(Photo: Baucus '08)

"There’s no doubt that this Congress is going to pass climate change legislation," he said. "I don’t know if it’s going to be this year. Probably next year."

Baucus' Finance Committee became a thorn in the side of progressives during this year's health care debate, holding lengthy talks with Republicans that ultimately proved fruitless and voting down a public option for the uninsured.

But Finance isn't all bad news for clean transportation -- Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), transit's biggest guardian on the environment panel, is a member of Baucus' committee, as are pro-transit Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Charles Schumer (D-NY). Another Finance member, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), recently signed on to Carper's plan setting aside 10 percent of future climate revenue for transit.

That said, the witness list for Baucus' Tuesday hearing on climate change and job creation looks oddly devoid of a "green jobs" representative, from the transit industry or elsewhere.

The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, part of the AFL-CIO, is testifying and did support the House climate bill that passed earlier this year. Another witness comes from Pacific Gas & Electric, a utility that quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to show its belief in the need to act on climate change.

The remaining three witnesses hail from the Nuclear Energy Institute, the American Council for Capital Formation -- a clearinghouse of climate critics that has received more than $1.6 million from Exxon since 1998 -- and the American Enterprise Institute, which has taken $2.5 million from Exxon since 1998 and offered cash to scientists who would dispute United Nations findings on climate.

House transportation chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) (Photo: STLToday)

For weeks, we've heard senior Democrats and the transit industry make the case for more transportation spending as a potent job creator, but the lack of funding for a full six-year bill has kept the conversation stalled.

But two things have happened in the week since Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) floated the idea of a "front-loaded" infrastructure plan that would concentrate investment in the first two years:

• The defeat of two Democratic candidates in Tuesday's off-year elections reinforced that job creation and economic worries are the No. 1 concerns for voters.
• Gross domestic product may be rebounding, but unemployment decidedly is not.

This adds up to renewed interest in fast-tracking a new transportation bill, perhaps with a two-year window. As House transport committee chairman Jim Oberstar (D-MN) told David Rogers of Politico, "The concrete is cracking."

But even if the White House is prepared to abandon its insistence on an 18-month extension of current law, how to pay for new transportation legislation remains a very open question. House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC), for his part, told Rogers that he likes the sound of Rep. Pete DeFazio's (D-OR) proposed tax on Wall Street oil speculators:

There are some painless ways to fund the highway bill. Transaction taxes, that’s a painless way ... Where are the shared contributions to all this? If you’re sitting there on Wall Street, if you’re Goldman Sachs, if you’re making all this money, if you got all this federal money [in a] bailout, and you are paying all these big bonuses to your folks, where is your contribution to this recovery? That’s why it’s painless.

Clyburn's reference to the "highway" bill brings up another lingering mystery about the type of transportation spending being envisioned by senior Democrats. If the White House does agree to support a new infrastructure bill after health care is finished, will it include policy changes or just new money?

Because, as Clyburn inadvertently acknowledges, simply adding more money to the framework of the 2005 infrastructure law would help highways but do little to move the nation towards a more rational mix of transit and roads. Oberstar's pending six-year bill, by contrast, would institute an array of reforms, cutting 75 funding categories from the current system and allowing more "flex-ing" of road money for use on transit.

If a front-loaded bill is passed with some of the policy changes offered by Oberstar, job creation and a more accountable national transportation system could start moving hand-in-hand. If a front-loaded bill is passed but scrubbed of any substantive reform, jobs may be created but voters will still be sitting in traffic.

Late Update: House Republicans are making noise about using unspent money from this winter's economic stimulus law to bolster infrastructure projects, which comprised just 6 percent of the stimulus' $787 billion price tag. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) said at a press conference today:

And so I'd like to see us go to the back end of where the stimulus is going, to be inflating more government programs ... scrape that money out and put it into infrastructure, which we know [is] the job creator.

The concept of tapping the stimulus is one that Republicans have floated for months, including in legislative form when the nation's highway trust fund was nearing insolvency over the summer. The problem, then as now, is that senior Democrats such as House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI) are staunchly opposed to diverting funds from the massive recovery bill.

Later Update: Politico's article cites Oberstar as arguing for "an upfront investment of $80 billion over two years" in transportation. But it's worth noting that the transportation chairman has not formally endorsed that figure, according to his office.

