Free Republic

The surface transportation construction industry has long had to rely on Washington for its prosperity. We spend most years holding our breath and hoping we will receive more Federal funding to fix our crumbling roads, bridges and highway systems. Currently in the United States, 7 percent of bridges are structurally deficient, and 19 percent of major highway pavements have deteriorated. Yet, our existing financing structure has few tools to address the looming reconstruction challenges facing existing infrastructure. In 2020, Congress passed a one-year extension of the Fixing America's Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. While the one-year extension of the FAST Act...

Is fighting sprawl still a goal for those who decide the fate of transportation funding at the federal, state and local levels?Transportation planning is deeply connected to economic development, but there in any agreement about transportation funding among government leaders often ends.Parag Khanna, a senior public policy analyst in Singapore and author of “Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization,” summarized the political divide over transportation planning like this: “America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters.”But division that stymies transportation planning goes further. Government leaders have always been divided...

You know something is a big deal when politicians start fighting for credit — and camera time. Given the "thank me" glomming going on in Baton Rouge these days, clearly news that the federal government will pony up enough cash to fix the disaster that is Interstate 10 westbound off the Mississippi River Bridge is one of those hallelujah moments. There was Gov. John Bel Edwards on Thursday (Aug. 4), at old McKinley High School with U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond by his side, telling the world Louisiana will be getting between $20 million and $25 million in FASTLANE grant money...