Very good news today for the Westside Subway Extension: a $640.8-million loan neared final approval for the project by the U.S. Department of Transportation, according to Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. The loan is coming from the TIFIA program, which is the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act. TIFIA [continue reading]
As we’ve crossed the halfway point of 2011, Metro’s government relations staff are still plugging away and hoping to persuade Congress to make America Fast Forward [AFF] the law of the land. AFF would provide government loans and other financing that would allow Metro to accelerate the construction of 12 [continue reading]
I’ll cut right to the part of the new construction fact sheet for the Westside Subway Extension that will likely interest you most: Construction Schedule Construction timing for the Project is dependent upon how the funding package for the project comes together. Presuming that the environmental clearance process concludes [continue reading]
This is the fifth story in our series examining how L.A. County’s 30/10 financing model — and its national counterpart America Fast Forward — could help other cities around the country. Los Angeles’ image as the nation’s capital of cars and sprawl persists, despite its having among the highest number [continue reading]
The Los Angeles Chapter of the Urban Land Institute held a conference in Pasadena on Thursday to discuss transit-oriented development in the greater-L.A. area. The aim of the conference was to figure out a way to put more development around transit hubs. It’s a strategy embraced in many places to [continue reading]
Fox and Hounds Daily this week published an editorial titled, “Putting American Workers and Businesses Back In the Fast Lane,” that makes a strong push for support of America Fast Forward. The authors of the piece were Gary Toebben, President of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, and Maria [continue reading]
Mobility 21, a transportation advocacy group made up of Southern California stakeholders, have expressed thanks to a bipartisan group of Senators for developing a new transportation bill called “Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century” or MAP-21. One of the key components of MAP-21 is America Fast Forward (PDF) [continue reading]
Over at the Engineering News Record, former New York City traffic commissioner Sam Schwartz took to his transportation blog to extol the benefits of America Fast Forward. A lot of the issues he touches on will be familiar to Source readers. Here’s an excerpt from the piece in which Schwartz [continue reading]
Over the past several weeks, we’ve been running our ongoing series where we ask the question: How could America Fast Forward work for other cities around the country? Well, Minneapolis was definitely on our radar, but it looks like Minneapolis Post writer Steve Berg beat us to the punch. In [continue reading]
This is the second story in our series examining how L.A. County’s 30/10 financing model could help other cities around the country. On the eve of the 21st Century, the citizens of Salt Lake City cut the ribbon on their first light rail project, a 15-mile line connecting downtown to [continue reading]
