Wednesday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued | | No Comments
  • President Trump’s latest budget cuts Amtrak funding by 50 percent and eliminates a loan program for clean vehicle manufacturers. It also includes $1 trillion for infrastructure, but with no way to pay for it. Democrats are unlikely to go along. (Reuters)
  • A California judge declined to block a new state law that requires Uber and Lyft to treat drivers like employees rather than independent contractors — a sign Uber’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the law is unlikely to be successful. (Gizmodo)
  • E-scooter companies are having a hard time making it in less-dense cities. Those cities can help by limiting the number of vendors and giving users more freedom on where to park the devices. (City Lab)
  • The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding hearings this week on autonomous vehicles, and two members write in The Hill that they could save thousands of lives by eliminating human error.
  • With the number of people who bike to work expected to double by 2022, cities don’t have enough bike infrastructure to keep up. (Denver Channel)
  • Biking in Denver is near a tipping point. Already in some neighborhoods, 10 percent of vehicles on the road are bikes — the point at which drivers really start to pay attention. And other areas could hit that mark as the city continues to build out a network of protected bike lanes and more people feel safe pedaling. (Denver Post)
  • San Francisco is planning a two-way bike path along the Embarcadero, where drivers have killed two people and injured 242 in the past five years. (SF Bay)
  • Las Vegas’ regional transportation plan includes 200 miles of light rail and bus rapid transit lines. (Review-Journal)
  • Utah took the first step toward a statewide rail system, which could mean commuter rail in Salt Lake City that runs twice as frequently. (Salt Lake Tribune)
  • Oregon will roll out its cap-and-trade program in Portland first, then other cities, to spare rural areas where the idea is unpopular from higher gas prices. (KATU)
  • Washington state might stop building new roads, focusing on maintenance instead. (Columbia Basin Herald)
  • Toll lanes and transit are among the Georgia DOT’s ideas for fixing perpetually clogged I-85. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
  • In an alternate — and much cooler — universe, Columbus has a train to Cleveland, a downtown streetcar and a citywide network of bike lanes. (Underground)
  • Even though central London has practically eliminated private car trips, it’s more congested than ever, thanks to ride-hailing, delivery vans and other factors. (The Guardian)

Tuesday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued | | No Comments
  • Oil companies invented fake news, astroturfing and the modern public relations industry. They’ve known about climate change since the 1960s, but have been denying it publicly anyway. (Grist)
  • States can’t depend on the federal government to pay for infrastructure as long as President Trump is in office, according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. (NY Daily News)`
  • Uber continues to pour money into money-losing side businesses, though it expects to start turning a profit by the fourth quarter of this year. Meanwhile, Lyft is focusing on subscriptions. (Reuters)
  • Los Angeles and other California cities keep raising speed limits when they should be lowering them. (LAist)
  • Bike ridership was up 20 percent the first day that San Francisco’s Market Street was closed to cars. (Examiner)
  • Houston METRO is building a bus-only lane above the Katy Freeway. (ABC 13)
  • A majority of Charlotte drivers want transit and bike and pedestrian facilities along I-77, but a proposed light rail line has been stalled for years. (Observer)
  • Portland voters will go to the polls in May to renew a 10-cent gas tax for street repairs. (KOIN)
  • Columbus drivers killed 23 pedestrians last year, compared to just six in Cincinnati. (Dispatch)
  • St. Petersburg is adding 50 e-bikes to its 300-strong bikeshare fleet (Tampa Bay Times). JUMP bikes are coming back to Providence (Journal). Hartford — where Lime pulled out last year — and surrounding towns are contracting with Zagster to bring in bikes and e-scooters (Courant).
  • Old man shouts at clouds that Twin Cities rail is a dystopian hellscape. (Pioneer Press)

