the roads are no more important than the people who use them. I don't think the story is completely analogous to our current situation (I don't know anyone who worries that we'll someday become slaves to VDOT), but I find that the broader point is certainly applicable: transportation is too important to let it come screeching to a halt, and that includes being made to do so by automobiles. We may not be at the mercy of disgruntled engineers threatening to jam up road-rolling motors, but in many areas of the state - and even in a couple of narrow corridors in our very own Roanoke and New River Valleys - we're at the mercy of clogged highways and rush-hour traffic that is no less inefficient. If the roads must roll today, and certainly they must, we will have to provide the safest, broadest array of options for people to roll across them.

Don't worry, we in the TDM industry aren't planning on revolting any time soon.

Bike Commute Benefit in MY Bank Bailout Package?

It's more likely than you think.

In an unexpected bonus for bike commuters, the controversial $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed on September 20 ... carried along a $20-a-month tax-free reimbursement for biking to work....

The text of the legislation can be found here. There has been some discussion on professional listservs regarding exactly how this interacts with the existing transportation fringe benefits for parking and transit, but it seems to follow the same basic rules: Your employer offers the benefit and can subsidize all, part, or none of it. If you pay for all or part of it, you pay no taxes on that portion of your salary; the employer similarly pays no taxes on whatever portion of the benefit it subsidizes. The trick, I guess, is how the employer verifies that the $20 is being used for bicycle-commuting related expenses, and what, exactly, those constitute.

Still, it's something that bicycle advocates have been fighting for, so it's good to see it finally put into place.

Long Range Plan Public Meetings

The Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission, in cooperation with the Virginia Department of Transportation, will hold a public meeting to introduce and gain feedback on several of the region’s long-range transportation plans. Several regional planners will be on hand to answer questions and take comments.

WHAT:
Public review and input on the following plans for the region’s urban, rural, and multimodal transportation systems

WHEN:
Wednesday, October 22, 2008, 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm

WHERE:
Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission
3rd Floor Conference Room
313 Luck Ave. SW, Roanoke, VA 24016

WHO:
Mark McCaskill, Senior Planner
Jake Gilmer, Regional Planner
Jeremy Holmes, Program Director, RIDE Solutions
Representatives of VDOT, Salem District

Each of these plans are in different stages of development but ultimately will establish the goals and objectives of regional urban and rural transportation infrastructure and multimodal options. Maps illustrating potential growth areas and needs will be available for comments, and the staff members leading each effort will be available to answer questions and accept input.

The statewide planning process is an important part of establishing local and regional priorities for state-funded transportation projects. Particularly in lean fiscal times when transportation dollars are at a premium, vigorous public participation is necessary to assure that plans accurately reflect local needs and that state funds are constrained appropriately.

The Roanoke Valley Area Metropolitan Planning Organization’s Long-Range Transportation Plan is a long-range strategy and capital improvement program developed to guide the effective investment of public funds in multi modal transportation facilities within the urban area, including Roanoke City, Salem, Vinton, and parts of Roanoke, Boutetourt and Bedford counties. The plan is updated every 5 years, and may be amended as a result of changes in projected Federal, State and local funding, or other significant studies/plans. The Long Range Plan provides the context from which the region's Transportation Improvement Program (TIP), a short-range capital improvement program for implementing highway, transit, and bikeway projects, is drawn.

The Rural Long Range Transportation Plan will cover the rural portions of the region, including Alleghany, Craig, and Franklin Counties, and portions of Botetourt and Roanoke Counties. This is the first time a long range transportation plan has been developed for such a large region, and VDOT is partnering with Planning District Commissions across the Commonwealth to develop similar plans for all rural regions. VDOT will use the plan when evaluating requests from the local governments for specific transportation projects and/or implementing projects that VDOT initiates. Recommendations from the plan will also be used in the statewide transportation planning process so that the magnitude of transportation needs statewide can be more accurately quantified and incorporated into Virginia's 2035 State Highway Plan.

RIDE Solutions’ Long Range Transportation Demand Management Plan will establish objectives for expanding transportation options in the RIDE Solutions service region, which includes the towns, cities, and counties of the Roanoke Valley-Alleghany Regional Commission and the New River Valley Planning District Commission. The plan will identify trends in congestion, air quality, and gas prices and set out service and infrastructure priorities for the region that allow commuters the best access to sustainable transportation options. Infrastructure will include the expansion and/or addition of Park and Ride lots, bicycle and pedestrian accommodations, preferential parking, and other items. Services may include additional transit service, carsharing, online ridematching, and service area expansion. This plan represents the state’s first effort to formalize local transportation demand management strategies and aggregate them into the statewide transportation plan.

Commuter Bus to Rocky Mount on the Table

From The Franklin News-Post:

Because of the large number of Franklin County and Rocky Mount residents who work in the Roanoke Valley and the sharply rising gas prices, Town Manager James Ervin said that he and Franklin County Administrator Rick Huff have talked with Valley Metro about starting a commuter bus service between Roanoke and Rocky Mount.

