As the House and the Senate get to work on hashing out a multi-year transportation bill in conference committee, Congress is also putting together its annual spending package for transportation. The annual bill decides the fate of several discretionary programs, and earlier this year it looked like US DOT's TIGER grants, which tend to fund multi-modal projects at the regional or local level, might not survive.
Stephen Lee Davis at Transportation for America says the final bill keeps TIGER but still represents a step backward for transit:
Good news: the new bill proposes no changes to what kinds of projects can apply for TIGER funding, and increases funding for the program by $100 million this year.
The Senate’s initial bill introduced this summer provided $500 million for TIGER -- the same amount as the just-ended fiscal year -- and the House version of this bill provided far less at $100 million. It’s encouraging to see the Senate appropriators increase funding for this important program in the newest draft proposal, and that there are no changes to what kinds of projects can apply. This is a hopeful sign that for future House-Senate negotiations on the final transportation spending bill for 2016.
The funding for building new transit service -- New Starts, Small Starts and Core Capacity -- was increased by more than $300 million from this summer’s Senate THUD bill up to $1.9 billion, just $24 million less than the proposed House levels of $1.92 billion. That sounds like good news, but it’s still represents a $200 million cut from last year for this program.
Amtrak funding was unchanged: $289 million for operating and $1.1B for capital projects, which is slightly more ($39 million) than this year.
Elsewhere on the Streetsblog Network today: Jarrett Walker at Human Transit says transit doesn't have to be designed to serve a single "downtown" focal point -- in fact there are major benefits to having multiple clusters of destinations. Also at Human Transit, a guest author asks whether autonomous cars will lead to a big boost in vehicle miles traveled. And BTA Blog writes that a group of victims' families is speaking up for safer streets in Oregon.
