CityLab Daily: Why Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Must Put Transit First
Also today: Biden brings back fair housing rules scrapped by Trump, and this newsstand shows why urban neighborhoods will bounce back.
Transportation advocates insist that President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan represents an opportunity to rethink the importance of transit-oriented development.
Transit first: President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan currently allocates $85 billion to the nation’s transit systems, nearly doubling the annual federal contribution to public transportation. But to keep the economy running while also fighting climate change, that may not be enough.
In a new perspective piece, researcher Simon Berrebi imagines the opportunities to integrate transit in a new paradigm of infrastructure planning. Modernizing highways could mean giving buses and trains dedicated lanes and signal priority, for instance, and the $213 billion investment in affordable housing could be used to build and preserve units near transit stations. And even as the plan carves out a path for an electric vehicle boom, he argues, expanding transit will continue to be a critical goal for the environment and for broadening access to opportunity. Today on CityLab: The Case For a Transit-First Infrastructure Plan