PHIA News Digest – Vol. 89
Pennsylvania Wolf Administration Announces Investments to Improve 23 Airports
Twenty-three airports will make safety upgrades and expand operation opportunities with the assistance of $8.8 million in state investments, Governor Tom Wolf announced today.
“Maintaining and expanding opportunities in our transportation system includes the more than 400 airports in our state,” Governor Wolf said. “Hundreds of thousands of jobs are supported by aviation in Pennsylvania, and these investments will help them operate safely, expand to meet demands, or attract more growth.”
Study: Mon-Fayette Expressway, MLK busway projects would create more than 20,000 jobs
Rocky Moretti, the director of policy and research for TRIP, a national nonprofit transportation group in Washington, D.C., talks on Tuesday about the benefits of the Mon Fayette Expressway extension from Jefferson Hills to Monroeville and the East Busway extension from Swissvale to Turtle Creek during a news conference.
Long-Awaited U.S. Infrastructure Spending Comes to Fruition
America’s states and cities are finally seizing on record-low interest rates to finance needed work on roads, bridges and schools.
After borrowing costs tumbled worldwide as central banks sought to jump-start their economies, agencies from New York to California have sold about $272 billion of bonds this year and are funneling more into construction projects, instead of just paying off higher-cost debt. That’s put the municipal market on track to approach the record level of sales reached in 2010, when the federal government was seeking to hasten the nation’s recovery by footing some of the bills on debt issued for public works.
LVPC reviews letter to US Dept. of Transportation over proposed metro planning rule
The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission (LVPC) Thursday reviewed nearly a dozen letters it plans on forwarding to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation as part of a 60-day public comment period ending Aug. 26 regarding the fed’s proposal of implementing a new east coast nine states mega-region metropolitan planning organization which will serve in part to determine the current and future allocation of federal transportation dollars to the Lehigh Valley.
Freedom Transit sees 3 percent increase in ridership during past year
On Wednesday, the concrete was drying around a newly installed bicycle rack at 50 E. Chestnut St., Washington.
Bikes may not have been an element of “intermodal transportation” officials envisioned when a proposal for the center formed more than seven years ago, but Sheila Gombita, executive director of the Washington County Transportation Authority, said, “People have asked where to chain a bike.”