Stephen Box at SoapBox LA reports:

These kids from the West Side of LA were determined to let the city know what they think about bike commuting.

The FIRSTteamWestside (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a group of kids who prepared a presentation that they intended to give at the Bike Plan (draft) workshops.

Their mission was to develop a plan to improve local transportation. They did the research and they prepared and they discovered that the public workshops were not the robust public arena they desired, so they adapted.

Their coach reports, "The kids were hoping to give a presentation at one of the "public forums" but were badly disappointed when they found out that members of the public would not be allowed to speak so they posted it on YouTube and submitted the link at labikeplan.org."…

The kids gave an amazingly articulate and informed statement, recommending additional bike cars for the region's commuter rail system. The message: the future is coming.

More from the network: The Transport Politic looks at the importance of aligning transitways with walkable neighborhoods. On Transport discusses the concept of "lifestyle centers" and their aspirations to create a sense of community in a suburban mall setting. And Intersection 911 reports on the 38 percent bump in Philadelphia bike commuting during the SEPTA strike.

(Photo: One Penny Sheet)

In the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday, Democratic elder statesman Rep. John Dingell (MI) called on his colleagues to "exercise a modicum of restraint" as they considered how to prod states to ban texting and cell phone use behind the wheel. Dingell said (emphasis mine):

Although we share a justified measure of concern about the relationship between use of certain technological devices and driver safety, we have to guard against enthusiastically enacting overly prescriptive statutes and directing creation of regulatory regimes that in the long term may stifle innovation and ultimately show them to be of marginal benefit to the cause of improving driver safety.

Dingell's tepid view of the federal role in limiting distracted driving should not come as a surprise to most, given his stalwart support for the U.S. auto industry. But Ford has already endorsed legislation that takes a punitive approach to banning texting while driving, potentially offering political cover to lawmakers who want to follow suit.

Still, few Democrats offered distinct words of support for pending legislation that would yank 25 percent of highway funding from states which fail to crack down on drivers' gadget use.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Energy and Commerce's chairman, wondered "whether hands-free devices are any safer than hand-held," suggesting that any attempt to entice states into passing hands-free laws might ultimately do little for road safety.

On the GOP side, however, there was no shortage of lawmakers urging Washington to stay out of it and let states go their own way on distracted driving. (Of the 18 states with laws on the books banning texting behind the wheel, four lack basic tools for enforcement.)

"I think that sometimes we grow very weary of the long arm of the federal government telling us what we can and cannot do, and we are at the same time very concerned about what we see as the distraction that is there from utensils, and innovations, and gadgets, and items in our cars that do distract us from watching the road," Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said.

Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) disputed the merits of a bill endorsed by three Republican senators that would offer grant money to states which pass anti-distracted driving laws.

"While this [incentive-based] approach may be better, I do not believe the federal government needs to have an all-out federal program at this time," Stearns said.

Lawmakers took a purely incentive-based approach to promoting the passage of state-level mandatory seat belt laws; as a result, enforcement of those rules has proven spotty. Congress' punitive approach to promoting state drunk driving laws, by contrast, resulted in broad compliance, with no state losing federal highway money.

Another hot topic in Energy and Commerce was the role technology might play in curbing distracted driving. Steve Largent, a former member of Congress who now heads the wireless industry's trade group, said that he knows of "six or seven companies" working on applications that would shut down cell phones when a user attempts to activate them in a vehicle going more than five miles per hour.

• What's the real lesson of this past Election Day? That ballot measures for transportation investment do well (Morning News)
  

• Blumenauer introduces a bill that would expand Safe Routes to School to high schools (Bike Portland)
  

• For fuel-efficient cars to command the U.S. market, auto executives say they need one thing to happen first: a gas tax hike (Reuters)

• But speaking of the gas tax, hopes for a state-wide increase in New Jersey are looking D.O.A. thanks to the election of GOP gubernatorial candidate Chris Christie (Bloomberg)
  

• You know about the distracted driving debate, but Congress may act more quickly to curb distracted flying (Dorgan Press)
  

• Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (R), facing a conservative challenge in his 2010 U.S. Senate bid, calls for a special state legislative session to consider commuter rail funding -- and with it, a greater shot at federal high-speed rail money (AP)
  

Crowding is just one indignity transit users have to face. Others include inadequate bus shelters, nonexistent or vandalized seating, blocked entrances -- you know the stuff.

