Thanks to a tip from one of our dedicated readers, David, it has come to my attention that US Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters will be speaking at the Downtown Miami Hilton Today. The event, A New Transportation Approach For America, is sponsored by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce and will begin at 12:30 (Click here to register, $75 fee for non-members.) I’m going to try my best to make it there and hope that despite the short notice some of you all can attend. You can find some of the emails SBH has shared with me concerning the subject here.
Like our friend over at Hallandale Beach Blog has noted, we too find it interesting that Mary Peters can make some time out of her busy schedule to speak about transportation in Miami, while FDOT director Stephanie Kopelousos remains MIA in the South Florda region. Kopelousos recently held a transportation summit in Destin Florida to discuss the congestion issues of North Florida. I guess a drive down to Miami would have been to difficult.
Here is what the Halladale Beach Blog has to say:
When federal public transit policy meets South Florida’s notoriously fickle apathy, who wins?
Oh, right.
Everyone loses!
Jim Ray, the assistant to Mary Peters was on C-Span’s show Washington Journal, lots of great questions but few good answers.
Decent speech, long on rhetoric, short on concrete policies. She spoke about reducing the number of Federal surface transportation programs from 102 to 8 that focus on truly Federal priorities, and awarding the remainder of funds as sort of block grants so that local governments can spend it on their own priotities rather than having the Federal government mandate all 102 ways to spend it. The final Q of Q&A, a guy asked how the Federal government is planning to deal with the eventuality of flying cars.