- Riffing off last weekend’s notorious New York Times article, Treehugger says that when self-driving vehicles arrive, cities will be forced to choose between banning cars and penning up pedestrians.
- Here’s an innovative idea for funding transportation: Tax corporate stock buybacks (Inside EVs). Or, if you want to keep the gas tax, at least index it to inflation and stop charging electric vehicle owners more than those who drive gas-powered cars (Natural Resources Defense Council).
- In Chicago, transit delays are down and ridership is up. In Washington, D.C., the opposite is true. What can the Metro learn from CTA? (Washington Post)
- Bay Area Rapid Transit is installing what appear to be switchblades or inverted guillotines on fare gates to stop turnstile-jumpers, raising concerns that they could be dangerous to people in wheelchairs and hostile to minorities and the poor. (Salon)
- The deaths of two cyclists this summer is spurring Denver to build out its bike and sidewalk network faster, but it could still take another 18 years to complete. (Denver Post)
- Uber is suing Chicago over the city’s exclusive bike-share contract with Lyft. (Sun-Times)
- Lyft e-bikes’ battery packs caught fire in San Jose and Berkeley before the company pulled its e-bikes from the Bay Area after two San Francisco fires. (Mercury News)
- Sen. Ben Cardin is urging Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to include a protected bike and pedestrian lane on the new Rt. 301 bridge to Virginia. Hogan had promised to include one, but then quietly backed off. (Maryland Matters)
- The commissioner of Georgia’s department of transportation thinks freeway express lanes are the future of transportation, and no, he did not time-travel here from the 1950s. (Curbed)
- It’s the mother of all bike clutter: Beijing has removed almost 400,000 rental bikes and shut down four companies in the first half of 2019. (Nikkei Asian Review)
I keep coming back to this sentence: “The city records 1.6 million daily bike-sharing rides on average…” 1.6 MILLION. DAILY.