Wednesday’s Headlines From Around the Nation
The news of the day is still COVID, COVID, COVID — but it's all here, curated for you in one place.
By
Blake Aued
12:01 AM EDT on May 27, 2020
- The federal DOT is giving permission to airlines to stop serving about 60 small and mid-sized cities (New York Times). So how about some rail lines to connect those cities to their bigger neighbors, then?
- Cars aren’t going away, so let’s make them smaller, slower, cleaner and safer. (Crikey)
- Self-driving and remote-controlled scooters now being tested could end sidewalk clutter. (Forbes)
- Uber and Lyft’s $100 million effort to overturn a California law classifying drivers as employees rather than independent contractors is officially on the November ballot. (San Francisco Examiner)
- Jump bikes are back in Denver after Lime bought the company, and they’ll start each day in food deserts, with sanitized handlebars. (Denverite)
- A Washington, D.C. reopening task force’s recommendations don’t include enough about opening up streets for social distancing, some city officials believe. (WAMU)
- San Antonio is closing two residential streets to through traffic as part of a pilot program on making room for biking and walking. (Rivard Report)
- Pittsburgh transit has lost three-quarters of its ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Public Source)
- Albuquerque is painting its bus-only lanes red in an effort to alert pedestrians that they should look both ways — a bus could be coming from either direction. (Journal)
- The city of Austin and its transit agency are hashing out a deal to turn the city-owned B-Cycle bike-share over to Capital Metro. If it happens, people could buy a one-day pass on their phone to use both transit and the bike-share. (Community Impact)
- King County Metro in Seattle is considering a late-night reservation system so that riders aren’t passed up by buses that have reached their COVID-19 capacity. (Seattle Transit Blog)
- Service won’t start for three more years, but the Southwest Line’s first train cars have arrived in Minneapolis. (Star Tribune)
- The Tennessean has a list of kid-friendly bike routes in Nashville.
Blake Aued has been doing Streetsblog's daily national news digest for years. He's also an Atlanta Braves fan, which enrages his editor in New York.
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