A follow-up . . .

. . . on the new tax credit for employers whose employees cycle to work, via Matthew Yglesias. He provides more details and a helpful reminder to cyclists to be proactive about this with their HR people at work (the rough-and-ready spellings are Yglesias' own):

There’s a provision of existing tax law called the “Transportation Fringe Benefit.” Employers can offer the Transportation Fringe Benefit to their employees. It allows employees to receive a tax-exempt benefit of up to $215 per month for drivers participating in qualified parking plans or $110 per month for those who use transit or vanpooling.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer represents Portland — the bike commuting capital of the United States — and was formerly Portland’s Transportation Commissioner. He introduced the Bike Commuter Act last year that would amend section 132(f) of the IRS code of 1986 to include “bicylces” in the definition of transportation covered by the qualified transportation fringe benefit.

His Act was incorporated into the bailout package and signed into law. Since the mechanism of the subsidy here runs through your employer, it’s possible (like, I would say) that many employers won’t realize this change has been implemented starting next year so people may need to show some initiative to actually get their new bike Fringe Benefit. I’ll try to stay abreast of this issue and let folks know what they need to do. (emphasis added)

And as he updates, I'll pass the word on here.

As I've said before, Yglesias is a political blogger, but he's also very interested in and smart about many areas of policy, especially urban and transportation policy, and he averages one or two posts per day on these topics. If you're interested in these matters and/or want to learn more, you should be reading him.