Send us your pictures of crummy transit service and infrastructure where you live and we'll put together a new slide show. You can e-mail JPEGs to me at sarah [at] streetsblog [dot] org, or tag them with "streetsblog" and "transitfail" in Flickr. Get your submissions in by next Thursday.

Senate Commerce Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) (Photo: AP)

While the bill reported out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee today is in some ways better than the bill that passed the House in June ... it remains a woefully disproportionate response to the tremendous economic, security and public health threats posed by global warming.

The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulated carbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who brought us the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve global warming. The bill showers polluting corporations with billions of dollars, but doesn’t require them to reduce pollution fast enough to avoid devastating climate change impacts. And it contains massive carbon offset loopholes that would allow U.S. polluters to keep polluting by paying for often-non-existent pollution reductions overseas. Other loopholes, such as excluding pollution from bioenergy, also undermine the bill’s intent.

Plenty of folks in the green advocacy world are more open to working within the Senate's framework -- the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, to name a few. But the lack of a unified front from environmental advocates, which reared its head during the House climate debate over the summer, risks amplifying the lack of a unified front among the very same Democrats who must help bring the bill over the finish line.

The Senate is a singularly cautious place that often seems tousled by the slightest shift in the political winds; witness Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who hails from coal country and mused yesterday that he doesn't "think people in my state are going to stand up and start cheering about Copenhagen," where global pollution reduction talks will open next month.

Simply put, the more schisms begin to show in the Senate climate debate, the more lawmakers such as Rockefeller may push to de-emphasize the issue.

Virginia Gov.-elect McDonnell (R) at his first press conference yesterday. (Photo: Virginian-Pilot)

What's the first item on McCartney's list? Sadly, it's "Find money for roads." He seems to be using the "road" frame even to refer to transit projects:

McDonnell should lock in dedicated funding for the Metrorail system and ensure that the Silver Line is built to Dulles Airport and beyond. He should add the proposed high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes on interstates 395 and 95. He should do something for I-66, too, although admittedly our region is sharply divided on whether to widen it inside the Beltway.

In fact, the region is just as sharply divided over whether to add HOT lanes to those two highway, a project that was put on hold in August and faces legal threats from local residents.

As David Alpert has observed, there's a big difference between constructing new HOT lanes (which ultimately encourages more congestion and has yet to pay for itself) and converting existing lanes to variable tolling (which has shown it can make money). McCartney's column makes no attempt to acknowledge that distinction.

On the subject of Metrorail, the nation's only transit system without a dedicated revenue stream, McDonnell's transport plan is mum about the importance of making sure the federal government follows through on its recent authorization of $150 million in annual matching funds.

Meanwhile, the White House budget for next year did not include money for Metrorail -- Congress later added the money, but the bill has yet to be signed into law. McCartney's urging that the governor-elect "lock in" dedicated transit money is a sound one, but it makes one wonder why the Post waited until after Election Day to press the issue.

Portland Transport has a post on the connection between cul-de-sac development and safety for all street users, as discussed at the Congress for the New Urbanism Transportation Summit in Portland.

What are the dangers of cul-de-sac development? (Photo: TheMuuj via Flickr.)

For me the highlight presentation on opening day…was about the safety effects of different street network types.

The study was based on looking at all cities in California with population of 40,000 or greater. The surprising finding was that cities built before 1950 are safer (in terms of both serious injuries and fatalities for all classes of users: auto drivers/passengers, cyclists and pedestrians) than cities built after 1950.

The differences appears to be in the type of street network. Compact street grids seem to be safer, compared to the arterial-collector-local street 'tree' style of street network popular in post-war development.

No link to the study itself yet, but we're interested in hearing more.

More from around the network: Urban City Architecture launches a series of posts on the pressing issue of pedestrian safety in Miami. Bello Velo reports on a new driver education campaign designed to improve cyclist safety in Huntsville, Alabama. And Copenhagenize is looking for your opinion on the safety of daylight headlight requirements.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (Photo: AP)

The environment panel's chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) had offered Republicans several days to abandon their walkout, promising time to consider GOP amendments and a complete Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) modeling of the bill before it comes to the Senate floor.

