Transportation Nation

"GM to investors: You can bet on our team" (Detroit Free Press)

Obama Administration plays big role in share offering of General Motors (WSJ)

Former car czar Rattner says plunging $20B into GM "effective," worries about IPO market (CNN)

UK study shows predominantly white communities have 11 times more parks, gardens and playing fields than others (Guardian)

More airlines offering front rows of economy seats, for extra fees (WSJ's Middle Seat)

Switchgrass?  Algae?  Batteries?  Future of energy could be in nanotubes (NY Times)

Big Three brands Lincoln-Mercury, Buick best European brands in consumer auto survey (Detroit Free Press)

In Wisconsin, GOP primary opponents agree that they'd halt high-speed rail.  One candidate says he'd return federal money.  (Milwaukee Public Radio)

New Haven-Springfield line gets $260 million in Connecticut; feds could add more (CT Post)

SF Bay Area , Pittsburgh among those facing public over transit cuts this week.

Siemens takes high-speed rail message directly to public at airports (Streets Blog)

Democratic candidate for governor in Texas says he won't rule out higher debt, taxes to bring new road projects.  (AP)

Even before the election of David Cameron, the UK has been bracing the austerity measures it must undertake to save the nation's economy.  One of the moves already made is to put Britain's only high-speed rail route -- the railroad connecting London to the tunnel under the English Channel -- up for sale.  As many as six firms have bid on it, reports the Wall Street Journal.  It's everyone from Goldman Sachs to a group of Canadian pension funds.  The price to run it for 30 years?  Could be more than $3 billion. -- Collin Campbell

New train service could go from London to Frankfurt in four hours, in time for Olympics (Telegraph)

UK rail fares could go up 10 percent off inflation fear (Guardian)

Bus seat belt rule proposed by Obama administration‎ (Dallas Morning News)

Former TSA supervisor stole from luggage at Sea-Tac Airport (Seattle Times)

Texas takes first step toward high-speed-rail funds‎ (Fort Worth Star Telegram)

GAO finds states getting fair share, even in transportation funding vacuum. How? (New Republic/Brookings)

The crash was fit for a rallying cry.  On October 11, 2009, Carmen Huertas was driving six children to her house for a slumber party.  She had been drinking, and, one of the kids in the car said, asked her young passengers to raise their hands if they thought "we're gonna get into an accident."

Huertas did crash the car, and the result was the death of 11-year-old Leandra Rosado.  As he grieved, her father started a campaign to make New York state's laws the toughest in the nation.  A month later, a new law was unanimously passed in Albany, and signed by the governor.

"Leandra's Law" as its now called, makes it a felony to drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs while carrying passengers age 15 and under.  It went into effect statewide on Sunday.  UCLA transportation scholar Eric A. Morris says it does something even more important, however.

It requires any driver convicted of DWI to install an ignition interlock system on any car they drive.

Dept of Energy not spending stimulus smartly, even as more money comes it way (The Hill)

Chicago Transit Authority averages one bus collision per day‎ (Chicago Tribune)

Why don't women run automakers?  (Automotive News)

CA high-speed rail opponents on the Peninsula ready lawsuits, ballot measures (SJ Mercury News)

Fight brewing over one-cent transportation sales tax in GA (Atlanta Journal Constitution)

Do rule-obiding casual carpoolers chip in for new Bay Bridge toll?  (SF Chronicle)

Flight attendants at Turkish Airlines told to lose weight or lose their jobs (Economist)

(Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation)  Stephen B. Goddard, in his (very excellent) book Getting There, aptly compared the Highway Trust Fund to a perpetual motion machine. Devised in 1956 to pay for the Interstate Highway System, the HTF, as it’s often abbreviated, pooled gas taxes and other automobile-related revenues and spit them right back out as construction money for more highways, the presence of which encouraged more driving and therefore more revenue, and so on.  As Goddard tells it, the HTF was more of an engineering marvel than the roads it built: “It satisfied those who wanted spending linked to revenues, those opposed to diversion [of gas tax monies to non-highway purposes], and congressmen, who would now have one less vote to justify at election time.”

