Federal Transportation Authorization moves forward
The US House of Representatives Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure (T&I) introduced a five year federal transportation reauthorization bill earlier this month. Entitled BUILD America 250, the bill (HR 8870) would represent the largest ever federal investment in bridges. T&I held a full committee “markup” (review and revision) for the bill on May 21, approved the amended legislation by a very strong bipartisan vote of 62-2, and subsequently released the bill for consideration by the full US House. The bill includes the first new federal transportation revenue source in decades. Read more in this week’s blog.
Maryland tour attendance is up, and our speaker list is growing
We are looking forward to the July 20-21 RTA 2026 Leadership Briefing and Field Visit to Maryland — and so are a number of our members and partners.
We will tour the largest transit depot microgrid in the nation, learn about and travel to existing and emerging BRT transit corridors, and visit excellent examples of both a junior freeway and a dynamically priced multimodal turnpike.
We will also spend time with senior leaders from both Maryland and North Carolina throughout the two day event.
Please click here for the growing list of confirmed attendees, and also please review the current list of speakers from Maryland.
We are getting close to activating a waitlist, so please register soon if you would like to join us. Please visit our RTA tour website for more information and to register.
Transit ridership is up in the Triangle
The City of Raleigh’s GoRaleigh service deserves several kudos. We have previously noted that GoRaleigh transit is now the most frequent service in the Carolinas, with the third most frequent service mileages in the southeastern United States. They are also our largest regional transit system by ridership, and they had the largest increase in ridership among all bus systems in the United States in its service category (i.e., 3 to 15 million riders per year).
We have seen increased ridership for several of our systems across our market, as noted in this recent Axios article and chart. GoTriangle noted that year-over-year ridership is up more than 30%, at least partially due to elevated gas prices. The work by communications students at NC State has also supported this growth.
The regional business community continues to promote and support the successful expansion of our enhanced regional transit system. RTA thanks all of our transit providers, including GoCary, Chapel Hill Transit, GoDurham, GoRaleigh, GoTriangle, Duke University Transit, and NC State Wolfline, for your service to our region.
Thank you for your membership in RTA. Have a great weekend, everyone
Let’s get moving.
Joe