But environment committee Republicans were unmoved, insisting on an immediate five-week delay for EPA analysis despite testimony from the EPA that such work would produce little new information. Boxer's GOP counterpart on the panel, Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), seemed to delight in forcing the chairman's hand as he labeled the no-amendments move the "nuclear option."

The question now becomes whether the specific proposals added by Boxer's panel -- including grant programs for transit and clean transportation that nearly triple the funding approved by the House -- can survive a long slog through as many as five other committees.

Boxer insisted this morning that "many things in this bill ... are going to be part of that comprehensive bill" that ultimately reaches a full Senate vote. But others on the committee acknowledged that the bill's one-party approval would not bode well for its political prospects.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), the chief sponsor of efforts to boost the climate bill's clean transportation provisions, described himself as "very, very, very disappointed," particularly given the loss of a chance to amend the legislation.

Carper submitted an amendment that would have added more than $400 million to the bill's annual set-aside of climate money for transit, inter-city rail, local land use planning and other projects.  "I don't like this process," Carper said this morning. "I don't think any of us do."

The question now becomes whether Sen. Lindsey Graham (SC), the lone Republican who has shown willingness to work with Democrats on the climate bill, can provide the momentum needed to overcome the Senate's molasses-slow pace.

Even if Graham's work produces an end result that can win over liberals and centrists, the billions of dollars that the environment committee devotes to transportation is not guaranteed to survive that process.

The lone vote against the environment committee's climate bill came from Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Finance Committee -- which has asserted jurisdiction over the apportionment of valuable climate "allowances" to various sectors of the economy, including transportation.

Late Update: While the environment panel was finishing up its work on the bill, Inhofe was giving an interview to Fox News (which mistakenly labeled it the "energy committee"). Inhofe called Baucus' no vote a sign that the bill is "dead" and claimed that this summer's conservative protests at town-hall meetings were driven as much by concern over the climate bill as over the health care bill. Check out the video below:

• A local editorial board calls on Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to push Congress' high-speed rail investment to $4 billion (Merc News)
  

• U.S. DOT and the Federal Communications Commission team up to seek technological solutions to distracted driving ... congressional action, meanwhile, remains up in the air for now (Net World)
  

• Newsweek is "very pleased" to be co-hosting an energy briefing with the chief of Big Oil's lobbying arm?! (TPMmuckraker)
  

• Illinois governor skips meeting with transit officials on possible service cuts and fare hikes, heads to D.C. instead (Trib Blog)
  

Chicago's earliest rail transit line, pictured here, was run by a private company. (Photo: Franzosenbusch Project)

Although Amtrak based its challenge on Keolis' inexperience operating American rail lines, the latter company maintains a sizable transit presence as a subsidiary of SNCF, the French national high-speed railway.

Moreover, Keolis submitted a notably lower bid to take over VRE operations, undercutting Amtrak by $500,000 on first-year transition costs and $300,000 in annual operating costs. The French-owned company's winning bid totaled $85 million for five years, offering VRE workers the option of shifting to another Amtrak line or staying on under the new management.

Looking beyond the local implications of VRE's switch to Keolis, the new contract is part of a larger trend toward transit privatization that has seen recent deals struck in New Orleans, Savannah, and Phoenix. The Obama administration is encouraging greater use of public-private partnerships to help fund and operate transport networks, making these agreements something of a portent.

But substantial hurdles remain to the effective participation of private companies in the business of transit. Independent auditors at the Government Accountability Office submitted a report [PDF] to Congress last week after taking a yearlong look at how the federal transit funding process affects the ability of local officials to join forces with the private sector.

And what the GAO found was a whole lot of hurdles, many of them unique to the cumbersome rules of Washington's New Starts transit program. From the report (emphasis mine):

Consultants to the Dulles Silver Line project sponsor told us that through the New Starts process, [the Federal Transit Administration] has complete control over a project’s schedule, and project sponsors have to put project work on hold while waiting for FTA’s approval to advance into the next project phase. They also told us that construction activities on the Dulles Silver Line could not begin until the approval of a full funding grant agreement — as design and construction activities cannot be completed at the same time — and so some of the time-saving benefits of the design-build approach were lost.