The magical self-feeding road beast did its thing for fifty years, but now, as transportation writer Yonah Freemark laid out last week, it’s become a much more complicated mechanism.

It's was a wonderful piece of reporting this week in the Middle Seat column of the Wall Street Journal: a review of DOT data, yielding what amounts to an MPG rating for the airlines.  Alaska came out on top, with a bit of luck (like being West Coast-based) and some good practices (like shutting down engines quickly at the gate).  The worst guzzlers turn out to the three biggest U.S. carriers.

But here's the big question: would information like this -- that getting you from LAX to JFK sucks around 10 gallons more fuel on Delta than it does on JetBlue on average -- cause you to change who you buy your ticket from?  Let us know in the comments.

Runaway London tube train goes four miles without driver‎ (BBC News)

Investigators begin to doubt JetBlue flight attendant's story of provocation (WSJ)

Holocaust ties come up in CA high-speed rail, may hurt French bidder (AP)

First look at overhauled Ford Mustang.  Can good gas mileage come with a supercharged V-8?  (Chicago Tribune)

What better place than tech-savvy and traffic-choked San Francisco to work up a way to automatically ticket poorly-parked cars?  Cameras mounted on MUNI buses capture vehicles parked in transit lanes, loading zones and double parked cars, then generate citations.  Mayor Gavin Newsom pumped it up as a way to ease traffic and speed up transit.  But the plan seems to have failed in the most basic way. -- Collin Campbell

GM announced its strongest quarter since 2004 this morning on a conference call.  It was the automaker's big moment, to affirm a comeback from bankruptcy and a loss of almost $13 billion, on year ago.  After analysts and reporters tried to pick apart those numbers, Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre Jr. had one more big announcement: he was stepping down.  Replacing him is Dan Akerson, a G.M. board member put in by the Treasury Department, with a background in finance and telecom.

David Shepardson of the Detroit News was the first to cast doubts, perhaps only as a Motor City man can: "Why did the board choose Dan as opposed to looking outside or picking someone else with auto experience?"  The answer failed to satisfy us, and Shepardson's follow-up catches some silence on the other end of the line.  -- Collin Campbell

Photo: Jackie Yamanaka

(Billings, MT -- Jackie Yamanaka) Billings, Montana has had some pretty scary streets for bikes and pedestrians, but officials there are hoping to change that. The Billings Chamber of Commerce is launching a new bike and pedestrian trail system, and held a ribbon-cutting this week at what will be a bike/pedestrian trail under Montana's busiest highway. The City of Billings Alternate Transportation Modes Coordinator, Darlene Tussing, says safety is important for cyclists, but it's not the only reason to build trails.

"When we're in a car with our windshield in front of us and our metal around us we fell like we're hunkered in in this little -- when you're out on the trail and on your bicycle there's no barriers. It really does make a very strong social networking opportunity for the community."

Audio here.

One year after losing almost $13 billion and going bankrupt, GM reports $1.3 billion in profit (WSJ)

Early probe results show no cause for sticking gas pedals; Toyota lawsuits to be a challenge‎ (Detroit Free Press)

Pelosi, LaHood attend high-speed rail groundbreaking in San Francisco, (SF Chronicle)

NTSB urges Coast Guard to fight distracted boating, especially among its officers (USA Today)

CA budget impasse threatens $3 billion in transportation projects, DOT warns (SF Chronicle)

How do you spell "school" outside such a building in North Carolina? PIC (Yahoo)

(Washington, DC -- David Schultz, WAMU) The role of the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, is a bit like that of a Greek chorus. The Board comes in after a tragedy has occurred and explains it to the audience - or, in this case, the general public.

That was its role in the case of last year's deadly train crash in Washington D.C.'s Metro, which killed eight passengers and one train operator. After a comprehensive investigation lasting more than a year, the NTSB released its final report on the crash late last month, amid much media attention.

The report laid bare all the factors that contributed to the train crash - not just technical malfunctions, but pervasive systemic mismanagement within Metro. It represented yet another day of negative headlines for Metro after a year of almost nothing but.

The legacy of the train crash hasn't simply been the nine lives it took. The crash ushered in a new era for Metro, in which it's struggled mightily to win back the trust of its riders. And despite the its exhaustive efforts, the NTSB can't offer Metro much help in doing this.

