CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Some West Virginia cities can now use certain federal transit funds to cover fuel and utility costs for public transportation.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced Wednesday that dozens of cities nationwide will benefit from the spending flexibility. It allows transit operators to use a portion of their Federal Transit Administration funds to help offset high gas prices and ensure that buses, light rail and other vehicles remain in service.

Under the provision, smaller cities won’t be required to provide matching funds as required in previous years. Such cities in West Virginia are Huntington and Weirton.

Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/QHpoKUE1SL8/201204120023

Auditor General Jack Wagner today called on Gov. Tom Corbett and state lawmakers to coalesce around a transportation funding plan to help Pennsylvania chip away at its backlog of structurally deficient bridges and other highway needs.

Wagner, using the aging Mulberry Street bridge – complete with nylon netting set to catch falling chunks of concrete from crashing onto Cameron Street below – as a prop, said it’s time for all parties to let safety issues trump political concerns about raising taxes.

For starters, Wagner said officials should look to savings in areas where past audits have shown the state can save money, like in public welfare programs and subsidies to charter schools. The savings could be used to help fund the Pennsylvania State Police, freeing up gas tax dollars that can otherwise go to highway and bridge repairs.

Wagner also endorsed lifting a longstanding cap on collections from a wholesale oil tax, that would likely raise gas prices at the pump.

Those measures, Wagner said, would provide a good start toward the raising the $2.7 billion annually recommended last year by the governor’s Transportation Funding Advisory Commission.

Corbett, to date, has not offered his own transportation program, arguing he needs to get the state’s budget in order first and that these are poor economic times for any tax increases.

“There is never a good political time, so to speak, but life safety issues must prevail,” Wagner, an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for governor in 2010 and potential contender in 2014, said. “This is very frustrating to me because I know the costs (of deferring maintenance) will increase dramatically by kicking the can down the road.”

Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/9zAgSxL75Q8/post_339.html

Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-LedgerIn his first public comments since a federal report spurred questions about the math Gov. Chris Christie used to justify killing a Hudson River commuter rail tunnel, NJ Transit executive director Jim Weinstein Wednesday defended the governor’s decision.

In his first public comments since a federal report spurred questions about the math Gov. Chris Christie used to justify killing a Hudson River commuter rail tunnel, NJ Transit executive director Jim Weinstein today defended the governor’s decision.

The $9.8 billion project was terminated 18 months ago based on a recommendation from a committee headed by Weinstein.

“It was canceled because we didn’t have the money,” Weinstein said after NJ Transit’s monthly board meeting in Newark. “It was a bad deal for New Jersey. The governor made the right decision.”

The Access to the Region’s Core tunnel, America’s largest public works project, would have linked Secaucus to a new station deep under West 34th Street in Manhattan.

Christie scrapped the tunnel in October 2010 after he said its pricetag had ballooned to between $11 billion and $14 billion.

However, the independent Government Accountability Office report said the range projected by NJ Transit just two months earlier had a high estimate of no more than $10 billion and that the Federal Transit Administration estimated the project would cost between $9.78 billion and $12.43 billion.

Christie also said New Jersey was responsible for 70 percent of the tunnel costs, but Tuesday’s GAO report determined the state was responsible solely for $1.25 billion — or 14.4 percent of what was then an $8.7 billion project.

Critics contended Christie raided the tunnel money to prop up the state’s nearly bankrupt Transportation Trust Fund — which pays for road and bridge repairs and transit projects — and keep his pledge not to increase the state’s relatively low gasoline tax.

But Weinstein said the tunnel was terminated because New Jersey simply could not afford it.

“While there were differences between the FTA and us on the price, the bottom line is that the exposure wasn’t to the

Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/PcRf_HwLQzA/nj_transit_boss_defends_gov_ch.html

AP Photo | MEL EVANSChris Christie: He doesn’t need any lectures from Frank Lautenberg after Frank and his fellow Democrats dismantled the ARC project.

It’s not a “gotcha” if they didn’t getcha.

And the Democrats didn’t get Chris Christie with their attacks based on that General Accounting Office report on the governor’s decision to cancel the ARC Tunnel.

