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Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante, right, has struck a deal with Quebec Transport Minister Chantal Rouleau, center, and Treasury Board President Christian Dubé to help fund Quebec City's tramway project in exchange for a commitment from Quebec to support part of Plante's proposed Pink line from downtown Montreal to Lachine. — CBC
Discussion over Montreal's proposed Pink Line is well underway thanks to a deal negotiated by Plante and Quebec Transport Minister Chantal Rouleau and Treasury Board President Christian Dubé. When Plante was first running for mayor, her pro-transit platform was designed to ignite an additional... View full entry
“These are expensive projects. There’s no question. But if we are to reap the benefits of mass transit, we have to provide mass transit that is attractive to individual travelers and their families,” said Rick Cotton, the executive director at the Port Authority, without explaining the rise in cost. “Experience shows that rail mass transit is the most attractive alternative, and we’re committed to provided that.” — AM New York
While the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey works to implement an $8 billion overhaul of LaGuardia Airport, costs for a planned AirTrain link connecting the airport to regional mass transit continue to grow. According to AM New York, when first proposed in 2014, the two-mile... View full entry
Metro Oregon and Portland's TriMet are studying the possibility of creating a new below-ground transit route through the city's downtown. Planning for future growth, the organizations are working to link the Lloyd Center shopping mall on the eastern banks of the Willamette River with Southwest... View full entry
The BART Board of Directors approved a $50 million contract for up to 10 years to consultants HNTB Corporation, of Oakland, to advise and guide planning for the future Transbay Rail Crossing. — San Francisco Examiner
The San Francisco Bay Area is one tiny step closer to undertaking the construction of a new Transbay crossing between San Francisco and Oakland. The San Francisco Examiner reports that the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Board of Directors recently approved a 10-year, $50 million contract with... View full entry
As part of a recently-opened exhibition envisioning the future of Paris's urban highway system, a team led by Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a dramatic, two-pronged vision for what the city's Boulevard Périphérique might look like in 2050. Ratti, working with research... View full entry
Dallas Area Rapid Transit has joined a national effort to explore how autonomous buses could shuttle people around cities in the future.
It is one of about a dozen transportation agencies that are part of the Automated Bus Consortium, which will research driverless buses and run pilot projects to better understand how they could be rolled out nationwide.
— Dallasnews.com
The consortium, whose membership includes the transit agencies of Los Angeles County and Atlanta, and the Michigan Department of Transportation, was created by AECOM and aims to begin testing a fleet of 75 to 100 full-sized automated buses in major cities by 2021 or 2022. Todd Plesko, Dallas... View full entry
Even today, parking garages are typically underused. In the not-too-distant future, car shares, self-driving cars, increased investment in transit, or simple behavioral change could all shift the amount of parking people think they need. And the U.S. also has far more parking than necessary–in Seattle, for example, there are five parking spaces for every resident. Architects and city planners are increasingly realizing that valuable city space could be put to better use than storing cars. — Fast Company
Parking garages run rampant, especially in Los Angeles. According to Gensler's co-CEO Andy Cohen there are 500 million parking spaces in the United States. “Think about all that real estate, all that attention to parking, that could be revitalized and reused for the future of our cities.”... View full entry
Metro CEO Phil Washington announced Thursday that the agency had signed a letter of intent with a company called Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies that plans to build an aerial tram running between Union Station and the stadium.
The letter will allow the agency to begin negotiations with the company in order to allow the proposal to move forward.
— Curbed LA
That crazy-sounding plan to shuttle thousands of baseball fans from Los Angeles Union Station to Dodger Stadium on game days has become slightly less crazy with Metro's decision to take a closer look at the lofty transportation scheme proposed earlier this year by Aerial Rapid Transit... View full entry
Some of his benches have become part of the fabric of the city — sat on and rained on, captured on Google Street View and even vandalized. Scrawled in tidy handwriting on one bench was, “i love it, thank you,” punctuated by a small heart.
His greatest frustration is that whoever is removing them is leaving bus riders with no place to sit. The benches and their removal get at one of the more byzantine corners of transit bureaucracy in Los Angeles.
— Los Angeles Times
Realizing he had no place to rest at the bus stop near his Eastside home while recovering from a knee injury, this anonymous Los Angeles artist took matters into his own hands and began installing benches at neglected bus stops around the area, Carolina Miranda writes. Unsurprisingly, some of his... View full entry
The project, called 96th Street Station, is being designed with swooping canopies, skylights, and glazed screens to create a spacious environment for travelers... — Urbanize LA
After much anticipation, progress for the 96th Street Transit Station has made leaps and bounds in its development stage. Metro's new transit station aims to connect the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to its regional transit system. View of the planned light rail platforms. Image... View full entry
While the school district had tried repeatedly in court to stop Metro from building the subway underneath the high school’s campus, Korbatov’s “Stop the Purple Threat” campaign takes a different approach: Nab the attention of President Donald Trump and try to convince him to order the withdrawal of federal funding from the Purple Line extension. — Curbed LA
School district administrators also helped BHHS students organize a districtwide “walkout” that took place today in protest of the Purple Line extension, whose second phase is already underway. Here are some interesting Twitter updates from LA Times transportation reporter Laura J. Nelson... View full entry
Following the construction of the first phase in 2015, the Mecanoo-designed Delft City Hall and Train Station is now fully completed, the Dutch firm recently announced. The 28,320 m2 project sits on top of a train tunnel, which replaced an old concrete viaduct that divided the city since... View full entry
It’s official! The sorriest bus stop in America is in … Canada!
The horrendous bus stop on the Lougheed Highway in Pitt Meadows, just outside of Vancouver, has won our annual contest, trouncing Cincinnati in a 58%-42% landslide.
— usa.streetsblog.org
Streetsblog has announced the 'winner' of its annual America’s Sorriest Bus Stop tournament, and it's an impressively desolate and pedestrian-inadequate spot on a highway outside of Vancouver, BC that gets to take home the crown this year. Congrats on the 2nd place: Daly Road in Springfield... View full entry
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is back at it again with more outlandish ideas to solve Los Angeles' traffic. Earlier this month, Musk's latest venture–The Boring Company–resuscitated its flawed proposal to dig new car tunnels for Los Angeles, this time to connect the Red Line subway with Dodger Stadium [...] The Chicago tunnel idea is bad enough, but the Dodger Stadium plan is exceptionally poor even if one takes Musk's promises at face value. — urbanize.la
Alon Levy pokes holes in Elon Musk's public transit plans for Los Angeles. Musk's plan involves tunneling under Sunset Boulevard between the Dodger Stadium and one of three Red Line stops: Vermont/Sunset, Vermont/Santa Monica, or Vermont/Beverly. Levy cites major issues with construction... View full entry
The city grid, which once served to organize the development of private real estate by providing access to land parcels, now has a more pressing role to play in making cities livable. Our reimagining of the grid starts from the premise that how we use public rights of way no longer meets the city’s needs, so we should transform the streets radically, dedicating them to pedestrians. — citylab.com
Jonathan Cohn and Yunyue Chen propose a new pedestrian plan for Manhattan's grid grouping blocks into larger neighborhoods and organizing streets into either thoroughfares or local streets. Cohn leads the transportation and public infrastructure studio of Perkins Eastman, while Chen received... View full entry