Curtis Tate

The U.S. Department of Transportation said Tuesday that it would start limiting payments to states for road and transit projects next month in an attempt to conserve the federal Highway Trust Fund’s rapidly diminishing cash balance.

The nation’s largest haulers of crude oil by rail on Tuesday appeared to abandon their insistence that information about such shipments could not be shared publicly for security reasons.

As the White House reviews a package of proposed rail safety regulations, the rail, petroleum and chemical industries in recent weeks have held nearly a dozen meetings with Obama administration officials.

_ A pair of Texans with decades of firefighting experience is encouraging state and local government leaders to consider establishing SWAT-like response teams for crude oil train fires.

The State Department projects 28 more fatalities and 189 more injuries a year if crude oil moves by rail instead of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Sounds bad, but is it true?

A requirement from the U.S. Department of Transportation last month to limit the release of information about Bakken crude oil shipments by rail has set up a conflict between railroads, states and the federal government that could wind up in court.

On Friday, the State Department revised its January report on the environmental impacts of building or not building the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, including the number of potential injuries and fatalities if Canadian oil would move by rail instead.

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved on Thursday a transportation spending bill that includes funding to address gaps in safety and training revealed by recent derailments of trains carrying crude oil.

Last month, California Gov. Jerry Brown claimed that “virtually no Republican” in Washington accepts what 97 percent of climate scientists do _ that human activity is likely causing temperatures to rise faster than they would naturally.

With the federal highway trust fund set to run out of cash in August, House Republicans are circulating a proposal to pay for a one-year extension by cutting back most U.S. mail delivery to five days a week.

Harvey Milk never lived to see his life’s work come to fruition.

In what it called the single highest civil penalty resulting from an automobile recall, the U.S. Department of Transportation on Friday fined General Motors $35 million for the company’s failure to report a safety defect.

The Wall Street firm that owns the railroad through Lac-Megantic, Quebec, is making plans to ship crude oil again through the lakside town devastated last summer by a fiery train derailment.

America’s smaller railroads lack the capability to offer safety training in the shipment of crude oil and ethanol, and two top Senate appropriators asked federal regulators Thursday to fund those efforts.

DOT stops short of requiring phase-out of older tank cars in crude oil shipments.