Federal Highway Administration

The event was a co-production of the GBH Forum Network and the Transit Advocacy Coalition, Transportation for Massachusetts.

On stage with me, Stephanie Pawlak, the former Secretary of Transportation for Massachusetts and Federal Highway Deputy Administrator, Yonah Fremark of the nonprofit think tank, The Urban Institute, and Corrigan Salerno, the Transportation Policy Manager for the Metropolitan Abundance Project.

Here's some of our conversation.

Corrigan, I was wondering if you could just sort of like compare and contrast

And there's a lot of different reasons for why they're able to achieve that.

But one of the main things that we don't do is fund our transit at the levels that they do for continuous amounts of time.

So we've had a very large deficit between the inception of the Federal Highway Program and today between what transit funding levels are.

and what highway funding levels are.

So, um, that proposal got real traction.

Uh, it was included in the 2016 National Pollinator Plan with the Federal Highway Administration signing a formal memorand- memor- memorandum of understanding.

Uh, but the official Monarch Highway Initiative has since stalled, mainly because states never got dedicated funding or federal funding to implement it, and leadership priority changes across administrations left policy adherence inconsistent.

Uh, Chip Taylor said also, "All these things take money, and they take personnel, so they take knowledge, and to a certain extent, they take training.

The new light is blue and is mounted above the regular traffic light and is electronically linked to turn on with the red.

The Federal Highway Administration says it's a visual for police, but there's no recording and it's not in every state yet.

Colorado, Florida, South Dakota, Kansas and some cities in California have them and it's reported to drop red light runs by 33 percent.

Merriam-Webster is adding 1,400 new words to its dictionary, including words stemming from social media like looksmaxing, parasocial, and rickroll.

which I can touch on later.

But really what it's about is utilizing things like collaborative delivery, like project bundling, a lot of the Federal Highway Administration's initiatives, everyday counts initiatives, ways to deliver projects faster, more efficiently.

and below budget.

So all of these things that we do that we did in Osceola County and are now doing for the Hualapai tribe out in Arizona.