Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Recent Posts
Sure, Leave Gas Tax Collection to Liberal Tax-and-Spend States Like Georgia
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One nay-sayer argument against greater federal spending for transportation goes like this: “Too many faceless bureaucrats in Washington have too much control over how states spend their money. Let states raise their own revenues and spend them as they wish.” Besides, they say, the national government is broke. There’s no more money to spend on […]
Civil Rights Group Demands End to Car-Centric Transportation Policies
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“This is the civil rights dilemma: Our laws purport to level the playing field, but our transportation choices have effectively barred millions of people from accessing it.” So says a report from the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a project of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The coalition wasn’t involved in the transportation reauthorization debate […]
The Environmental Impact of Your Two-Wheeled Commute
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Slate’s Brian Palmer wrote in an article this week that he’s thinking of switching his commute “from four wheels to two” but he’s concerned about the environmental impact of bicycling: specifically, “about all the energy it takes to manufacture and ship a new bicycle.” He wants to know how many miles he would “bike the […]
It’s Official: Congress’s Next Spitting Contest Will Be Over the Gas Tax
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Since the 112th Congress convened in January, the federal government almost shut down, the government almost defaulted on its debts, and the FAA was temporarily shuttered. It’s the Crisis Congress, thriving on the chaos of catastrophe. Next up: a bruising fight over funding the transportation system. A few weeks ago, Ben Smith at Politico mentioned in […]
Absent a Transportation Bill, DOT Can Innovate All On Its Own
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As Deron Lovaas said this morning on NRDC’s Switchboard blog, “If recent events are any indicator, it might take Congress a while to agree on a policy that will put our underfunded, inefficient, oil-dependent transportation program on the right track.” Well now, that’s an understatement. Between the uncertainty of the supercommittee and the bicameral bickering […]
Feds Call “All Hands On Deck” For Detroit Transit
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For the last two days, transit experts from around the country have been hunkered down in Detroit to devote their collective expertise to making the Motor City a better city for transit. The Federal Transit Administration convened the panel, which included current and former transit agency leaders from Salt lake City, Denver, Portland, Atlanta and […]
Alex Steffen: We Can’t Avert Climate Change Without Dense Cities
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Alex Steffen goes by the title “planetary futurist,” which makes me realize I should probably spruce up my title to something that makes me sound like I should be wearing a cape, too. What he does is write about sustainable cities, on WorldChanging.com for seven years and more recently in his book, Carbon Zero. He […]
Report: Get Out of the Highway-Obsessed Eisenhower Era
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Building America’s Future, led by former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, has added their voice to the chorus calling for greater investment in U.S. infrastructure, lest the country fall behind its global competitors. In a new report, Falling Apart and Falling Behind, BAF recommends more […]
T4America Responds to the Raquel Nelson Case in the Washington Post
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The first shocking thing about Raquel Nelson’s conviction for vehicular homicide was simply that it happened at all. After all, the mother of three wasn’t even driving a car — she was crossing a wide street with poor pedestrian infrastructure when her four-year-old son was killed by a hit-and-run driver. The second shocking thing about […]
CNT Busts “Drive Till You Qualify” Myth in the D.C. Region
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Maybe we can finally lay the whole “drive till you qualify” myth to rest now. You probably already suspected that driving farther and farther outside the city limits until you found a house you could afford was not the smartest way to go about buying a home. You may have been tipped off by the […]
Larry Hanley: Part-Time Labor Won’t Save American Transit
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Streetsblog sat down last week with Larry Hanley, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union and member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Yesterday, we published the first part of our interview, focusing on movement-building around transit. Here, we had a vigorous discussion about union rules and Buy America provisions that are the subject of some […]
ATU President Larry Hanley on How to Build a Strong Coalition for Transit
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Streetsblog sat down last week with Larry Hanley, the president of the Amalgamated Transit Union and member of the AFL-CIO executive council. Hanley started his career in New York as a bus driver in Brooklyn and then Staten Island, from 1978 to 1987. He became active in the local transit union and worked his way […]