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In 2019, New York City's Hurricane Sandy-damaged L Train tunnel will shut down for repairs, making it tricky to get across the East River without a new form of transport. In a competition sponsored by the Van Alen Institute to find alternatives, AECOM suggested building a fiber-glass fabric tunnel... View full entry
Oh, SF BART Twitter account—back at it again with the going rogue. This time, instead of getting real with folks on the platform, they decided to have a little fun with the Los Angeles Metro account, challenging them to a full-on haiku battle on Twitter this past Friday. — Upout Blog
The official Twitter account for the BART isn't sycophantic or pandering: when confronted with customer concerns, it answers them with actual facts, even if those facts wouldn't gel with a traditional PR department. Now, however, the BART account has gone one step further and is outright having... View full entry
Could Los Angeles grow to become a “real city” like New York or London? Last year, LA gained at least 50,000 people, according to a recent report from the California Department of Finance, pushing the population to more than 4 million people for the first time in the city’s history. — Vice
Part of the appeal of Los Angeles has been its refusal to be like other cities. For years, its objective "center" was a forbidding cluster of office towers with near zero street life, while in outlying, low-density neighborhoods, people partied in back yards that ran up against wildlife preserves... View full entry
Deutsche Bahn, a German-based railway and logistics company that transports about seven million train passengers every day ... plans to operate fleets of autonomous vehicles that could be ordered via an app, much people already do when they order a ride-hailing service like Uber. These driverless cars would be used to pick people up and bring them to public transit stations, solving the so-called “last mile” problem. — fortune.com
More news on automated vehicles and public transit:Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo join forces to lobby for autonomous vehicles"In LiDAR We Trust" – Poking the subconscious of autonomous vehicles with special guest Geoff Manaugh, on Archinect Sessions #43Beverly Hills wants to provide... View full entry
For almost a decade, transit ridership has declined across Southern California despite enormous and costly efforts by top transportation officials to entice people out of their cars and onto buses and trains.
The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the region's largest carrier, lost more than 10% of its boardings from 2006 to 2015, a decline that appears to be accelerating.
— LA Times
"Despite a $9-billion investment in new light rail and subway lines, Metro now has fewer boardings than it did three decades ago, when buses were the county's only transit option." Related: Eric Garcetti vs the Car: how LA's mayor plans to change the way Angeleños get aroundLA's freeway system is... View full entry
[Hyperloop] has the swagger of Elon Musk rather than the stigma of a public bureaucracy. Second, it’s going to be, like, a billion times faster than HSR. [...]
And yet, this combination of enthusiasm and magnetism doesn’t buy farmland. It doesn’t ease eminent domain takings. It doesn’t blast through bedrock or relocate utilities. It doesn’t design station area plans. [...]
The very same mountains, cities, canals, farmers, and habitats that complicate HSR also complicate Hyperloop.
— cp-dr.com
For past reporting on Hyperloop in all its emerging forms:Designing the Hyperspace: UCLA studio imagines Hyperloop's future in CaliforniaA first look at the Hyperloop's real tubes and imagined winged terminalsUnpacking the Hyperloop's lofty promisesElon Musk launches Hyperloop Pod Competition to... View full entry
Instead of relying on a subway that breaks down and causes interminable delays, what if the 17 miles of London's Circle Line were replaced with three moving walkways, much like the ones in airports, that allow pedestrians to step on at three miles per hour and then amble over to a fast lane of... View full entry
A combination of (mostly) public transit along with some Uber rides can be affordable for a wider range of customers than Uber alone. — Five Thirty Eight Economics
According to a study of New York City's private-car hiring habits, many of those who hired Uber did so as an extension of public transit: in other words, instead of Uber-ing all the way to a particular destination, a wider socioeconomic spectrum of New Yorkers frequently use some combination of... View full entry
"You have generations of people under the age of 35 … who are choosing to live car free and car-lite." – Westside Councilman Mike Bonin — L.A. Times
From the newly installed "protected" intersections in Austin, Texas and Davis, California to additional proposed bus lanes and bike paths in Los Angeles, car culture is becoming less of a given and more of an expensive, perhaps even less desirable, option. Cities across the U.S. are starting to... View full entry
The current ferry plan will cost $55 million, with plans to expand to Coney Island and Stapleton in Staten Island once more money is secured. Additionally, service will be restored to the Rockaway ferry, which was put in place in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy wiped out subway service to the area. — 6sqft
On Tuesday, Mayor de Blasio gave his State of the City address where he announced plans for a new, city-wide ferry service that will serve neighborhoods including the Lower East Side, Astoria, the Rockaways, Sunset Park, Brooklyn Army Terminal, Bay Ridge, Red Hook and Soundview, among others... View full entry
Nashville’s bid to build its first high-capacity transit line is dead, the Tennessean is reporting today. It’s a victory for the Koch brothers-funded local chapter of Americans for Prosperity and a defeat for the city’s near-term hopes of transitioning to less congested, more sustainable streets.
The project, known as the Amp, called for a 7-mile busway linking growing East Nashville to downtown and parts of the city’s west end.
— streetsblog.org
At the broadest level, it's fair to say that urban mobility didn't have the most encouraging day. In recent years, conservative transportation policy has been much more inclined to favor highways serving rural and outer suburban regions than alternative modes that boost balanced city networks [...] But at the city and county level, where most transit initiatives occur, the midterms yielded a number of big victories, in keeping with the general success of transit ballot measures in recent years. — citylab.com
...there's an awful lot that U.S. cities should learn as soon as possible about the way the French design their transit networks. Whereas American light rail systems have had modest success and modern streetcar lines have questionable transit value, France operates 57 tram lines in 33 cities that together carry some 3 million passengers a day and create a fantastic balance of mobility options for urban and suburban residents alike—all built in the last 30 years. — CityLab
With views of the downtown skyline, the $1.1 billion new Indianapolis airport has been celebrated for its sense of place, and for treating its passengers as "guests," much the way the hotel industry does. It has its own civic plaza, a light-filled central space with 35-foot ceilings that functions as the nexus of activity—every passenger, whether arriving or departing, passes through—where half of all the airport's shops and restaurants reside. [...]
What is Indy doing right?
— citylab.com
Tilikum Crossing is the nation's first multi-modal bridge that will be off-limits to private automobiles. It will carry MAX light rail trains (the impetus for construction) as well as Portland's streetcar line and city buses, and of course pedestrian and bike lanes on both sides—but no cars. [...]
"Transit has a huge impact on urban planning. I mean, if you look at our city, it was designed around streetcars. On some level, it has to be part of their DNA."
— citylab.com
