There are few facets of government that directly affect us as much as transportation spending -- I mean, we've all got to get where we're going, don't we?

That's why looking at transportation funding is so dang interesting.

The folks Pew Charitable Trusts and their partners, the Sunlight Foundation, have launched a cool new transportation site for their SubsidyScope project. From their own description of it:

(It) will highlight overlooked stories, from expensive projects in sparsely populated areas to which public transit agencies get the most money. The site will also give you a chance to find these stories yourself. We’ve created a searchable database allowing users to find transportation subsidies by state; by type of recipient (for-profit company, for instance); and by mode (highways, public transit, etc.), among other options. You can also type in a search term, such as the name of a company or a type of fuel, for a more targeted approach.

I did a search on the database just now for "Texas" to see what it would bring up, and there's a lot of interesting stuff there. The item in the list with the biggest price tag? $250M for the DFW Connector project. I bet you can find some interesting stuff in there for your town, too.

If you're really interested in federal transportation funding, there's also the Center for Public Integrity's new project on The Transportation Lobby, which just came out earlier this month and which I blogged on the other day. Their database lets you see which cities, counties and private firms have retained Washington lobbyists to help get transportation money from Congress. It's pretty cool.

And here at Texas Watchdog, we're also looking into transportation funding. You may have seen our recent series of investigative reports about the Houston Airport System and its work building and running airports in other countries -- our most recent airport story was about an airport system executive who is being paid to promote a Norwegian town to people in Houston while also being paid to promote Houston to people in Norway. And our look at Houston's public transit system, Metro, continues today with the publication this morning of a new story looking at millions of dollars in no-bid contracts that Metro has doled out to consultants. And don't forget that we also mapped where TxDOT is spending federal transportation stimulus dollars.

Do you know of other transportation-related stories in Texas? We want to know about them. Leave a comment below or shoot us an e-mail to news@texaswatchdog.org.

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