Abstract: Wasteful, inequitable, and bristling with burdensome regulations, the Federal Highway Program is in dire need of reform. Although Members of Congress have attempted to enact changes in the past, the influence of many lobbyists and influential constituencies continues to thwart the process. By…
President Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is beginning to insidiously intrude in local housing policies in a concerted effort to require racial and economic integration in American communities. It started in 2009, when HUD began using a settlement between the county of Westchester in New York and…
Abstract: Given tight federal budget restraints and shrinking transportation trust fund revenues, states and the federal government need to find alternative financial resources to finance needed transportation infrastructure projects, especially maintaining and expanding the capacity of the Interstate Highway System. Increased use of public–private…
Abstract: Agenda 21, a voluntary plan adopted at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, unabashedly calls on governments to intervene and regulate nearly every potential impact that human activity could have on the environment. However,…
In October, the Obama Administration took the unprecedented step of revoking funds already awarded to the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) to study the feasibility of absorbing the independent turnpike commission, which operates the Ohio Turnpike, into ODOT or leasing the turnpike to private investors. Unfortunately for Ohio, neither option…
As this Congress and President continue their struggle to reauthorize the federal highway program (now more than two years overdue), their focus should be maximizing the value of each dollar spent by directing available funds to programs that improve mobility and safety on the roads. To do this, Congress should…
They stab it with their steely knives, But they just can’t kill the beast. —The Eagles, “Hotel California,” 1977 With Congress eliminating spending for the President’s faltering high-speed rail (HSR) program and making cuts in Amtrak’s…
In response to the credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s in August, the grim reports on the state of the economy, and the collapse of the stock and financial markets in the week after the downgrade, President Barack Obama has re-engaged with the issue of America’s faltering economy and the…
America’s transit systems confront serious financial challenges that will force them to raise fares and reduce service unless they can get better control of their costs. Carrying less than 5 percent of commuters and less than 2 percent of all urban travel and concentrated primarily in large urban areas, these…
Growing dissatisfaction with federal transportation policy and government’s mismanagement of the highway trust fund have encouraged many in Congress and in state governments to seek ways to overhaul the system or to extract themselves from it. Since the mid-1990s, legislation has been introduced each year in Congress to phase out…
Some national business leaders are outright opposing measures of fiscal responsibility. Fortunately, fiscal...…
The House Republicans will soon debate and vote on a series of changes in the rules that govern how the House operates...…
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