Thursday’s Headlines from All Over
- The big news today was Joe Biden and President Trump announcing dueling infrastructure initiatives. Biden's $2-trillion climate-change plan includes converting the federal government fleet to all-electric (New York Times, Streetsblog). Reaction was mixed: Slate called it the Green New Deal in everything but name, while Forbes' Carlton Reid said it's too auto-centric. Meanwhile, Trump was in Atlanta to talk about lifting environmental restrictions to speed up permitting on road projects, which he said would allow for the widening of I-75 (AJC). NPR contrasted Trump's fossil-fuel heavy approach with Biden's clean energy plan.
- A coalition of transit agencies said the $25 billion in the CARES Act to keep them afloat during the pandemic is running out, and asked Congress for an additional $36 billion. (The Hill)
- A new poll found that three-quarters of Americans would like to keep working from home at least one day a week, and a third want to ditch their commutes every day. (Streetsblog)
- Traffic engineers are finally starting to realize that setting speed limits based on how fast drivers are already going, instead of for safety, is a bad idea. (State Smart Transportation Initiative)
- Struggling Bay Area transit service Caltrain might have to shut down after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors rejected a request to put a sales tax generating $100 million on the ballot. (SF Chronicle)
- New York's MTA wants to cut staff. The problem is, the transit agency doesn't even have an organizational chart of its 70,000 employees. (Daily News)
- Massachusetts' attorney general is suing Uber and Lyft over their classification of workers as contractors. (NBC 10). Drivers say their lack of sick pay shows why they should be classified as employees instead (Bloomberg).
- Fresno is planning three miles of protected bike lanes downtown that could someday extend to the San Joaquin River. (Bee)
- Recently re-elected Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has an ambitious transportation plan for her second term, including more bike lanes and bike parking spots, a stipend to help families buy cargo bikes, lowering speed limits, banning polluting vehicles and permanently closing the Seine to traffic. (The City Fix)
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk's Twitter account was the first of many public figures' to be hacked in a massive bitcoin scam. (The Verge)
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