French designer Patrick Jouin has shared with us his latest project for client JCDecaux – a high tech bus stop (free Wifi anyone?) situated at the corner of Boulevard Henry IV and Place de la Bastille in Paris. Jouin has collaborated with JCDecaux on urban furniture since 2007, most notably for Vélib, the public bicycle sharing system in Paris. — bustler.net

Yes, it's still a bus shelter, but the idea is to make it both more useful and more of a social space. People may come here for a range of things other than catching the bus, so that social interaction and the life of the street intermix with waiting to produce a more vibrant, interesting, and safe environment. — humantransit.org

A safe, clean, on-time ride. That's all most of us expect from the Chicago Transit Authority. But why not ask for something more? Station architecture that puts zing in the journey and elevates the city around it. That's what we get at the crisply modern new Morgan "L" station on Chicago's Near West Side. — chicagotribune.com

“This project presents a novel approach to U.S. locomotive development, looking to technologies of the past to inspire solutions for today’s sustainability challenges."
- Sustainable Rail International President Davidson Ward, 2010 School of Architecture graduate from the College of Design at the University of Minnesota — UMNews

Behold the Subway Terminal Building, hidden in plain sight in the middle of downtown LA, where at one point during the 1940′s over 65,000 riders were shuffling down into the depths of Los Angeles to board a train which traveled beneath the busy streets. And, fittingly, it’s just a block from where you might board the Red Line subway today. — gelatobaby.com

Designed primarily by Roland Genick, chief architect for rail and transit systems at Parsons, the huge Pasadena-based construction conglomerate, the new stations are topped by undulating light-blue canopies of perforated metal panels that are not only dated — bringing a public-art project from the early 1990s to mind — but provide almost no shade or rain protection. Or solar power, for that matter, though from certain angles the stations look a bit like they're covered with photovoltaic panels. — latimes.com

A public forum today at Union Station provided the public with their first look at conceptual visions for Union Station and the surrounding area by six architectural firms bidding to prepare a master plan for the facility.

Metro Executive Planning Director Martha Welborne told the several hundred people in attendance that the point of the vision boards was to energize the teams submitting bids to prepare the master plan, and energize the public that uses — or will someday use Union Station. — thesource.metro.net

In the international design competition for Yenikapı Transfer Point and Archaeo-Park Area in Istanbul, Turkey, three First Prizes have been announced this week. The jury selected the top project teams Eisenmann Architects/Aytaç Architects, Atelye 70/Francesco Cellini/Insula Architettura E Ingegneria, and Cafer Bozkurt Architects/Mecanoo Architects from nine shortlisted teams, including MVRDV and other international firms. — bustler.net

In 2008, the substantially updated town center of Plessis-Robinson, a suburb of Paris, was named “the best urban neighborhood built in the last 25 years” by the European Architecture Foundation. A composite of six connected districts ranging in size from 5.6 to 59 acres, the revitalization comprises public buildings, retail, market-rate and subsidized affordable housing, parks, schools, gardens, sports facilities, and a hospital. Construction was begun in 1990 and took a decade to complete. — switchboard.nrdc.org

Some 600,000 commuters, riding Amtrak, Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit, now suffer Penn Station every day. That makes it probably the busiest transit hub in the Western world, busier than Heathrow Airport in London, busier than Newark, La Guardia and Kennedy airports combined.

To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation. — Michael Kimmelman, nytimes.com

[Beijing] started expanding the system in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and has kept pushing forward ever since. In 2001 it had 33 miles of track. Today it has 231.

Meanwhile, when you hear the completion dates for big U.S. transit projects you often have to calculate your age to figure out if you’ll still be alive. — salon.com