The rise of private transit operators like Bridj, Leap, and Uberpool has raised questions about equity in places including the Bay Area, where such services are fast replicating. A related issue is the impact they will have on traditional public transit systems. Private transit vehicles have been described as “like a lounge on wheels,” with […]

Chicago’s rail transit infrastructure has a lot of unused capacity, Yonah Freemark wrote last week on the blog of the Metropolitan Planning Council, and making use of it might be cheaper and easier than expanding the system. Some of Chicago’s most transit-accessible neighborhoods are barely growing, but rents are rising fast, Freemark reported, an indication that […]

There’s an interesting conversation happening in urbanism circles about how to make transit financially sustainable, going back to a piece in CityLab last June from University of Minnesota professor David Levinson. Levinson made the case for running transit like a public utility, not a government agency. There’s one thing that’s largely missing from these discussions, argues Cap’n Transit, […]

Job sprawl — picture suburban office parks with lots of parking — might be past its peak. The last few years have been good ones for central cities, as far as job growth is concerned, and not so hot for mid-height, reflective glass office campuses. That’s according to an analysis by researcher Joe Cortright at City Observatory. […]

City rankings that purport to reveal the best place to raise a family are ubiquitous. Where I live, in northeast Ohio, it’s the homogeneous, sprawling suburbs that tend to be very proud of their positions on these lists. Bradley Calvert at Family Friendly Cities examined the key criteria used by Apartment List to develop its “best […]

Since Republican Larry Hogan was elected governor in November, transit advocates in Maryland have been holding their breath. During the campaign, Hogan threatened to kill the mostly-funded and ready-to-go Red Line in Baltimore and the Purple Line in the DC suburbs — two of the biggest transit projects on tap in the U.S. A budget […]

Dallas is in the process of rolling out a “bike-share” system. According to the Dallas Morning News, the city installed the first two stations in a local park this week. The project got a boost from a $125,000 grant, and the plan is to expand the system piece by piece. But due to its pricing […]

Portland is importing a new kind of bike lane design from the Netherlands. “Advisory bike lanes” allow drivers to use the bike lane space if they have to — and if it’s safe. Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland reports that advisory bike lanes are intended for streets with high bike traffic but not a high volume of […]

Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic calls them infill stations: new transit stops built in gaps along existing rail lines. Current examples include Assembly Station just outside Boston in Somerville, DC’s NoMa Station, and the West Dublin/Pleasanton BART station. Infill stations are a pretty brilliant method to get the most out of older rail systems without spending very much, […]

Driving is too cheap in the United States. It’s a complicated thing to unpack, but David Levinson, engineering professor at the University of Minnesota and blogger at the Transportationist, attempted to analyze the cost per-minute. Levinson estimates that the true cost of driving — including vehicle purchase price, insurance, taxes, repairs, and costs like parking and […]

Copenhagen is famous for being a city where a lot of people bike. But for years the bike commuting rate has remained roughly steady at just over a third of trips. Then last year the city’s bike commute mode share increased from 36 percent to 41 percent. Meanwhile, driving declined 3 percent as a share of […]

The municipal skateboard ban is the “get off my lawn” of transportation policies. Outright prohibitions of this healthy, cheap, and environmentally friendly form of transportation are common. These laws — enacted in towns including Lakewood, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia — seem based at least in part on stereotypes applied to people who skateboard, particularly boys and […]