On May 29, Reconnecting America President & CEO John Robert Smith gave the morning keynote address at the Tennessee Obesity Task Force gathering in Nashville. Later, he was interviewed and that interview was recorded. Click on the links below to watch the video on each topic.

 With this bill Congress had the opportunity to establish a transportation program that would support communities' efforts to become more sustainable and economically resilient. Unfortunately, the conference report missed this opportunity and is in many ways a retreat from these goals. While I am pleased to see that funding for public transit was preserved at current levels, rather than being cut by 30% as was proposed last year, and that some transit-oriented development (TOD) language was included, the bill could have done so much more to provide transportation choices for people in rural, suburban, and urban areas to connect them with jobs, education, healthcare, and opportunity.

Reconnecting America President and CEO John Robert Smith applauded today's award of nearly $600 million in Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) II construction and planning grants.

The United States needs to link transportation and climate change policies if it hopes to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions enough to ward off the worst impacts of global climate change, according to a new study by the Center for Clean Air Policy.

A trio of papers that look into transit ridership and the factors influence the decisions on how to get from here to there have been added to the Best Practices section. Office Development, Rail Transit, and Commuting Choices While housing is generally the focus of transit-oriented development discussions, job centers are equally important, according to a paper by Robert Cervero, professor and chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. "In the end, concentrating housing near rail stops will do little to lure commuters to trains and buses unless the other end of the trip—the workplace—is similarly convenient to and conducive to using transit.," Cervero concludes. In California, central business district office workers with rail stations nearby are nearly three times more likely to commute by transit than workers in decentralized employment centers. Factors…

The utilitarian 1970s-style streetscape of New York could be transformed into narrow European-style roadways shared by pedestrians, cyclists and cars, all traveling at low speeds under guidelines established by the city's first street design manual. And one of the first examples of this new vision will take shape near Times Square when a section of Broadway is turned into a pedestrian mall.