I think this is a fantastic idea; easily the largest growth in our commuter database, right behind the Roanoke to Virginia Tech commute, has been the Rocky Mount to Roanoke commute (click the Franklin County button to zoom in). Most everybody in the database already meets at the recently-expanded Park-and-Ride, so I think there is plenty of demand already pent up.

If this is something you support, please contact Mr. Ervin and Mr. Huff and let them know!

The Bike I Want

One of the things that has always bothered me about bicycling as a commute option is the perception that you need a lot of gear to pull it off. A helmet is required, of course, but in Roanoke, at least, it has been the case that you don't see many people riding without the full lycra-costume, including those inappropriately tight pants. For my brief overseas visits to England and China, it was not uncommon to see someone in a business suit riding down the street on an old Schwinn; that's just not something you see often around here, and its a shame. The point of a bike, I would think, is the childlike simplicity of being able to hop on and just go.

Some bicycle manufacturers are responding to this by making bicycles that encourage casual, dress-down riding. I've got a cheapie little coasting bike from Wal-Mart, for example, upon which I would look absolutely silly if I was dressed in full speed-riding regalia. It's a bike made for shorts, t-shirts, and flip-flops. Expanding on this idea, a company called Shimano has created a family of Coasting bikes that are geared towards the casual, even commute, rider, with nice fat tires, springy seats, fenders, and chain-guards so you don't get your work pants all greast. My favorite is the Raleigh coasting bike, and not just because its got a six-pack suitable rack on the front with a built-in bottle opener.

This is on my wish list.

Try Transit Week

Remember, folks: This week September 22 through 25, is the statewide Try Transit Week. Please consider using any of our fine local transit systems for at least one trip this week - whether for your work commute, a shopping trip, or just to give it a shot. If you take the pledge you get a chance to win a one-year transit pass on the system of your chouce.

If you've got a Facebook account, I've set up an event through the RIDE Solutions group (of which you should also be a member) you can use to invite your friends and networks to attend. Questions about where your closest bus can be found or what time to catch the bus? Contact the appropriate agency below:

Blacksburg Transit: (540) 961-1185
Valley Metro: (540) 982-2222
SmartWay Bus: (800) 388-7005

Keep the Pressure On for Rail

I attended a TDM/Transit training session in Blacksburg yesterday, during the course of which the Statewide Rail Plan was again mentioned. The public comment period is now over, but you'll be glad to hear that of the several statewide public meetings held over the course of the summer, the meeting in Roanoke at the Salem Civic Center was said to be the best attended of the lot of 'em. Dan Rudge, Chief of Planning for DRPT, said that over 150 people came to the Roanoke meeting, and that the vast majority of them took the time to speak up. If I recally corrently, I left the meeting about about two hours and there were still quite a few people waiting their turn at the podium, and at that point there had not been a single voice in opposition to passenger rail in the area.

In contrast, Rudge said the Northern Virginia meeting was attended by about 10 people. He may have been exagerrating a, but the point is clear: The folks in the Roanoke region (and many of the attendees were from much farther away than Roanoke, actually) are passionate about this issue, they want to see passenger rail back in the Valley, and they showed DRPT that they cared. I think they heard.

Down to the Last Penny in the Piggy

Just got this from a TDM Listserv to which I am subscribed:

This afternoon, DOT Secretary Mary Peters announced that the highway trust fund is projected to have a zero balance by the end of this month unless Congress takes action. In response, DOT will take the following action:

“Effective September 8th, the Federal Highway Administration will begin making weekly reimbursements, rather than the current twice daily reimbursements. These weekly reimbursements will be made on a pro-rated basis. For example, if the funds available in the highway account covers 80 percent of the requests received, 80 percent of each reimbursement will be paid. The following week, the balance of unpaid requests from the previous week will be paid providing similar, pro-rated reimbursements for the new requests received that week. The Department is taking action to streamline personnel and purchasing policies to further slow the rate of depletion and will consult with other federal agencies funded by the Trust Fund to make the most of every available dollar.”

Additionally, Secretary Peters called upon the Senate to act upon HR 6532, legislation which would transfer $8 billion from the General Fund to the Highway Trust Fund. This is a reversal of policy as the Bush administration had previously opposed the passage of this legislation. In her remarks Secretary Peters called upon the Senate to act on this, ‘must pass legislation’, next week with out addition additional provisions or earmarks.

We certainly don't have the revenue to keep building more roads, and apparently not even enough (on the Federal level, at least) to maintain what we have without serious finagling of the payment system. It is increasingly obvious that reducing demand and concentrating on the best, most efficient way to move people - not automobiles - is going to have to be the solution.

Link Museum Sustainability Lecture Series

Check out what the Link Museum is going to further the cause of rail as a key component of a sustainable future. The lecture series looks pretty interesting, and I'm particularly impressed that they are combining different elements of sustainability - locally grown dinners, for example, along with the lectures.

Check them out if you get a chance.