Yesterday, details leaked of Congressman John Mica (R-PA) proposed bill for funding the U.S. government’s transportation priorities through 2018.

This New York Times article on the planned, 53-hour mid-July shutdown of the Los Angeles area’s Interstate 405 has the same hysterical, nearly apocalyptic tone as an Onion article. Apparently for two days, residents of America’s second city will be marooned in their own homes, forced to resort to pre-industrial means of transportation.

With employment flatlining stateside and at least one major western economy on the verge of collapse, it’s worth asking whether there are any surefire means of stimulating the economy.

After the Red Line crash of 2009, which killed nine people and brought untold humiliation to the Washington Metro Area Transit Authority, senator Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) requested a Government Accountability Office report on the capitol region’s public transit system.

Potentially-important news on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. The popular passenger route’s locomotives are going to be replaced with 70 state-of-the-art and energy-efficient models by 2013, thanks to a massive, low-interested federal loan secured by the national rail carrier.

This week, the New York Times published an article about European urban planners’ attempts at undermining the use of personal automobiles.

Fuel efficiency standards are about to go up.

This past weekend, the most dysfunctional state legislature in America passed a landmark same-sex marriage bill. New York is now the largest state in the country to legalize gay marriage—and thanks to a late-breaking vote in the State Assembly, it will have the largest “transit lockbox” in America (assuming New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signs the bill into law).

The great New York City Bikelash, an event so important that New York Magazine dedicated like an 8,000 word cover story to it, is over, says the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Gay.

Last night, President Obama gave a major speech announcing the drawdown of the U.S. military’s “surge” in Afghanistan. But yesterday offered an even more momentous (although far less obvious) geo-political development: the opening of America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the first time since Hurricane Katrina.