Dulles Silver Line sponsors also nearly lost the tax-increment financing that was intended to fund the project, according to the GAO, when a full funding agreement under New Starts took five years instead of the estimated two or three. A similar situation arose in Houston, where a public-private partnership on a local light rail network told auditors "that FTA required them to submit and resubmit entire project documents to FTA multiple times, which led to delays."

By contrast, private participation in new transit projects on the international level has included equity financing in addition to operations and maintenance of the new lines. Citing World Bank data, the GAO found international public-private transit projects in the United Kingdom, Thailand, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, France, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Given the already considerable obstacles to successful public-private partnerships in U.S. transit -- the need for private companies to cede the right to hike fares, for one -- it would seem grievously counter-productive to keep a system in place that impedes the use of the same "creative" financing methods being urged by President Obama.

But for now, the New Starts funding process remains in effect and providing that disincentive. The GAO's report recommends that the FTA introduce more flexibility into its current public-private partnership pilot program and "better equip project sponsors" to take advantage of alternative approaches, but large-scale change was not discussed.

Just how much will the tax credit mushroom thanks to the deal reached in the Senate? As the New York Times explains, it's time to take the "new" off of the credit's name:

The homebuyers’ credit ... would be extended to cover homes under contract by April 30. Also, it no longer would be limited to first-time buyers; people who have owned a home for at least five years could get a $6,500 credit on a new residence. Income limits for eligibility would be raised, making many more people qualify.

Extending and expanding the credit would cost an estimated $11 billion, on top of the $10 billion spent so far.

As Ryan pointed out earlier this week, the higher rate of home ownership in suburbs tilts the credit's benefits notably away from urban areas. But that's nothing new for the federal government, which has lavished subsidies on home buyers while paying much scanter attention to improving rental affordability.

In the fiscal year that ended October 1, Washington's support for home ownership totaled $230 billion, while parallel support for home renters was $60 billion, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported yesterday. That nearly four-fold gap is visible in the below chart:

(Image: CBO)

Even as federal lawmakers keep promoting home ownership as the "American dream," rental rates rose to one-third of the country in 2008, in part due to low-income and minority residents who were forced into default on risky mortgages. For many of those residents, as well as city dwellers in general, rentals tend to be the only housing option that offers access to affordable transportation -- but help from Washington has been perilously slow in coming.

And it may not come for a while yet. Legislation updating the Section 8 voucher program for rental housing was approved over the summer by the House Financial Services Committee but has yet to see floor time in the full chamber, let alone the Senate.

Meanwhile, the larger home buyers' credit is currently attached to a long-sought extension of unemployment benefits, making its approval a political fait accompli (though one much-delayed by partisan bickering).

Elly Blue writes:

Multi-use paths like the
Hawthorne Bridge have the
highest injury potential. (Photo copyright Jonathan Maus.)

There’s a constant chorus -- sometimes soft, sometimes overpoweringly loud -- in every conversation about bike infrastructure in America. Its refrain: You’re safer without any bike lanes, separated lanes, cycle tracks, bike boulevards, off-road paths. Just take the lane, follow the rules, wear your helmet, and you’ll be fine.

A group of scholars at the University of British Columbia have found otherwise. They conducted a literature review, looking at all available studies linking bicycle safety with infrastructure. Their conclusions will be counterintuitive for some.

“Results to date suggest that sidewalks and multi-use trails pose the highest risk, major roads are more hazardous than minor roads, and the presence of bicycle facilities (e.g. on-road bike routes, on-road marked bike lanes, and off-road bike paths) was associated with the lowest risk.”

“One of the major advantages of infrastructure-based improvements, compared to personal protective devices such as helmets, is that safe infrastructure provides population-wide protection for all cyclists,” study co-author Meghan Winters said in a press release.

The study's abstract draws these conclusions:

Evidence is beginning to accumulate that purpose-built bicycle-specific facilities reduce crashes and injuries among cyclists, providing the basis for initial transportation engineering guidelines for cyclist safety. Street lighting, paved surfaces, and low-angled grades are additional factors that appear to improve cyclist safety. Future research examining a greater variety of infrastructure would allow development of more detailed guidelines.

