Understanding Government

Headwinds  are building against California’s planned high-speed rail system, with congressional opponents attempting to kill funding, and new reports generating ever more negative rhetoric. That’s the  bottom line in Carolyn Lochhead’s piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Meanwhile, though significant cuts to transportation funding — both for road construction and maintenance as well as mass-transit are likely in the coming transportation bill, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has introduced an innovative financing scheme aimed at speeding up transit construction.  Villaraigosa’s initiativemay become a nationwide program, according to Rick Orlov of the Torrance Daily Breeze.

Criticisms at the policy end of high-speed rail are hardly new. Here’s a standard sample: (more…)

U.S. Transportation Sec. Ray LaHood attended Rahm Emanuel’s inauguration as Chicago mayor yesterday — and LaHood sounds eager to work with the new mayor. Tim Jones and John McCormick of Business Week report:

Soon after his swearing-in, [Emanuel’s] transportation advisers will go to Washington to discuss high-speed rail and other projects with LaHood’s staff, the transportation secretary said. “Rahm is going to have some very, very strong and significant partners in this administration because he wants to get things done,” LaHood said.

Why does LaHood want to help Emanuel? (more…)

The Midwest High Speed Rail Association has an ambitious vision of a 220-mph bullet train that would connect major Midwest cities, reports the Chicago Tribune’s Jon Hilkevitch. But 2011 has already been a terrible year for the politics and federal funding of high-speed rail. Do recent setbacks make a bullet train politically unrealistic?

Working with the Siemens Corporation, the non-profit rail association looked at a number of possibilities for a Midwest bullet train and concluded that the 220-mph train would be the most expensive to build but yield the greatest return investment. (more…)

The Illinois Department of Transportation has negotiated an agreement with Amtrak and Union Pacific Railroad that will let the state release $1.1 billion in federal grants for a high-speed rail line from Chicago to St. Louis. (more…)

Last week, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation provided Chicago $3.4 million to help build an air traffic control tower as part O’Hare international airport expansion. The project, though, is plagued with insufficient funds and no realistic completion date, reports the Chicago Tribune’s Robert McCoppin. McCoppin focuses on the stalled construction of a western terminal. “The fate of the terminal is unclear,” he writes. “Its uncertain status has some critics questioning whether the project’s promised economic boost justified destruction of hundreds of homes and businesses, as well as increased noise and pollution in the area.”

I think that one problem with the O’Hare expansion project has been the role of federal and state government as enabler to local government. (more…)