The New York Times' Carl Hulse reports: The United States Department of Transportation said it furloughed 2,000 workers on Monday as a politically charged impasse over unemployment benefits interrupted spending on a handful of federal programs and escalated tensions in Congress. With no quick resolution in sight, Democrats characterized the decision by one Republican to block the jobless aid and highway construction financing as an example of the practical consequences of regular opposition by Senate Republicans. The one Republican is Kentucky's Jim Bunning:

USA Today's Alan Levin reports on a three-day hearing by the National Transportation Safety Board into the safety of metro public transit systems (a hearing brought about by last June's subway crash in Washington): Peter Goelz, the NTSB's former managing ...

[caption id="attachment_6465" align="alignleft" width="192" caption="High speed rail in Taiwan"][/caption] The Wall Street Journal's Josh Mitchell reports that the Obama administration will today announce where $8 billion in stimulus cash for high-speed rail will go: The big winner ...

The Washington Post's Lena H. Sun, Joe Stephens and Lyndsey Layton join forces to report that John Catoe, General Manager of Metro, resigned yesterday. The Post describes "months of revelations about lapses in safety and oversight at the nation's second busiest mass subway system," including an investigation that followed ...

The New York Times' Michael Cooper reports that the Transportation Dept. is changing how it rewards money to state and local transit projects. The Bush administration awarded funds by how much transit projects cost and how much travel time they would save. Obama Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood wants to ...

The Chicago Current's Ben Meyerson flags an interesting report on what government spending on transit provides the most bang for the buck: Every billion dollars of investment nationwide from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act on public transportation created 16,419 total months of labor, while every billion dollars of investment ...

[caption id="attachment_6171" align="alignleft" width="192" caption="CTA Route Map"][/caption] Interesting news today in the Chicago Transit Authority's evergreen struggle to provide adequate public transit: two plaintiffs have filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all CTA black and Latino riders that ...

A great example of the connection between solid reporting and improvements in government can be found in the Washington Post's initial reporting on the alleged effort by Umar Abdulmutallab to incinerate himself aboard AA 253 in an attempt to kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people.  Three top Post reporters ...

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.

The New York Times' Michael Cooper reports that the Dept. of Transportation has severed ties with the contractor it hired to conduct the analysis of drug tests of employees regulated by the federal agency. Workplance Compliance evidently reviewed drug tests by pilots, train operators and other transportation employees without ...