I'm sure that many of our network members will want to dig deeper into this one. 

More from around the network: a rant against bike chic from Biker Chicks of West Chester. Extraordinary Observations makes the connection between free burritos and traffic congestion. And the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia reports on biking the transit strike in that city.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), at right, with climate bill co-author Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) (Photo: NWF via Flickr)

"If there's a pricing of carbon ... there are some people that just aren't going to come along," Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) told attendees at a National Journal energy policy event. "I don't think there's an enormous universe [of Republicans open to the bill], but it's enough to get us over the top."

Kerry's remarks came as his co-author on the climate bill, Senate environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA), continues to contend with a GOP walkout of her panel's first meeting on the measure.

Kerry and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) are slated to meet with senior Obama administration advisers today to discuss the framework for a bipartisan climate deal that the duo first unveiled in a New York Times op-ed last month. Kerry, Graham, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) also plan to tout the potential for a pro-business climate deal at a press conference this afternoon.

Kerry said today that the White House is "very much" open to the general principles of that op-ed, which include a strengthening of the climate bill's investment in nuclear power and expanded offshore drilling for oil and gas. "Nuclear is part of the solution," he added.

But even as Kerry and Boxer seek to make peace with resistant Senate Republicans, touting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's announcement yesterday of its (cautious) support for the Kerry-Graham framework, the prospects for political movement from the minority remain unclear.

Speaking to the Capitol newspaper Roll Call, Sen. Jim Inhofe (OK), the environment panel's senior Republican, charged Boxer with "destroying the integrity of the committee system" and suggested that his members had little will to show up for today's second day of climate meetings.

The Senate climate bill contains significant investments in clean transportation, including billions in annual transit and sustainable development grants. Inhofe was careful to distinguish his clash with Boxer on climate from his close ties with her on infrastructure:

When asked if the spat would hurt their efforts to pass a new transportation bill, Inhofe said “no.” “I don’t think so. We’re on the same side on that. ... You guys [in the press] don’t believe it, but we have a good relationship.”

GOP senators considered less conservative than Inhofe have been equally uncertain about the prospects for a climate compromise. Lisa Murkowski (AK), the energy committee's senior Republican, told National Journal attendees that "the closer to the election you get, the more political this issue will be," but she added that passage of a climate bill would be necessary before Election Day 2010 only "if it's [a] good [bill]."

Adding more subsidies for nuclear development is a high priority, Murkowski said, as is re-opening the incendiary debate over drilling in her state's Arctic National Wildlfe Refuge. "It's time to be talking about what we have up north," she stated.

• Atlanta transport planners are eyeing the headquarters of the local newspaper for a new transit terminal, but the Journal-Constitution isn't selling ... yet (AJC)
  

• German Chancellor Merkel tells Congress that climate change is one of the 21st century's "great tests" -- too bad the Senate isn't doing great so far (WashPost)
  

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) is one of Capitol Hill's strongest voices for walking, biking and transit. Soon after arriving in Congress in 1996, he started the Congressional Bike Caucus, now more than 160 members strong, and he's the founding chairman of the House's new "Livable Communities Task Force," which he announced two weeks ago here on Streetsblog.

Blumenauer's bike commute to the Capitol has become as much a personal hallmark as his predilection for bowties. So when he came to New York City this weekend to stump for a progressive federal transportation bill, the congressman didn't pass up the chance to tour the city's evolving bike infrastructure with Paul Steely White and Noah Budnick of Transportation Alternatives. Clarence Eckerson and his camera were there too, of course.

Watch this Streetfilm to hear Blumenauer's thoughts on the big federal transportation bill, the emergence of a national movement for safe biking and walking, and the difference between protected bike lanes and regular old Class 2 facilities. Then ask yourself: When will we get to see a lawmaker from New York City walk, bike, or ride the bus with Clarence?

Republicans on the Senate environment committee made good on their vow to boycott this morning's first meeting on climate change legislation, leaving Democrats to poke holes in the GOP's insistence on a new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) analysis of the bill.

Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) visited the environment panel this morning to read a statement (viewable above) calling for the EPA to take more time examining the climate bill's costs while using a more negative model than the agency used in its initial analysis of the legislation, released late last month.

