In the article, Cooper compared the United States’s rail system to those in Europe and Asia: “To some longtime proponents of high-speed rail who have watched with envy as other countries built ever-faster trains, failing to build a world-class high-speed train now would represent a tremendous missed opportunity to lure drivers off choked roads and fliers away from long delays at airports.”
No matter the amount, any money toward mass transit is undeniably a smart, forward-looking plan. It may be years until alternative-energy cars are widely available, and increasing mass transit is a tried and true way to increase fuel efficiency. Furthermore, this summer, in the midst of record-high gas prices, Americans showed that they are willing to use alternative forms of transportation. In June, The New York Times reported that Amtrak was transporting record numbers of passengers (indeed, it could not keep up with demand) around the nation.
The Washington Post reported in August that D.C.’s Metro ridership during the 2007-2008 fiscal year reached 215.3 million trips, up 7.4 million from the year before. The Massachusetts Turnpike Authority announced that, in August, drivers took a million fewer trips on state highways compared to the same month in 2007, a decline of 6.75 percent, and that that the number of bus, subway, and train passengers showed a concomitant increase of 6.9 percent.
Given the demonstrated efficiency of mass transit systems, Obama deserves credit for at least getting the $8 billion earmarked for high-speed rail projects into the stimulus package. It was a last-minute addition. “I put it in there for the president,” chief of staff Rahm Emanuel told Politico. “The president wanted to have a signature issue in the bill, his commitment for the future.”
Yet that $8 billion is a good example of the anxious quarreling that will continue to make this a challenging story for reporters. While the stimulus bill was still being debated in mid-February, The Washington Post many news outlets derided the $8 billion for high speed rail as “pork,” based on fears that a large portion of it would go to “a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid.” Those fears were premature. Reid does indeed support the Anaheim-Las Vegas line, but Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is responsible for doling out the high-speed rail money, and nothing has been allotted yet.
Indeed, only time will tell what the federal, state, and municipal recipients of stimulus money will be able to accomplish, and keeping track of the money will be utterly important. Along that line, Michael Cooper’s article in The New York Times on February 14 bears mentioning. As stimulus dollars get “sprinkled through the 50 states…” he wrote, “The money will be welcome, but hardly enough to transform transportation.”
Of course, it is entirely possible that fixing “small needs,” such as repairing roads, bridges, and tracks, will have transformative consequences to the people who rely upon them for transit. Indeed, during the political wrangling over the stimulus package, Obama’s most significant transportation-related public appearance was with Virginia Governor Tim Kaine. The location was an incomplete, 1.9-mile stretch of the Fairfax County Parkway. Both men said that finishing the project with stimulus funds would create jobs and bolster the economy by connecting residential areas to major business parks. “But so would many other highway projects,” the article noted. And so would many other mass transit projects.
Come what may, local and regional reporters especially will have excellent opportunities to analyze the merits of transportation projects as stimulus spending is “sprinkled throughout the 50 states.” First and foremost, those journalists must see if the projects actually do get underway, and if they do spur the economy and create jobs in their areas. But they must also ask if they serve the national interest as well, by advancing the kind of infrastructural transformation Obama has promised—one that is so badly needed.
More press criticism, less boosterism for the New New Deal, please.
I get it ... you like liberal big government programs and you're bursting at the seams you're so happy, and you just can't contain yourselves and you have to share your joy with someone.
But I'm at a loss to understand how this post, or frankly many of the others, fits in the tag line of "a lens on the science press." What does a soliloquy on the soundness of transportation funding have to do with science? And how does it cast an eye on the press at all?
Oh, sure there are a couple of perfunctory quotes from reports on the topic, but in measure that reminds me of a junior-high essayist who realizes the report she's written really doesn't talk about the book at all, so she needs to cram some stuff in there that does.
Seems to me a blog like this ought to be deconstructing underreported and overhyped stories about vaccine scares, the health disorder of the day and the general lack of rigor in, and attention to, science reporting.
Instead, we get a press release for a jobs program.
Sad.
#1 Posted by Mike, CJR on Tue 3 Mar 2009 at 09:47 AM
Many people bidding for some of these government funded construction projects will be left out in the cold if they do not have their OSHA training. MA and several surrounding states (NY, CT, RI, NH, and MO) have laws requiring workers on publically-funded jobsites to take the OSHA 10 hour construction training class, like the ones available at www.osha10hourtraining.com . Without the OSHA card, they cannot get on the site. Many general contractors also have the same requirement for minimum OSHA training. So be prepared, do not wait until the last minute.
#2 Posted by OSHAPro, CJR on Tue 17 Mar 2009 at 05:12 PM
@OSHAPro
While it is true that more and more states are requiring workers to have their OSHA 10 hour cards, the fact is that it has never been easier to get them. Online OSHA training, like that found at http://www.easysafetyschool.com/, is not only easy, but it is roughly 1/3 the cost of on-site training.
#3 Posted by HenryW, CJR on Wed 22 Sep 2010 at 06:49 PM