The Salt Lake Tribune (Utah) – Rocky Mountain Power has launched construction of its new high-voltage transmission line that will run from Downey in southeastern Idaho to an existing substation west of Salt Lake City International Airport.

The 135-mile-long project known as the “Populus to Terminal” transmission line will cost approximately $600 million and is scheduled to be completed in 2010.

It is part of a massive $6 billion project of approximately 2,000 miles of new transmission lines that PacifiCorp, the Oregon-based utility that does business as Rocky Mountain Power and Pacific Power, hopes to complete in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and possibly Colorado by 2014. [read more…]

Reuters – The Obama administration is expected to unveil its plans on Thursday for accelerating development of high-speed rail, a concept that in the past has had mixed political support and little public funding. [read more…]

WFMY-TV (Greensboro, N.C.) – North Carolina’s infrastructure received an overall grade of C- in a report card released today by the North Carolina Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. [read more…]

The New York Times – The industrial slivers of northern Brooklyn and western Queens that sit in the shadow of the Kosciuszko Bridge are, to most New Yorkers, forsaken territory.

But on these hinterlands near the Kosciuszko, the aging bridge that connects Greenpoint, Brooklyn, to Maspeth, Queens, along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek, is a thriving commercial ecosystem. It is inhabited by freight trucks that come and go, a scrap metal yard, wholesale distributors of flowers and Bangladeshi foods and a factory that produces steel doors. [read more…]

The Associated Press – New Jersey officials are hitting the road to find people willing to sink money into state highway projects.

In better economic times, the state could sell bonds to finance road projects with little marketing effort. But now, with the country in recession and credit markets struggling, officials in New Jersey and elsewhere have resurrected the “roadshow,” going beyond their borders to pitch investors on their funding needs. [read more…]

Denver Business Journal – Tri-State Generation and Transmission Co., Colorado’s second-largest power utility, said Friday it will shift its focus from building more coal-fired power plants to natural gas, renewable energy and efficiency.

If it plays out, it’s a major change of policy for Westminster-based Tri-State, which supplies wholesale power to 18 electric-distribution cooperatives in Colorado and 26 in Wyoming, New Mexico and Nebraska. The utility’s two-year-old resource plan had called for the construction of 2,100 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants by 2012.

Critics have blamed nonprofit Tri-State for not embracing alternative energy in its future plans, the way investor-owned utility Xcel Energy has. [read more…]

The Associated Press – The latest in bridge construction technology goes unnoticed by drivers zipping over a two-lane highway that carves through the countryside of central Maine.

The 35-foot-long Neal Bridge on Route 11 is the first in the nation to use a process developed at the University of Maine that’s dubbed “bridge in a backpack” because the materials used to make the arches can be carried to the site in duffel bags.

Once at the site, a light, durable fabric that folds as easily as a pair of pants is filled with concrete to form arches that will support the span. They’re installed in a matter of days or even hours, instead of weeks. The process is being touted as a way to cut costs and lengthen the life expectancy of bridges. [read more…]

The Los Angeles Times – Ohio wants to spend $57 million in federal stimulus money on highway projects that won’t begin for years, an unusual strategy for money that President Barack Obama said should be used to give the economy an immediate job-creating jolt.

Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland and the state’s transportation officials passed over some ready-to-go construction projects and steered about 7 percent of their $774 million share for planning and preliminary studies.

That infuriated some local leaders who hoped the money would build even more new bridges or resurface roads in the cash-strapped state, where unemployment recently hit a 25-year high of 9.4 percent. [read more…]

The Los Angeles Times – Govs. Schwarzenegger and Rendell and New York Mayor Bloomberg worry that Congress will hijack a proposal to improve the nation’s highways and bridges. [read more…]