The report remains unreleased, but U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg criticized Christie on charges that he overstated possible cost overruns associated with the project.

It’s Lautenberg who deserves the criticism. The senator who prides himself on his grasp of transportation issues presided over the death-by-bureaucracy of what was once a wonderful project.

Here were the original goals established when the Access to the Region’s Core plan began in the 1990s:

1. To provide New Jersey commuters with direct access through Penn Station to Grand Central Station, the “region’s core” of the project title.

2. To create two tunnels under the Hudson that could be shared by NJ Transit and Amtrak trains.

By the time Jon Corzine cut the ribbon on the project in 2009, both those goals had been abandoned in favor of a route that Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club dubbed “the tunnel to Macy’s basement.” ARC had been turned into a scheme to build a dead-end terminal of a type that has been obsolete for a century.

That meant Amtrak still had to build two new tunnels of its own. At a news conference last year, Amtrak chief Joseph Boardman proposed a plan to do just that, in the process taking a shot at the canceled ARC plan for “going to Macy’s basement.”

Lautenberg was there for that news conference, so it’s a little disingenuous of him to pretend Christie did not have good reason to abandon a plan that failed to meet the original goals of ARC. And it’s time for him to realize we need to move forward by going back to that plan.

(Express-Times File Photo)Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/3tpKSdkYo10/dont_criticize_chris_christie.html

The Amish will no longer face jail time in Kentucky for refusing to mark their horse-drawn buggies with slow-moving-vehicle emblems that they object to on religious grounds.

Gov. Steve Beshear signed a bill into law Wednesday that allows the Amish to use reflective silver or white tape on their buggies rather than the traditional fluorescent orange signs that makes the buggies more visible to approaching motorists.

Atlee Miller, an Amish farmer from Franklin, said he appreciates the help from the state’s politically powerful to provide an exemption, but he said the credit really goes to a higher power.

“The man above has got control,” Miller said. “We thank him most of all.”

Several Amish farmers in western Kentucky had served jail time for refusing to use the emblems. They said the triangular shape represents the Trinity, which they are not allowed to display, and that the fluorescent orange calls undue attention to them against the norms of their religion.

“I think we were able to fashion a solution that helped folks with their religious issues but at the same time still maintained the standard of safety that we have to have on our highways,” Beshear said.

Sen. Ken Winters, R-Murray, said the signing turned Wednesday into a day of celebration not just for the Amish but for police, prosecutors and judges who jailed the otherwise law-abiding Kentuckians.

“It will be a burden from the shoulders of the Amish, but also will lift a burden from law enforcement people and others who are forced into doing some things that most of them would not want to do,” Winters said. “All of us will be relieved.”

Beshear and lawmakers were left to weigh religious rights against traffic safety in implementing the law, which carries an emergency clause that makes it go into effect immediately.

Not all lawmakers favored the law. A handful feared that exempting the Amish from using the slow-moving-vehicle emblems may make it more difficult for motorists to spot the drab buggies on Kentucky highways.

Rep. Fred Nesler, D-Mayfield, said that while the reflective tape would work well at night by reflecting car headlights, it will do nothing to make

Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/30-sasr1gn8/article_5713d732-297f-565b-a57b-7de082225620.html

The plan to build the California bullet train is almost certain to be approved Thursday by the state’s high-speed rail authority at a board meeting in San Francisco, but the project is facing a less certain future in Sacramento.

The rail authority has long insisted that it needs to move as quickly as possible, starting construction on an initial $6-billion segment of track through the Central Valley this year to meet the terms of a federal grant that covers more than half of the initial project.

But that push by the authority, labor unions and the Brown administration for quick action is running into some obstacles. A handful of state senators are insisting that the plan is arriving months past when it was expected and that they will not be rushed into approving it.

Sen. Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) has been arguing for weeks that it is impractical for the rail authority to think the Senate could hold hearings and approve the $68-billion rail system — the biggest infrastructure project in state history — in a couple of months.

