Today’s Headlines

Romney: As President, I’d Borrow to Pay for Transportation Infrastructure (Transpo Nation)
Senator Brown’s Transit Flexibility Bill Is Badly Needed in Many Cities (T4A)
Mexico City’s Sleek New Buses Cut Pollution, Generate Carbon Credit Sales (Reuters)
Strong Support for Texting Ban Runs Deeper in Missouri Town (HuffPo)
BRT Is Great But Is It to Blame for Killing Detroit Plans for Light Rail? (Transport Politic)
DC City Council Considers Move to Promote Partying in the Streets (HousingComplex)
Sprawl Blamed for Plunging Canadians Into Debt (Times Colonist)
Salt Lake Suburbia Wants ‘Suburban Renaissance for the 21^st Century’ (SLTribune)
Burlington, Vermont Police Discover the Benefits of Bicycle Patrols (Fox8)
Transit Goes Festive for the Holidays (NRDC)

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

A Decade of Growth for Transit-Accessible Neighborhoods in America

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 11, 2014

The first decade of the millennium saw significant growth for transit in America. From 2000 to 2010, the number of regions with fixed-guideway transit — rail systems or bus systems with dedicated lanes — grew from 27 to 40. And ridership followed. In the period beginning in 1995 and ending in 2008, total American transit ridership […]

Without Transit, American Cities Would Take Up 37 Percent More Space

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 28, 2015

Even if you never set foot on a bus or a train, chances are transit is saving you time and money. The most obvious reason is that transit keeps cars off the road, but the full explanation is both less intuitive and more profound: Transit shrinks distances between destinations, putting everything within closer reach. A new study published by the Transportation Research Board quantifies […]

Let the Debate Begin: NYC, SF Snag Top Spots in First Transit Score Rankings

By Ben Goldman | Apr 26, 2012

Today, Walk Score — developer of the popular method for evaluating neighborhood walkability (and filling out NCAA tournament brackets) — announced its first ranking of cities by Transit Score, a measure of the “usefulness” of a city’s transit system. On a 100-point scale, New York and San Francisco took the top two spots with scores of […]

A New Resource for Tracking Transit Trends in American Cities

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 9, 2016

How does transit ridership in your city stack up against other cities? A new tool from transit analyst extraordinaire Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic can help you figure it out. Freemark’s “databook” compiles a raft of data from the Census and the Federal Transit Administration into a series of graphs and tables that show trends in transit ridership in selected U.S. cities. Here you […]

The 10 Best and Worst Cities to Catch a Bus to Work

By Angie Schmitt | Oct 7, 2014

It’s been called “the geography of opportunity.” And David Levinson is trying to make a science of it. In a new analysis, Levinson, a University of Minnesota transportation engineering professor, and his colleague Andrew Owen have ranked the 50 largest U.S. metro areas based on job accessibility by transit [PDF]. Levinson and Owen used transit schedules and walking […]

Many Americans Live Near Transit, But Few Live Close to Good Transit

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 10, 2016

This chart tells an eye-opening story about access to transit in the United States. Using the new data tool AllTransit, TransitCenter dug into who has access to transit in American cities, making a crucial distinction between residents near any transit whatsoever and residents with access to convenient, frequently running service. The analysis encompassed the nation’s 25 largest cities and […]