Completing Rural Highways: Funding Complete Streets

Even with a strong commitment to Complete Streets principles, many state agencies and their local partners lack dedicated and consistent funding streams to add the necessary elements to existing road projects. Rural infrastructure can be particularly difficult to fund, costing more per capita, so adding new elements is often seen by state and local agencies as a burden. Smart Growth America and the State Smart Transportation Initiative worked with practitioners to illustrate how their peers have found ways to overcome these obstacles.

Complete Streets Transportation

INVESTing in more equitable transportation


American transportation is rife with inequality that makes it more difficult for low-income people, people of color, and people with disabilities to get where they need to go, and can put them at greater risk. Today’s inequalities reflect the racism and ableism of the era in which much of today’s network was built, but they also still pervade federal transportation policy. The INVEST Act—a transportation policy proposal in the U.S. House—offers a major first step towards a more equitable transportation system by breaking with many policies of the past.

Transportation Uncategorized

Houston: A tale of two transportation systems

a photo of Houston from the north looking southeast.
The average American currently drives nearly twice as far each day as they did 30 years ago. Taking a cursory look at two radically different transportation plans for Houston, TX shows how the default position of federal transportation policy is to increase driving—and consequently pollution—by offering billions to states to build new roads and make existing roads wider, while making transit projects wait in line or compete for much smaller amounts of funding.

Transportation

President Obama Calls on Congress to Save Highway Trust Fund

Yesterday afternoon in Washington, DC, President Obama called on Congress to adopt a long-term transportation bill on the scale of his recently proposed four-year, $302 billion program. In a speech in front of the Key Bridge in Georgetown, the president also appealed to Congress to save the Highway Trust Fund from pending insolvency, which would threaten jobs and the progress of vital transportation projects nationwide.

Uncategorized