Houston Chronicle: Who’s Safety Lou, and what does she mean to you?

From Houston Chronicle: 

I kept hearing about her during my first days on the transportation beat. I imagined her as a sisterly and sweet road-safety mascot trotted out at ball games to remind children to use crosswalks. Kids, listen to Safety Lou!  Silly cub reporter. What I was hearing was “SAFETEA-LU.” That’s transpo lingo for “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: a Legacy for Users.” And what is that? It’s the 2005 federal funding bill that coughs up the dough ($286 billion) to build our highways and mass transit projects. And it’s expiring this year.  Before your eyes glaze over, I’ll try to convince you why you should care. Because what I’ve learned is that this bill has a huge effect on how we live: It determines where roads go, how crowded they are, what our cities look like, and whether we have money for rail, room for cyclists, and air that we can safely breathe. The next SAFETEA-LU will last five or six years and could have $500 billion in federal funds. Transportation activists say it needs to be more than another clever acronym.