Google has donated $6.8 million to the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (Muni) for a pilot program that would allow low- and middle-income San Francisco kids aged 5 to 17 to ride Muni for free. The donation comes as Bay Area tech companies have experienced increasing criticism from city residents who are upset about rising housing costs, gentrification, a wave of renter evictions, and perceived aloofness of tech companies and their employees, many of whom travel to jobs in the South Bay in luxurious private buses that use city bus stops for free.

Read more on SFGate.com.

Last week US Senator Barbara Boxer urged lawmakers to quickly "save" the Highway Trust Fund from insolvency due to a reduction in gas tax revenues because people are driving less and cars are more fuel efficient. The Congressional Budget Office and U.S. Department of Transportation have projected that the trust fund, which is funded by the 18.4 cents/gallon federal gas tax, will run out of money by August. The gas tax brings in about $34 billion per year, while the current federal transportation bill contains more than $50 billion in road and transit projects. Boxer said it's unlikely that the gas tax would be increased now, in an election year.

Read more on The Hill.

Both the TIFIA low-interest loan program and a new class of federal tax credit bonds are in President Obama's proposal for a 4-year federal transportation bill — these two financing strategies were part 1 and part 2 of LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's "30-10" plan.

In 2012 Mayor Villaraigosa and LA Metro, working with U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, convinced Congress to increase funding for the low-interest TIFIA loan program from $120 million over 2 years to $1.7 billion, an amount expected to leverage an additional $50 billion of private investment — making this the biggest federal financing initiative in U.S. DOT history.

This year LA Metro and new LA Mayor Eric Garcetti are urging Congress to support a new federal tax credit bond program, which would allow local governments to bond against a secure revenue stream — like LA County's Measure R sales tax — in order to  raise money to accelerate construction of multiple projects. While local governments would pay back the principle, the federal government would give investors tax credits in lieu of interest payments, making this another low-cost financing strategy.

Bruce Katz gave a shout-out to Los Angeles, TIFIA and the bond program in his book The Self-Help Metropolitan Revolution, and last year the Brookings Institution included them in the “Top 10 Metropolitan Innovations to watch.”

President Obama also announced another $600 million in TIGER competitive grants to fund "transformative transportation infrastructure projects." Good luck LA!

Read more on the Source.
Read more on the White House website.

 

Three transit projects are underway in downtown San Bernardino: The sbX bus rapid transit line is already under construction, and ground was broken last week for a downtown intermodal transit center as well as an extension of Metrolink to the center from the Santa Fe depot to the west. Read more.

In the future, there's likely to be a light rail line from Redlands into San Bernardino, as well as an extension into San Bernardino County of the Gold Line from downtown LA, and there are plans to double-track portions of Metrolink. Read more.

 

Those leaving include Doug Failing, director of Metro's highway programs, Roger Moliere, director of real estate, and CFO Terry Matsumoto and Real Estate. One source told the LA Times that paying fewer executive directors may help ease the agency's financial issues: Metro is facing an operating deficit of $36 million in 2016, and most executives earn more than $150,000 a year.

Read the LA Times story here.

Move LA is a co-sponsor. And there are scholarships, travel grants, and a sliding scale for registration ($25 to $100)!

Here's the deal: Join advocates and leaders from across California for 2 days in Sacramento to learn about and educate legislators about the need for more transportation choices. On Tuesday April 22 hear from leaders — including Senator Kevin de Leon, the heir apparent to Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg — in the movement for sustainable transportation, bike and ped safety and healthy neighborhoods. And strategize on important issues including Caltrans reform, cap & trade revenues, safer streets for bikes and pedestrians. (De Leon is the author of SB 535, which would require a minimum of 10% of Cap & Trade revenues to be invested in disadvantaged communities.) On Wednesday April 23 meet with legislators from around the state at the Capitol and let them know why transportation choices are so important.

Transform is a nonprofit organization based in Oakland. Find out more about the summit on their website.

 

Because Super Bowl ads often glorify cars and their drivers and because there are never any ads glorifying transit and transit riders, nextcity.org created this pretty awesome video. Next City is a nonprofit organization and online media publication "dedicated to connecting cities and informing the people who work to improve them."  Watch it on their website.

Apparently Amtrak is planning to offer “residencies” — long roundtrip train rides for free — to writers! Read more on The Wire blog.

U.S Rep. Bill Shuster, head of the powerful House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, hasn't been willing to commit to any particular proposal for funding transportation even though the Highway Trust Fund predicted to remain solvent only through September of this year. Lawmakers have been lining up behind various funding proposals, ranging from gas tax hikes to wholesale fees on oil. Yesterday Shuster stated his support for a VMT fee -- based on the number of vehicle miles traveled -- and said "Economically it is not the time" to raise the gas tax . . . Raising the gas tax would be by far the simplest and most popular option. Implementing a VMT fee will involve tracking vehicles in a way that many legislators object to.

READ MORE ON STREETSBLOG.

David Abel’s annual VerdeXchange conference -- the 7th annual held in the LA Hotel Downtown last week – is a place where high-profile decision-makers come together to publicly discuss and debate LA’s green future and the global green economy with this subtext: Markets in California are opportunity-rich. Speakers ranging from LA Mayor Eric Garcetti to UC President Janet Napolitano to Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols discussed topics ranged from “Are American Utilities in a Death Spiral?” to “Micro Apartments, Pop-up Retail and 3D Printed Houses” to “The High Desert Corridor: Sustainable, Multi-Purpose Infrastructure.” That highway and/or rail corridor, to hone in on the transportation discussion, would connect high-speed rail from San Francisco to Palmdale with high-speed rail (to be built with private investment) from Victorville to Las Vegas, with wind turbines providing the energy. “What we’re really talking about is rebuilding California’s highway system as electric rail,” said CA High Speed Rail Authority CEO Jeff Morales. “We want to connect San Francisco and Las Vegas and Los Angeles through Palmdale, where the Palmdale Metrolink line can bring high speed rail down to LA's Union Station." He said the XpressWest high speed rail line to Las Vegas could take 19 million cars off the road from LA to Vegas each year.

Move LA’s Denny Zane spoke on a panel entitled “Sustainable Transportation: Trains, Trucks, Buses and Fleets,” moderated by former California Assembly Speaker Pro Tempore Fiona Ma. Panelists included LA County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, SoCal Edison’s Edward Kjaer, Cliff Gladstein of Gladstein, Neandross and Associates, and Stella Li of BYD, a Chinese manufacturer of electric cars and buses. Gladstein released a report showing that despite the fact that California is ahead of the pack when it comes to clean air regulations, the state will still not meet federally mandated air quality deadlines – which will require an acceleration of the commercialization and deployment of ultra-low emission heavy duty vehicles.

It was a good set-up for Denny to riff on the importance of paying down the incremental cost of zero/near-zero technology in order to help it penetrate the marketplace, adding that this is critical since “there are few sectors that generate as many jobs as goods movement, and it is a sector that is also fundamental to relieving traffic congestion.” Denny has been speculating on the possibility that a future sales tax measure could help pay down the incremental cost of clean-truck-only corridors, for example, as well as grade-separations and double-tracking that would disentangle passenger and freight rail.