On Sunday the Senate voted 57 to 32 to approve the omnibus spending bill, which included $2.5 billion for high-speed rail. The spending bill, which already passed the House, will go next to the President's desk for signature.

While the bill's $2.5 billion is less than the $4 billion for high-speed rail approved by the House in an earlier version of the spending bill this year, it exceeds the President's request for high-speed rail in his draft budget ($5 billion over 5 years). With this appropriation Congress has indicated their strong support for the nation's high-speed rail program.

The bill also included a small ray of hope for the Northeast Corridor, which has been excluded from applying for significant grants in the FRA's high-speed rail program because it lacks an up-to-date corridor-wide Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The spending bill includes $50 million for planning grants to states (with an 80/20 federal-state split). That $50 million is being eyed by states in the Northeast to fund their work on the Programmatic EIS in cooperation with the FRA and Amtrak in order to hasten the corridor's eligibility for funding in the FRA's High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail program. 

America 2050 Director Petra Todorovich discusses how the New York region may fare in a jobs bill being considered by President Obama and Congress and the importance of fully funding the New York MTA's five-year capital plan.

Reprinted from the Northeast-Midwest Institute
by Fritz Ohrenschall, Research Associate, Northeast-Midwest Institute

The Administration's "Stimulus Bill" - the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - provides $8 billion for high speed rail.  Unfortunately, the Northeast Rail Corridor faces major hurdles in receiving any of this money because the Federal Railroad Administration has yet to document, as required by law, the environmental impacts of revamping the corridor.
 
Recovery Act rail funding is allocated in two tracks.  Track 1 funds individual projects on a rail line.  Track 2 funds corridor-wide projects that will reduce trip times on that line.  Construction of corridor-wide enhancement on the Northeast Corridor would fall under Track 2 and will require that the Federal Railroad Administration prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement documenting the effects of such enhancements in order to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.  This document must be very comprehensive and it remains to be seen whether it can be completed before the statutory deadline for Recovery Act monies to be spent.
 
Recognizing that Recovery Act funding is critical to the nation's busiest rail corridor, the states along the corridor, as well as the Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility have requested that FRA expedite the impact statement and have volunteered to help with it.  Currently it is unclear whether the FRA can meet this challenge.

Download "Challenges to Northeast Corridor ARRA Funding."

Since 2007, America 2050 has held megaregion forums in seven of America's eleven megaregions nation-wide. There forums were held as part of a "Rebuilding and Renewing America" campaign, which aimed to build support for the infrastructure investments we need to guide America toward a sustainable and prosperous future. The forums aimed to achieve three goals:

• Build support around the country for an ambitious national infrastructure plan in the areas of  transportation, energy, and water.
• Identify and prioritize the key infrastructure priorities in the megaregions, which can act as building blocks to a national plan.
• Create megaregion coalitions to support these megaregion priorities and begin coordinating with each other.

Each megaregion prioritized slightly different issues and has followed up on the forum in varying degrees. To read about the megaregion forums and next steps, download the summary below. Also available is a PowerPoint presentation given by Petra Todorovich at the America 2050 national meeting, which also outlines common principles on federal policy that were emphasized in each of the megaregions.

Download the Summary of Megaregion Forums.

Download a PowerPoint about the Forums.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation today announced a grant of $400,000 over three years to Regional Plan Association for wildlife conservation in the Northeast Megaregion as part of the America 2050 initiative. The funds will be applied to a new project to improve the integration of nature conservation with land use planning and infrastructure investments in 13 states across the Northeast, from Maine to Virginia. This marks the first effort to coordinate regional landscape conservation at the megaregion scale, mirroring similar large-scale efforts focused on transportation planning and advocacy that are underway in the Northeast Megaregion.

Read the news release

Regional Plan Association has released program materials and audio files of the 19th Annual Regional Assembly, "America 2050: Building the Next Economy," held on Friday, April 17th at the Waldorf Astoria. Visitors can now recap the days events including keynote speeches by Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell, Moody's Chief Economist Mark Zandi and the presentation of the RPA lifetime Leadership Award to Richard Ravitch by New York Governor David Paterson. Additionally, audio files for each of the workshop panels is available. More materials, including presentations and transcripts will be posted this week as they become available. We'll be announcing the releases on Twitter, so be sure to follow us there.
Regional Assembly Program
Speaker Biographies
RPA Membership Card
America 2050: Why We Need a Trans-American Network
America 2050 Infrastructure Report (PDF 9.3MB)
The Future of the Northeast Corridor (PDF 1.8MB)

The Day's Audio (all in MP3 Format):
See the full post for audio from all sessions.

Welcome and Introduction (15m)

The Business Alliance for Northeast Mobility, a coalition of more than 30 chambers of commerce and civic organizations, urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Appropriations Chairman David Obey in letters today to increase funding in the economic stimulus bill for transit and rail - the backbone of the Northeast economy. Increased funding will put people to work making necessary rail improvements and ensure the long-term economic competitiveness of the Northeast Megaregion. 

In a recently released report, the I-95 Corridor Coalition outlines a transportation vision for the eastern seaboard that would invest in a multimodal transportation system, reduce the carbon footprint of the region, and enhance the region's economic vitality and global competitiveness.  To accomplish this vision, the coalition calls for significant changes to the political, institutional, and financial arrangements that control transportation planning and funding.  For these goals to be realized it would require doubling fuel efficiency, tripling the transit ridership in the region, and increasing the intercity rail ridership by eight fold.  For an overview of the recommendations from the I-95 Coalition download the executive summary of the report here.