Skip to main content

Obama signs two-month transportation funding extension

President Obama has signed a two month extension of highway funding into law. The Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2015 extends several aspects of infrastructure funding to the end of July. Obama has proposed a six-year transportation bill of US$478 billion which would increase funding in US roads, highways and transit systems and for the first time would provide dedicated funding for passenger rail, rail safety and a national freight program. Congress has so far been unable to reach agreement o
June 2, 2015 Read time: 1 min
President Obama has signed a two month extension of highway funding into law. The Highway and Transportation Funding Act of 2015 extends several aspects of infrastructure funding to the end of July.

Obama has proposed a six-year transportation bill of US$478 billion which would increase funding in US roads, highways and transit systems and for the first time would provide dedicated funding for passenger rail, rail safety and a national freight program. Congress has so far been unable to reach agreement on how to fund the bill.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said it was the President’s view that the era of short-term patches and chronic under-investment in the transportation infrastructure must come to an end and would continue to urge Congress to take steps in that direction.

Related Content

  • Public transport operators implement passenger safety systems
    December 4, 2012
    Operators of public transport systems are arming themselves with sophisticated systems of technology to ward off terrorism threats to passenger safety. David Crawford reports. City transportation authorities worldwide are looking more keenly than ever for mass transit solutions to overcome traffic congestion and manage commuter flows. As they do so, concerns over passenger security are driving development of new technologies for terrorist incident detection, response and emergency passenger evacuation. The
  • Interoperability: towards the new frontier
    October 22, 2018
    After six years of intensive research, testing and negotiation, the US tolling industry is well on its way to groundbreaking results in the effort to establish regional - and eventually national - toll interoperability, says IBTTA’s Bill Cramer. Interoperability has been a high priority on the US tolling industry’s agenda for more than a decade. But several factors made it a uniquely complex issue to resolve - including the number of agencies involved, the significant investments those agencies had already
  • Innovative traffic information system
    January 31, 2012
    From the roadside James Foster compiles some eye-catching news, deployments and product picks from the work zone
  • EU triples funding for rail innovation
    December 18, 2013
    The European Commission has adopted Shift2Rail, a new public-private partnership to invest around US$1.3 billion in research and innovation to get more passengers and freight onto Europe's railways. Rail is amongst the most efficient and climate-friendly forms of transport, but currently it only carries about only 10 per cent of European cargo and 6 per cent of passengers each year. Shift2Rail is an ambitious public-private partnership which will manage a seven-year work programme of targeted research an