Monday’s Headlines

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  • Sustainable transit is a great investment because it saves lives, saves time lost to sitting in traffic and saves the environment all at once. (The City Fix)
  • Coronavirus is sowing confusion, fear and racism among Uber drivers. (Daily Beast)
  • Thirty companies have burned through a combined $16 billion trying to develop self-driving cars (The Information). Imagine if that money had gone into improving mass transit instead. 
  • To drivers who complain about bike lanes, here’s another reminder that if you’re driving, you’re not in traffic. You are the traffic. (Treehugger)
  • On a similar note, Los Angeles residents are happy to pay for transit, as long as they don’t have to use it themselves — which kinda defeats the purpose. (The Economist)
  • Former Streetsblog Denver editor Andy Bosselman has a solution for I-70 ski traffic: Toll drivers at peak times to fund free transit. (Denver Post)
  • Texans love pickup trucks, but will they buy an electric one? Tesla and Ford are betting they will. (Marker)
  • Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto’s new “Bike+” master plan would add 152 miles of bike lanes and trails, focusing on connecting existing infrastructure and incorporating scooters and e-bikes. (Post-Gazette)
  • Dozens of CEOs are backing a Michigan bill allowing metro Detroit voters to tax themselves to fund regional transit. (Oakland Press)
  • The conservative Heritage Foundation is, naturally, opposed to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s plan to raise the gas tax to fund transit. But the think tank does raise a good point about allowing denser development around transit stations. (Daily Signal) 
  • Actor Orson Bean, an icon of our old man editor’s childhood, but someone we loved in “Being John Malkovich,” was killed by two drivers in Los Angeles on Friday night. Local media in LA didn’t seem very concerned about the manner of the death (all the editor’s drive cars, no doubt), but if you read between the lines, it is clear that the city-loving Bean was betrayed by the car-centric streets of the City of Angels. Shame. (LA Times)
  • The head of the Decatur Bike Coalition pushes back against a biased Atlanta Journal-Constitution article about bike lanes in the nearby city. (Decaturish)
  • Transit ridership in Dallas-Fort Worth is falling, and agencies are surveying users to find out why. (The Texan)
  • Honolulu city council members are unhappy about delays on a light rail project. (Hawaii News Now)
  • Right hooks are the cause of two-thirds of crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians in Seattle. (My Northwest)
  • The new Jerusalem-Tel Aviv high-speed rail line is a sign that Israel is ending its longtime practice of overspending on car infrastructure and turning to transit instead. (City Metric)

Friday’s Headlines

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  • SUVs are a dangerous symbol of waste and excess — even if they run on batteries. (Motherboard)
  • If cities want funding for light rail, the feds should require them to build more housing (Forbes). In related news, Los Angeles is actually building plenty of housing — at least, for people who have a car (L.A. Times).
  • A Columbus partnership is helping employers cut down on employees’ single-occupancy trips and encourage them to use transit (Government Technology). In addition, the Ohio capital is now home to the nation’s first daily, public autonomous shuttle, funded by the Obama-era Smart Cities Challenge. The pilot program will run for a year (Bloomberg).
  • Georgia Democrats want to end the state’s long-standing policy of spending gas tax revenue only on roads and bridges, and open up for the funding for transit as well. (Curbed)
  • The Utah Transit Authority is considering extending TRAX light rail lines in Salt Lake City and offering service every five minutes. (Deseret News)
  • The Portland Streetcar is asking for six new cars to extend the line 2.3 miles. (Oregonian)
  • A proposed Boston ordinance would save people who ride transit to work a few bucks by letting them buy passes with pre-tax dollars. (Daily Free Press)
  • No wonder studies show women don’t always feel comfortable transit: An NBC Washington investigation found 120 complaints of sexual misconduct by D.C. Metro employees, ranging from lewd comments to assault.
  • Charlotte drivers continue to kill pedestrians at a record pace, despite new crosswalks and sidewalks. Police blamed pedestrians for “putting themselves in peril.” (Observer)
  • Likewise, drivers killed 16 pedestrians in Reno last year, many of them homeless. Instead of educating drivers or designing safer streets, social workers handed out reflective backpacks, and in more than half of collisions, police cited the pedestrian. (Gazette-Journal)
  • A heroic Chicagoan spray-painted bike lanes onto a deadly intersection the city has failed to maintain. (Block Club)
  • Helsinki did it! The Finnish capital recorded zero traffic deaths in 2019. (Smart Cities World)
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