Reconnecting America board member Andriana Abariotes and Bob Murphy, the Mayor of Lakewood, Co., testified Thursday before the House Committee on Financial Services in support of the Livable Communities Act.

The remarks of Abariotes, who is executive director of the Twin Cities Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), and Mayor Murphy were well received. Rep. Al Green (D-TX) was particularly interested in the work being done in the Twin Cities, and Mayor Murphy discussed the TOD planning study for the West Corridor. The mayor brought along some of the West Corridor TOD planning studies  developed with assistance from Reconnecting America.
In prepared remarks, Abariotes told the committee, "I am here today to talk about the relationship between the provisions laid out in the Livable Communities Act and community development activities."

Abariotes focused on LISC's Building Sustainable Communities initiative, and in particular the work on the…

The Transportation Research Board of the National Academies has released a new report exploring the impact of streetcars on the built environment.

Houston has completed an extensive "Livable Centers Study" that explores the area of midtown Houston around the Ensemble / HCC stop on the Main Street light rail line.

  [This is another in our series of expert blogs on TOD highlighting work and research that experts are doing in the field. The author, Yingling Fan, is an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute.] Public transportation plays an important role in addressing poverty, unemployment and equal-opportunity goals. Often, entry-level jobs are far from affordable housing. Moreover, low-income workers are often carless, or struggle with high gas prices. These factors make transit particularly important to working class people. The Hiawatha light rail line opened in 2004 as the first link in the Twin Cities’ envisioned transitway system—a system that provides premium transit services including light rail, commuter rail and bus rapid transit. The transitways are expected to improve mobility and accessibility through reliable and rapid service, yet many question who benefits from them. Over much of…

  James Corless, the director of Transportation for America, released a statement applauding the administration's Labor Day announcement of plans to "renew and  expand America’s roads, railways and runways."
 
“The President’s initiative, as we understand it based on the broad outlines issued [Labor Day], will give much-needed help to the economy while kick-starting the long-delayed transformation of the nation’s outdated surface transportation program," Corless said. “While the ‘front-loading’ of a new transportation authorization will put many thousands of Americans to work over the next couple of years, this should not be seen as a mere short-term stimulus. This kind of aggressive, multi-year construction and rehabilitation effort is fundamental to the long-term health of our economy. The…

Improving public transportation and making communities more walkable can have significant impacts on public health, according to a study written for the American Public Transportation Association by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute.

  A new study by the Transportation Equity Network suggests that metropolitan areas could produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs by simply shifting existing transportation spending from highways to public transit.  The study, entitled More Transit=More Jobs: The Impact of Increasing Funding for Public Transit, examined the use of Transportation Improvement Program (TIP) funds in twenty metropolitan areas of various sizes and found that public transit investments produce nearly 20% more jobs per dollar than road investments.  If these twenty metropolitan areas shifted 50% of their existing highway funds to transit, there would be a net gain of 180,150 jobs over five years without a single dollar of new spending.  Moreover, the majority of these jobs could be created within existing transit systems, as the study also found that investing in transit operations produces…