This is Minnesota's most crash-prone stretch of freeway, a half-mile, westbound portion of Interstate 94 on the south side of downtown Minneapolis. Cars from multiple lanes and another freeway mix and merge where the roadway curves and dips, taking many rush hour drivers by surprise. (MPR Photo/Dan Olson)

(St. Paul, Minn. - Dan Olson, MPR News) The number of deaths on Minnesota's highways is at a six-decade low -- 421 last year -- due in large part to improved technology, experts say. There's a lot of technology just around the corner that will save even more lives: ways to alert drivers to "lane drift," gizmos that slow speeding drivers, shut down all cell phones except for 911 calls, or email parents at home if a young driver is violating Minnesota's graduated driver's license rules by being out too late or has too many passengers in the car.

More from MPR News.

(Houston, TX - Wendy Siegle, KUHF News Lab)  Now that we're no longer fixated on what arcane technique BP will use next to end the flow of oil into the gulf, attention is even more focused on the aftermath of the spill. But questions aren't just raised over the extent of the environmental damage. Many expect the disaster to have a transforming effect on the landscape of the oil industry as a whole.

Anger at BP is widespread across the country. Esmeralda Gomez works at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University. She offers a typical sentiment.

"I was devastated. It's just something that seems very irreversible. Not a whole lot of trust in BP right now."

Listen:

The impact of the spill on BP itself is likely to be huge. The company has announced its intention to sell off $30 billion worth of assets over the next 18 months to fund liabilities arising from the disaster. Speculation has centered on whether the more than century-old company will survive the event. But the impact on the industry itself is not likely to be nearly as dramatic. Despite widespread anger at BP, most polls show that continued deepwater drilling is fairly popular among Americans. Still, there will be some changes. Bobby Tudor is the CEO of a Houston-based energy investment firm.

Courtesy: Ruth Wallach, USC Libraries

The misery of driving on LA's freeways is well known.  At times, the traffic isn't even the worst part -- it's the smog, the scenery, the utter lack of anything else to look at, besides the bumper of the car in front of you.  Sadly, this is about to get worse.

After fighting an onslaught of graffiti for years, California's Department of Transportation says it can no longer restore and maintain LA's famous freeway murals.  Started with CalTrans' permission around the 1984 Olympics, the murals have been a point of artistic pride, Chicano identity and the cultural landscape of LA.  Now, at best, some will be turned into vinyl banners. -- Collin Campbell, TN

More from Southern California Public Radio.

Boeing now has more cancellations than new orders in 2010 for Dreamliner (AP)

Tribune puts out list of Chicago's 10 worst transportation blunders.

Cost will be highest hurdle for high-speed rail (Philly Inquirer, four part series)

State and local money done, Denver looks to feds to finish "T-REX" rail and road project (Denver Post)

Good takes a look at San Francisco's new parking pricing system, designed by Adam Smith.

And the New York Times over the weekend looks at how Clayton County Georgia and other localities, facing budget shortfalls, have axed public transit entirely....and how red light cameras are becoming an issue in the 2010 elections.

(Matt Dellinger, Transportation Nation) The highway megaproject, an animal still thriving in China and other developing countries, has become something of an endangered species here in America. This has a little bit to do with actual endangered species—and more specifically the environmental laws we put in place to protect them. It also has a lot to do with money, which is kinda tight these days: The Highway Trust Fund is famously broke, and the transportation reauthorization bill is stalled because there’s no consensus on how to make up for anemic gas tax revenues.

But despite all of this—and despite the fact that, technically, the interstate construction program ended in the mid-1990s—the biggest new interstate of the post-interstate era is still struggling its way into existence up and down the middle of the country.

California high-speed rail unveils "Berlin Wall" plan for Peninsula (SJ Mercury News)

LaHood defends Ohio rail plan, attacked by state's Republicans (AP)

Austin will put $90 million transportation bond on the November ballot, somehow without raising taxes (Austin American-Statesman)

Mexicana suspends ticket sales, awarded bankruptcy protection (AFP)

School bus, fitted with jet engine, does 367 MPH [video!]‎ (Telegraph)