In recent years a little noticed shift has been transforming suburbia: the home of the middle class has become the home of the working poor. As a result, roadways that were built for the car are now used by a growing population that can't afford to drive. The consequences can be deadly. Blueprint America on Need to Know from suburban Atlanta where getting to the other side of the road is nothing to take for granted.

What do you call a highway program that just keeps going long after its original goals were achieved? A zombie highway. Blueprint America -- with The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer -- goes to Birmingham, Alabama, to look into the Northern Beltline, a road that will cost more than $3 billion, most of which will be paid for by taxpayers nationwide.

Blueprint America correspondent Rick Karr in a web report from Alabama on the environmental impact of building highways, and the growth they can create.

Blueprint America: Public Works is an effort by 18 public television stations across the country that concentrates on the state of their local infrastructure. Communities -- big and small, urban and rural -- are, for the first time, collectively rethinking what it takes to make a place livable. PBS stations are producing radio and television segments, hosting discussions between policy makers and their communities, and offering further content online, all as a part of Blueprint America.

A roundup of links to local stories of national importance to the state of America's infrastructure.

President Barack Obama's stimulus money is about to be distributed, but will it be spent in the way it is intended? One alarming example: Mass transit. Cities and states, strapped for money, are cutting back on mass transit even as it becomes more popular with Americans. At the same time, President Obama is calling for increased mass transit as a necessary step toward energy independence. Blueprint America -- with NOW on PBS -- reports from North Carolina to see what the future holds for the country's mass transit systems in these financial times.

A journalist who uncovered potentially fatal design flaws in the connections between natural gas pipes - and revealed that state regulators, along with local power companies, had known of the flaws for nearly thirty years.

While some states are looking everywhere for funding as revenues fall, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is thinking twice about taking stimulus money from the federal government. Even as the state's infrastructure is reeling, he tells Blueprint America that there are consequences to unchecked government borrowing and spending.