And he fails us again...

Obama is really on a roll these days ... I can see the change rapidly disappearing over the horizon.

First he decides to have Rick Warren speak at Inauguration ... ues this is the same guy who has compared gay marriage to incest and polygamy.  Nice O ... nice.

And now this - when I came in this morning and saw that a Republican named LaHood would likely be named Minister of Transportation, I was intrigued as I had never heard anything about this guy.  Could he be the amazing savior of American transportation policy as we all hoped for from Obama?  Nope.  You can see the updated article in The Paper of Record here.  GGW has a small write-up about what a disaster this is, in terms of Transportation planning - here.  What was Obama thinking!?!?  Matt over at Track Twenty-Nine has a very informative write up as to why Obama has failed America with this nomination.  You can view that here, but I wanted to share with you this little excerpt in order to entire you to go over there:

And I'm afraid Mr. LaHood's nomination does not bode well for America's transportation policy. By selecting someone with little transportation experience, Mr. Obama is indicating that he does not place much emphasis on the importance of transportation on his policy agenda. 

While I don't necessarily think that Mr. LaHood will have a negative impact on transportation policy, I don't think that he's the person who is going to bring change to Washington. I think it most likely that he will keep the status quo, at best--and right now, that is one of the last things we need in transport policy. 

Here is a picture of LaHood ... he looks like a real winner.

Also ... just because I also saw this today and its transportation related, I share these interesting stats which I found over at Rebuilding Place in Urban Space:

Capacity of one mile of road-lane for one hour

Limited access freeway: approximately 2,000 vehicles

Typical urban arterial: 800-1,000 vehicles

Typical suburban arterial: 1,300 vehicles

Typical bus service*: 6,750 passengers

Bus rapid transit: 10,000 passengers

Light rail/tram: 15,000 passengers

Heavy rail: 20,000 to 65,000 passengers

* Streetcar service is comparable to bus service. Generally it isn't designed for high capacity, high speed service.

(Sources, Jeff Tunlin, Nelson Nygaard, Presentation in DC 2005, Steve Belmont, Cities in Full,Highway Capacity Manual)