Transit

This weekend, Philadelphia ran subways all night on two of its lines for the first time in 23 years, and ridership jumped. The city normally runs a night-owl bus that mirrors the subway between midnight and 5 a.m., but the early Sunday morning subway ridership this weekend was 35 percent higher than the average for the bus.

The first decade of the millennium saw significant growth for transit in America.

Transit officials lined up today to make clear that holding transit spending at current levels -- as the Senate’s transportation authorization bill does -- will put transit systems at risk of falling further into dangerous disrepair.

Welcome to a super-long extra-bonus episode of Talking Headways! We only took on two topics this week, but we got so enthralled by both of them we just couldn't shut up.

And, side note: The giveaway for our spring pledge drive has changed since we recorded this podcast. Now, you'll be entered into a drawing to win a package of zines and books by feminist bike activist and writer Elly Blue. Thanks for your donation!

There are plenty of reasons why Omaha, Nebraska, isn't known for being a walkable, people-friendly city. It has one of the lowest bike commuting rates in the country. In a vote last year, Streetsblog readers crowned a location in Omaha as America's worst intersection.

Young people want to live in cities that give them a variety of transportation options and make it easy to get around without a car. That's the key finding from a new survey of more than 700 young adults by the Global Strategy Group. The survey was commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation and Transportation for America.

All across America, city buses are waiting. Waiting at stoplights, waiting behind long lines of cars, waiting to pull back into traffic, waiting at stops for growing crowds of passengers. And no, it's not just your imagination: Buses are doing more waiting, and less moving, than they used to. A recent survey of 11 urban transit systems conducted by Daniel Boyle for the Transportation Research Board found that increased traffic congestion is steadily eroding travel speeds: The average city bus route gets 0.45 percent slower every single year. That's especially discouraging given how slowly buses already move, with a typical bus averaging only 13.5 mph.

Did you go to the World Urban Forum in Medellín, Colombia, last week? Neither did your hosts Jeff Wood and I, but we sure found a lot to say about it anyway on this week's Talking Headways podcast. Medellín's remarkable urban transformation -- undertaken in the midst of war -- has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention lately for making the city's transportation infrastructure more equitable.