Federal Transit Administration

DART will award three retired passenger vans to organizations addressing transportation needs in its member communities.

Recipients will be required to contribute an estimated $2,000 to $4,000 per vehicle toward the federal interest owed to the Federal Transit Administration, DART will donate its stake in the vehicles.

DART has awarded 26 vans to 22 nonprofit organizations since launching the program in 2014.

Applications are due by 5 p.m. on November 6th and can be submitted or mailed to DART's Caravan Department, which is located at 620 Cherry Street in Des Moines.

So the Promoting Access to Transit in High-Growth Communities Path Act would simply modify how the federal government evaluates transit projects through an existing funding mechanism, a granting process, or money to the states earmarked for transit use only.

This all runs through the FTA, the Federal Transit Administration, and a project, sort of a spin-off project of the FTA called the Capital Investment Grants Program, CIG.

This is basically the system that distributes federal money to the states based on...

Lengthy list of priorities that the program has itself, but also different metrics that the state will send in that score them basically in a not just first come first serve way.

And we were so behind places like Japan and China and even the UK on public transit, it was just basically as much money as we can get out there as possible to get these projects rolling.

Now things have evolved and shifted a little bit that this makes a lot of sense.

The FDA has, for the past six decades, been working on, you know, trying to constantly modernize their distribution system for grant money to states.

Curtis said that his bill basically says, you've done a great job of that, but this factor should be a higher priority than it is.

But I'm not sure that I've got a whole lot new to add except for one thing.

And that is that I did find a report sponsored by the Federal Transit Administration.

And it was carried out by, I think, the University of Florida or the University of South Florida, but some university transportation department experts.

And the report looked at five different urban circulators and Cincinnati was one of them.

Nobody's even afforded a feasibility study.

So I don't know what these people are talking about when they say, you know, do you support an extension of the streetcar? What they should be doing, well, let me get into this.

So In 2018, the Federal Transit Administration, as I mentioned, commissioned an assessment of these five circulators, urban circulators, including Cincinnati.

And it's a very, very sophisticated analysis, econometric modeling.

So how does that work and how does that tie into the routes and how things are decided like that?

So that's an evolution over time, right? So our primary funding source is the federal government through the Federal Transit Administration.

And we can't spend any of those dollars without matching them to some degree.

capital expenses or capitalized operating expenses, the federal government will participate in 80% of every $100.

We have another opportunity coming up this fall, though, to go after the same funding.

And this will be through the source.

at the FTA, Federal Transit Administration, that we've gotten the bulk of our funding from so far.

So I expect we might have a leg up on that from a competitive standpoint.