Jobs bill includes transportation funding

The Jobs Bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives includes $27.5 billion for highways, $8.4 billion for transit, $500 million for airport improvement, and $800 million for Amtrak fleet modernization.

It includes some pretty interesting provisions--including a requirement that 50% of the funds allocated must be under contract within 90 days, or the state will lose all the remaining funds.

The bill also extends the federal highway and transit program through 30 Sep 2010 (the previous authorization expired 30 Sep 2009 and has been extended by bits and pieces since then). It also provides some technical but important fixes to the Highway Trust fund.

The bill still must be taken up by the Senate, which likely will not happen until early in 2010.

More details are in an article on the Roads & Bridges web site.

How might this affect bicycling and walking in Missouri?
Missouri's ARRA funding has allowed a pretty large number of needed bicycle and pedestrian projects to go forward--projects for which the need has long been identified but for which no funding was available.

This includes creating bicycle and pedestrian access on two Missouri River bridges in the Kansas City area--where no Missouri River bridge currently provides safe access for bicycling and walking--as well as numerous small sidewalk and other bike/ped related projects all around the state.

If the funding for the Jobs Bill goes forward, it will provide about the same amount of transportation-related funding to states as ARRA did before.