Ridescout, the “Kayak of ground transportation” that aggregates over 300 rideshare services, announced today that it will integrate carpooling into its app. This move comes on the heels of recent announcements from Uber and Lyft, which on the same day earlier this month revealed they would gradually begin to allow their users to carpool. While ridesharing has up to this point been a mostly single-user service, Ridescout’s announcement reinforces a general trend toward multi-user integration. — urbanful.org

Today, Uber is announcing UberPool, a new feature that will let you pick up other riders on the way to your destination and split the bill.

While the feature should do a lot to cut costs for passengers, not everyone will want to ride with a stranger in addition to the driver picking them up; Uber notes that the new feature also serves as a kind of “social experiment.” [...]

Starting August 15 a public beta will launch in the San Francisco Bay Area. — techcrunch.com

Central Atlanta Progress, a nonprofit corporation of Atlanta business leaders, has released the documents from a recent assessment of Downtown Atlanta parking. They include reports on the existing parking situation and recommendations for “improving the customer parking experience in Downtown Atlanta.” [...]

The first sting was felt when I read this nugget from the report:

A person’s first and last impression of a city begins and ends with parking.

Ouch! I beg to differ. — ATL Urbanist

With so many crossovers in private operations, public data, and private uses, our future transit agency would blur the line between public and private sectors in a way we haven’t yet pioneered. The challenge is one of governance, bureaucratic turf, organizational development, planning, and public policy, not simply one of technology. Technology is just a tool, and our human institutions can either make use of it or try to ignore it. — urbanomnibus.net

The wisdom of surrounding transit stations with "seas" of park-and-ride lots may be turning. In theory, park-and-ride seems like a great transportation compromise, converting full-trip drivers into part-trip riders. In practice, the opposite often occurs, with former non-drivers now commuting part of the way by car.

That unexpected practical shift can increase vehicle miles traveled in a metro area, subverting the sustainability goal of transit. — citylab.com

Cars offer more than just convenience: they can give lower income Americans an economic leg up. [...]

While tracking households that had participated in two federal housing voucher programs, [a study] found that car owners were twice as likely as transit users to find jobs and four times likelier to retain them. Car-owning households were also able to locate near better neighborhoods and schools. This reaffirmed previous work ... arguing that car ownership plants the seeds for upward mobility. — thedailybeast.com

The just-elected new Mayor of Paris, Madame Anne Hidalgo, has prepared a revolutionary sustainable mobility project whereby virtually all of the streets of the city will be subject to a maximum speed limit of 30 km/hr.

The only exceptions in the plan are a relatively small number of major axes into the city and along the two banks of the Seine, where the speed limit will be 50 km/hr, and the city’s hard pressed ring road (périphérique) [...]. — World Streets: The Politics of Transport in Cities

New bike lanes certainly make life better for cyclists, but how do they affect drivers? This question is hotly debated, especially when a new bike lane replaces a lane used by vehicular traffic. It seems that unless a ton of people start commuting by bicycle, giving away a lane would cause increased car traffic. But is this really the case? — fivethirtyeight.com

Inspired by the engineering, intricate choreography, and impromptu interactions of your daily commute? Wish there was an open mic night for historians and urbanists? A show-and-tell for your creative musings on mass transit? Looking for a public platform to present your ideas to a captive audience?

Us, too. That’s why we are excited to announce PLATFORM, a new series of cross-disciplinary programs created by the public for the public. Have an idea? We’ll give you a platform. — NY Transit Museum

The Paris Métro, opened in 1900, extends over more than 200 kilometers of track, serving more than 300 individual stops. But there are 11 more stations that, though once built, now stand nearly abandoned. Many of these "ghost" or "phantom" stations shuttered after the occupation during WWII. [...]

Parisian mayoral candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet has a bold plan for these phantom stations ... these abandoned spaces should be reclaimed for the city's residents. — The Atlantic Cities

Last January, Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, did something that no other city its size had done before: It made all public transit in the city free for residents. [...]

One year later, this city of 430,000 people has firmly established itself as the leader of a budding international free-transit movement. [...]

What’s less clear on the first anniversary of free transit in Tallinn is whether it has actually changed commuting behavior all that much. — Citiscope

Superpedestrian, a start-up in Boston, announced on Monday that it has received $2.1 million in financing to help build a wheel that transforms some standard bicycles into hybrid e-bikes.

The product, the Copenhagen Wheel, is a design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology SENSEable City Laboratory. The original goal of the wheel was to entice more people to more bicycles in large cities in lieu of cars by giving them help from a motor. — New York Times

Given current growth trends, the world's population is expected to reach 9 billion people by midcentury. That also means a quadrupling in the number of cars to 4 billion by 2050 -- and that, said Ford, is a recipe for global gridlock that he argues will become "a human rights issue, not just an inconvenience."

For Ford [...] the only answer is to create a future where pedestrians, bicycles, and cars become part of a connected network. — CNET

Elon Musk's Hyperloop announcement resulted in quite a bit of skepticism. We'd like to think that has less to do with the feasibility of Musk's concept and more to do with the massive mass transit failures of the past.

And there have been some doozies. — wired.com

In our previous post, we published the winning projects of the 2013 Burnham Prize Competition: NEXT STOP-Designing Chicago BRT Stations. The brief asked designers to envision iconic, functional and sustainable stations for Chicago’s planned Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system.

One of the finalist entries, the concept "Hurry Up and Slow Down" by Ann Lui and Craig Reschke, was recognized with a Citation for proposing a counterpoint to a RAPID transit system: the Slow Line. — bustler.net