MAP-21

Just shy of one year since the passage of the new transportation law, MAP-21, the US Department of Transportation has issued the final guidance and a

Less than a month ago, President Obama announced that his choice for the next US Secretary of Transportation was Anthony Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte, NC.  Based on his work in Charlotte and his remarks about transportation, we are hopeful about his potential to carry forward Secretary LaHood’s leadership on bicycling, walking and Safe Routes to School.

At the National Bike Summit this year, Douglas Meyer from Bernuth & Williamson presented some fascinating results about what Congressional allies and opponents think about bicycling.

If the news in your hometown is similar to what I hear in Washington, DC, you are probably hearing a lot about the sequester. Back in 2011, Congress and the President agreed to reduce the federal deficit, and created the sequester as a fail-safe to force spending cuts if they couldn’t reach a deal.

Since it has been a full six months since MAP-21 was signed into law, we are now seeing progress and decisions on the implementation of the law.

I’ve written a lot in the past few months about implementation of the federal MAP-21 transportation law at the state level, but there are still many issues and processes remaining at the federal level. So this month, I thought I’d touch on a few of them.

With the issuance of the new interim guidance for the new Transportation Alternatives program under MAP-21, we now know for sure that future Safe Routes to School projects no longer have the luxury of being 100 percent funded by federal transportation dollars. Now, project sponsors will need to