City officials were not pleased yesterday with the suggestion that a tax dedicated to Honolulu's $5.3 billion commuter rail project be diverted temporarily to help balance the state budget.

People are beginning to get that we can't have it all. A week ago, I asked Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato whether his transportation priority would be a light-rail link between Downtown and Oakland or completion of the Mon-Fayette to Pittsburgh and Monroeville, and he answered, "I think we need 'em both." That won't do with a president who says we need to make hard choices. Yesterday, he said if he had to pick, he'd opt for the light-rail extension in Pittsburgh. That should be an easier sell in Harrisburg and Washington. Mr. Biehler said, "I don't know where $5 billion comes from" to complete the Mon-Fayette. There had been talk of innovative public-private partnerships, but those proposals were made in the hallucinogenic easy-credit days of the recent past. Mr. Biehler doesn't foresee enough volume on this road to provide the toll money to pay for itself.

The Town of Chevy Chase's official comments (large PDF) on the Purple Line DEIS take up about 50 pages plus 90 pages of attachments. Citing many sources and statutes, it appears written by lawyers. Presumably that's the work of their pro bono attorneys from nationally prominent law firm Sidley Austin, whose policy of helping needy organizations seems to extend to DC's richest towns. The comments basically attack (or should we say, declare war on) Maryland MTA's analysis.

Elana Schor's got the quotes from Representative Jim Oberstar (D-MN) that indicate that the reason rail got so little funding in the stimulus proposal is that they were cut to make room for more tax cuts

Cleaner air over the past two decades has allowed Americans to live an average of 21 weeks longer. In areas such as New York that have dramatically changed air quality this has gone up to 43 weeks longer. Of course, we also know the cancer rates along freeways and highways are dramatically worse than elsewhere in Seattle.

Even before Inauguration Day had ended, Metro officials said ridership set a new record: people took 973,285 trips as of 7 p.m. The figure breaks the all-time rail ridership record of 866,681, which was set yesterday on Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Some Denver-area mayors analyzing options for RTD's financially strapped FasTracks program said voters in their communities will rebel if construction of some lines advances while their lines are delayed. "We think all corridors need to share costs," Broomfield Mayor Pat Quinn said Tuesday at a meeting of the Metro Mayors Caucus' FasTracks committee. "We feel you can't put a corridor totally to the back of the pack." Last year, the Regional Transportation District said costs of the FasTracks program had ballooned to $7.9 billion, about $2 billion more than the agency expects to have on hand for construction of six new train lines by 2017.

Changes to a federal transportation plan could one day return that once familiar 'clang-clang-clang' to local streets. The New York City Transportation Committee recently announced the addition of a project to investigate the potential for light rail, trolley or similar "rail-based community development" in Red Hook and Downtown Brooklyn. The committee is a component of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, which is housed within the state DOT. In September, the council held a series of federally mandated workshops seeking to shape a plan intended to guide the next 25 years of transportation improvements.

In response to the current economic crisis, the Obama administration has pledged to pass an aggressive economic recovery bill to create jobs and jumpstart the U.S. economy. President Obama requested that the proposed legislation be completed by the time he takes office. Last week, Democrats in the House of Representatives revealed their economic recovery package, which calls for $90 billion in roads, bridges, waterways, and transit infrastructure investments. Public transportation capital investments would receive $10 billion under this proposal and $30 billion would go for highway construction.

Traffic backed up for miles in the pre-dawn hours outside transit centers. Trains bulged, often turning away passengers. Many people shuffled along jam-packed streets, searching for a way through security checkpoints and onto the National Mall. Hundreds of thousands -- if not millions of people -- poured into downtown Washington to see the inauguration of President Barack Obama Tuesday. They did so via foot, bike, bus or rickshaw because the major highways and bridges into town were blocked by armored vehicles and barricades. "Millions on the mall, few out on the freeway," is how Bob Marburg, an area traffic reporter, described the scene.

The $700-plus billion recovery package being hashed out in Congress has tremendous potential to revive the American economy. But if it moves ahead as designed, I fear it will also further entrench many long-standing inequities of American life.

We discussed the text of the stimulus bill yesterday, decrying its rather limited investment in transit, and the fact that it would allocate far less to transit and high-speed rail projects than would have Congressman Jim Oberstar's Rebuild America proposal, even while maintaining the level of support planned for highways. Now the Wall Street Journal reports that some congressmen, especially those on the Transportation Committee, are calling foul:

The most eye-catching aspect of yesterday's package of rail announcements is the establishment of a company to plan and build Britain's second dedicated high-speed rail line. High Speed 2 will be set up to explore the options for a rail line heading west out of London to a new Heathrow International hub near the airport, before going on initially to the West Midlands, but possibly eventually to Scotland.

Democratic governors are slamming environmental advocates, in one of the first fights to break out within the Democratic party over the shape of the stimulus bill being fashioned by Congress and the new Obama administration. The governors want money pumped into roads and bridges. Environmentalists say that just means more cars, and therefore more pollution, and want greener initiatives instead.

Eden Prairie envisions a new "town center'' in its future, and Wal-Mart -- to the company's dismay -- has a store right in the middle of it. Wal-Mart has urged Eden Prairie to alter its redevelopment plans for the area north of Eden Prairie Mall to take its store out of the plan. The city's concept calls for smaller, pedestrian-oriented businesses forming a new 100-acre downtown that would completely encompass the current Wal-Mart site. An all-new "Main Street" would even cut right across Wal-Mart's existing parking lot.

The Utah Transit Authority spent at least $48,000 last month taking nine managers and board members, a business booster and three mayors on a weeklong tour of six European streetcar systems. The itinerary: Vienna, Munich, Zurich, Nice and Bordeaux, with incidental stops in Monaco and Paris. The goal: peruse state-of-the-art trains unlike any used in North America and consider them as possible connectors that can share traffic lanes with cars to link with Utah's expanding light-rail system. The travel tab: An estimated $3,700 a head -- all from UTA tax dollars.

Google has announced that its maps program, offered at maps.google.com, will now visualize transit lines, something it had not previously offered. As you can see in the images to the right (London above, Paris below), the maps program has added "Transit" to the "More" tap located at the top right of the map window. The result is fantastic: geographic representations of transit lines in fifty cities around the world. Previously, Google had simply incorporated station sites into the maps - this addition provides a whole new interface and allows people to forgo official transit maps entirely as they plan their commutes.

StreetsBlog (www.streetsblog.org) isn't your average blog, but rather a well-funded institution that helped promote and propel a major transformation that has taken place on New York City streets since the site was founded in 2006, sparking rapid and substantial improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians. In the process, StreetsBlog - which is part of the Livable Streets Network, along with StreetFilms and the StreetsWiki, started by urban cyclist Mark Gordon, founder of the popular file-sharing site LimeWire - developed a loyal following among alternative transportation planners and advocates in cities across the United States.

In case you missed it, the New York Times gave Oregon congressman Earl Blumenauer and his work to get more Americans on their bikes the profile treatment in Tuesday's paper. Of course, it would have been easy to flip past the piece, entitled "A Bicycle Evangelist With the Wind Now at His Back." It was tucked inside the weekly Science section.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer was at a commuter rail luncheon in Charlotte on Wednesday. Earlier in the morning, he and other regional leaders toured that city's one-year-old light rail train system. Before flying to Charlotte, the Central Florida Commuter Rail Commission unveiled SunRail's new logo (see logo) and gave out canvas bags at Orlando International Airport.