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...Metro is hardly the only one in the U.S. with an aging fleet. Public-transit advocates in many major cities face a similar problem: an aging, underfunded transit system struggling to safely ferry ever larger numbers of riders. "This does draw attention to the fact that we need to invest a lot more in our transit system," says Deron Lovass, the federal transportation director for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). "Our highway system is world class, but we've neglected public transit along the same way." (See pictures of Washington...
This spring the Federal Transit Administration gave marginal or poor ratings to more than a third of the equipment of the largest rail transit agencies in the U.S. To replace the nation's elderly equipment and finish station rehabilitations, it would cost roughly $50 billion; keeping the updated system in good repair afterward would run nearly $6 billion a year. (Read: "U.S. Stimulus Puts Bullet Trains on the Fast Track...
However, that money is found nowhere in the federal budget - and not even in the stimulus bill, which dedicated more than $8 billion to transit capital improvements. In Washington, Metro officials said they have wanted to replace outdated cars, which make up more than a quarter of the total system, but couldn't for lack of funds. "The Metro, like most of our larger public-transit system, has suffered from a lack of public resources," says David Goldberg, the communications director for the transit advocacy group Transportation for America...
Even as national public-transit ridership hits levels not seen since the 1950s - the decade when the new interstate-highway system began siphoning travelers off trains - federal funding has not risen in step, leaving the biggest systems struggling to pay for the very capital projects that could improve performance and safety. Meanwhile, the major U.S. cities that are most dependent on public transit - such as New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington - receive a progressively smaller percentage of the federal funding that is available. The combination of increased ridership - triggered at least in part by higher gas prices, which...
Traditionally there has been an imbalance at the heart of transportation funding: highways get billions, and public transit gets the scraps. But that may change. This week Minnesota Representative Jim Oberstar - the Democrat who runs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee - unveiled his $500 billion, six-year draft bill to overhaul the nation's transportation system. Though the bill is still nebulous, analysts say it's a considerably more transit-friendly bill than Congress has produced in the past, pouring $100 billion into public transit. New transportation bills are authorized only once every six years, and there's a real...