The Wall Street Journal’s Gary Fields has a comprehensive piece on hard times in the transportation construction industry: unemployment in the transportation and material-moving construction sectors has gone from 7.9 percent in October 2008 to 11.6 percent in October 2009. This leads to a familiar battle cry: the stimulus bill hasn’t done enough stimulating — the bill allocated $27 billion in “shovel-ready” transportation construction projects.

But a bigger issue is that Congress and the Obama administration have delayed writing and passing the five-year surface transportation spending bill. Some estimates have the bill providing $450 billion over six years in highway, road, and rail projects.

Transportation Dept. Sec. Ray LaHood said in June that it would be unrealistic for the Obama administration to expend time and political capital on a mass transit bill, what with the all-consuming health care debate. But the administration is now forced to deal with job creation, anyway: the double-digit unemployment rate has prompted a White House “jobs summit” Thursday. Getting the transportation bill to start winding its way through Congress would be one fairly uncontroversial way to create jobs.

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