Today’s Headlines

  • Study: Walkable Neighborhoods Cut Obesity, Diabetes 10 Percent (NYT)
  • Opening Date for Cincinnati Streetcar Set for This Fall (WMUB)
  • Milwaukee Area Planners Predict BRT Will Attract an Additional 9,000 Riders (Wauwatoosa Now)
  • Twin Cities Light Rail Plan in Doubt After State Punted on Funding (Star Tribune)
  • Gainsville Sun to FDOT: Don’t Expand Underperforming, Sprawl-Inducing Toll Road
  • Business Owners in San Diego Up in Arms Over Bike Lane Plan That Would Reduce Parking (CBS 8)
  • The Stranger: Seattle Betrays Cyclists by Ignoring Dangerous Streets
  • Salt Lake City Changing Zoning to Promote Streetcar Ridership (Tribune)
  • Racial Divide Over Wake County’s Transit Plans (Indy Week)
  • Forbes Writer Compares Light Rail to Landlines
  • bolwerk

    That dudebro at Forbes couldn’t actually find a subject matter expert to support his preconceptions? Even an anti-rail ideologue, with at least some credible urban planning bona fides, like Enrique Penalosa? Even the not-so-dogmatic Jarrett Walker is critical of surface rail, if not adamantly opposed to it. Nope, gotta parrot the most unassailably bogus voices in the business. Again:

    But it doesn’t seem to do any of this, a conclusion drawn by numerous analysts, most notably Randal O’Toole. For decades, he has written in books, blogs, and as a Cato Institute analyst about the fool’s errands of cities trying to reorient themselves around rail. They spend billions on building and maintaining systems, only to find that their cities largely function as they had before, via car use and fragmented development patterns.

    But hey, let’s just go on completely ignoring most of those light rail networks are moving people more cheaply than the buses they supposedly replace (supplement/augment, really, if we can get past the silly Randroidish notion that everything is a competition).