Voinovich left the committee room soon afterward, leaving the panel's Democrats to question David McIntosh, the EPA's associate administrator for congressional affairs, on the relative irrelevance of performing another climate bill analysis.

If the EPA were to go through that process, McIntosh told the Democrats, "you would see vanishingly small differences" between the House climate bill that passed in June -- which was given a full examination -- and the Senate's version, which nearly triples the House's investment in clean transportation.

Moreover, according to McIntosh, there is more paperwork available to the environment committee on the costs of this year's climate bill than there was in 2007, when Republicans allowed a similar cap-and-trade carbon emissions plan to proceed to consideration by the full Senate.

"It is difficult to link the motivation [for the GOP's move] to an amount of the analysis before the committee at this point in time," said McIntosh, a former adviser to Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and his primary aide during the 2007 climate debate.

The environment panel's chairman, Barbara Boxer (D-CA), kept the committee's meeting open in the hopes of breaking the stalemate. No amendments can be taken up without GOP members present -- potentially derailing any plans to increase the bill's transportation funding.

"If our colleagues would join us, the amendment process would go on as long as necessary to debate" proposed tweaks from both sides of the aisle, Boxer said. "The time to do an analysis is when there's changes that will move the models. Otherwise you're wasting taxpayer dollars."

Democrats' efforts to undermine the Republican climate boycott continued even outside the environment panel. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) promised today that he would submit the upper chamber's final bill, which will be a merged product of the work of five separate committees, to the full EPA workup that the GOP is demanding.

At a press conference today, Reid likening Republicans to unwilling dance partners. "She has been extremely deliberative and very patient," Reid said of Boxer. "And so I don't know what more she can do."

Late Update: At the end of today's climate change session, Boxer revealed that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- which recently lost several high-profile members thanks to its criticism of the congressional climate bills -- has written to the Senate endorsing the legislative goals set out in a recent op-ed by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

The Chamber's letter notably stops short of endorsing the climate legislation currently on the table in the Senate, co-written by Kerry and Boxer. Still, it could lead to a loss of political cover for the staunchest opponents of the bill and help push the GOP back to the negotiating table; how quickly that happens remains to be seen.

Warren Buffett (Photo: Redfin)

BNSF last year ... moved a ton of goods 470 miles on one gallon of diesel. It releases far fewer pollutants into the atmosphere. It saves enormously on energy consumption and ... it diminishes highway congestion. Rails last year moved 40 percent, more than 40 percent, over the country. They moved more than all those trucks, just the four big railroads. It's a very effective way of moving goods. I basically believe this country will prosper and you'll have more people moving more goods 10 and 20 and 30 years from now, and the rails should benefit.

That environmental rationale for Buffett's deal struck some in Washington as dubious. Frank O'Donnell, president of the green group Clean Air Watch, wrote on his website that the BNSF deal was "the biggest climate story of the day," bigger even than the political maneuverings of the Senate environment committee:

This is a $34 billion dollar bet that coal will remain the centerpiece of American energy policy in the future. Buffett clearly believes that coal use will remain strong - and possibly grow. So he is putting his money on a vision of America with no effective climate policy at all – or at least one that doesn’t slow coal growth.

BNSF's reliance on coal is indisputable; the black stuff has accounted for nearly half of its tonnage this year, and MarketWatch estimates that 10 percent of U.S. electricity comes from coal hauled by the railroad.

As coal-hauling railroads go, however, BNSF has made an attempt to distinguish itself on the energy efficiency end. The railroad is developing an emissions-free hydrogen-powered locomotive, and in May started to test-run a group of GE locomotives that cuts emissions by 40 percent over previous, dirtier models.

BNSF also has gotten on board the California High Speed Rail Authority's plans for an initial route connecting Merced to Fresno, and its CEO has advocated for a national focus on one initial high-speed project, rather than spreading around the Obama administration's $8 billion investment "like peanut butter."

When putting Buffett's bet into context, however, the corporate identity of BNSF may matter less than the impact of one powerful investor's foray into transportation.

At a time when the job-creation potential of infrastructure spending is increasingly propelling the political debate, Buffett's interest in the transport sector could be a harbinger of greater private-sector involvement to come -- thus bolstering Democratic lawmakers as they make the case for more transit, bridge, and road repair money to hasten the nation's economic recovery.