As a result, the Senate’s Democratic leadership is considering whether to delay including money for construction of an initial rail segment in the 2013-14 budget this spring, and instead push the decision into August before the Legislature recesses. The budget deadline is June 15, but appropriations can be made in separate legislation until Aug. 31.

“The timing is still being discussed, but we should have a better idea in the coming days,” said a spokeswoman for Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg. “It is not uncommon to appropriate bond funds in a bill outside of the budget act.”

The project’s supporters are still pushing for quicker action.

“Rolling up their sleeves and burning the midnight oil would be in order,” said James Earp, executive director of the labor group California Alliance for Jobs and a member of the California Transportation Commission. If the Senate needs more time, Earp said, they will undoubtedly get it, but they should at least try to make the June budget.

The result of such a series of delays so early in the project could

Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/0fIn0KmO0Lw/la-me-bullet-budget-20120412,0,7920645.story

Governor Christie killed the Hudson River rail tunnel nearly two years ago, but New Jersey taxpayers will still pay more than $408 million for locomotives built specially for the project.

NJ Transit purchased 26 of the locomotives in 2008 — and nine more in July 2010, just months before Christie scuttled the project. Eight of the engines, the first of their kind in the United States, have already been delivered.

The ability of the dual-mode locomotives, specially designed by Canadian manufacturer Bombardier, to operate seamlessly on both diesel and electric rail lines

was a key selling point of the tunnel project: It would allow Main, Bergen and Pascack Valley line commuters to ride directly into Manhattan without having to transfer.

The engines, about double the cost of a diesel locomotive, are another example of the costs that linger when a project of this size is canceled. Also paid for are land deals on each side of the Hudson River totaling more than $100 million – including $95 million paid upfront by the Port Authority for a 10-year lease on a Manhattan waterfront parcel deemed critical to the project.

And the locomotives, at $8.5 million to $10.2 million a pop, have some questioning why the agency isn’t cutting its losses.

“The last nine have not been built yet. That’s why we’re hoping they would cancel them,” said Jack May, vice-president of the New Jersey Association of Railroad Passengers, which advocates for stable fares and transit use. “These locomotives cost an awful lot of money.”

NJ Transit officials, however, made it clear at Wednesday’s board meeting that all 35 locomotives will be delivered.

NJ Transit Spokesman John Durso said the first 26 locomotives cost $10.2 million each, while the last nine cost $8.5 million each. A diesel locomotive is about

Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/DZgYI0waXx0/NJ_Transit_spends_408M_on_locomotives_built_specially_for_scuttled_tunnel_project.html

The Assembly Transportation Committee voted Wednesday to allow the committee’s chairman to sign off on subpoenas and investigate the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The committee is preparing to use a rarely-exercised power to compel a person or authority to release information — in this case, asking the largest bi-state agency in the country to provide documents on its spending and decision-making during the last few years.

Democratic committee members overruled Republicans and narrowly approved Wednesday’s resolution to give the committee the power to authorize those subpoenas. It also gives him power to okay outside costs associated with the legal process, which the state-run legislative services staff have said they cannot provide.

The committee’s chairman, Assemblyman John Wisniewski D-Middlesex, also serves as the head of the state Democratic party.

Controversy over the authority’s spending began last summer, when authority heads approved toll hikes for all bridge and tunnel commuters into New York City. Prices rose from $8 to $9.50 for E-ZPass tagholders and to $12 for cash customers.

Officials at first indicated part of that toll hike would help pay for the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. But that was contradicted by information obtained in a later lawsuit by a motorists advocacy group.

The toll increase went into effect with the approval of Governor Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Media reports have also questioned the authority’s overtime perks, hidden salaries and rampant patronage.

SUBHEAD HERE

Christie, who spoke out last year about the authority’s waste and lack of transparency, promised in January to “get my arms around” the authority this year. He sent his former Attorney General Paula Dow as a deputy general counsel at the agency.

Article source: http://feeds.stateline.org/~r/StatelineorgRss-Transportation/~3/Z4KduXyeK1w/Assembly_Transportation_Committee_to_allow_chairman_to_sign_off_on_subpoenas_investigate_Port_Authority.html