TIGER

Congress is on track to trigger spending austerity that will cut programs like New Starts and TIGER.

There's good news out of the Senate committee responsible for doling out transportation funds.

Unfortunately, a transportation project that has the potential to positively transform the University of Illinois at Chicago's campus was passed over for federal funding. The $29.3 million initiative, called Crossroads & Connections, would make significant changes to campus streets in order to make walking and biking safer and more convenient.

The House's current transportation spending bill calls for reducing the share of federal spending that goes to TIGER, a grant program for sustainable transportation projects in cities, from $500 to $100 million. The budget, meanwhile, holds highway funding steady.

The drama is over; the House and Senate have both passed the "cromnibus" spending bill [PDF] that funds government operations through the end of fiscal year 2015. And the Department of Transportation's TIGER program survived.

Last month, it was a bummer when the Illinois Department of Transportation announced $52.7 million in funding for transportation projects, including many bike and pedestrian projects, but the expansion of Divvy into the suburbs wasn’t one of them. However, officials say they’re hopeful money can be found to extend the system past the city limits.

There’s more good news on the Divvy bike-share front. The Chicago Department of Transportation announced this morning that they scored a $3 million federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement grant to add 75 more docking stations to the 400 already planned. The system recently reached 300 stations and 3,000 bikes.

Out of 585 applications, U.S. DOT has chosen 52 transportation projects in 37 states to receive TIGER awards totaling $474 million. The Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery program was originally an element of President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package. Although it hasn’t been reauthorized and many Republicans claim to hate it, funding somehow keeps being appropriated for TIGER. Amazingly, despite enormous funding obstacles, including a sequester, U.S. DOT just announced the fifth round of TIGER awards.