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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Register now before we sell out! Act against climate change and create universal mobility at the 2020 National Shared Mobility Summit, March 17-19 in Chicago. Meet leaders from the public and private sectors and learn the latest policies and practices. Form partnerships and make new modes work for communities of all sizes

  • 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)

Thursday’s Headlines

By Blake Aued | | No Comments

Register now before we sell out! Act against climate change and create universal mobility at the 2020 National Shared Mobility Summit, March 17-19 in Chicago. Meet leaders from the public and private sectors and learn the latest policies and practices. Form partnerships and make new modes work for communities of all sizes

  • Sidewalks, bus shelters and a grid rather than hub-and-spoke routes are the keys to resurrecting city bus systems, according to author Steven Higashide. (Kinder Institute)
  • Cities need both carrots (like subsidies for micro-mobility services) and sticks (like banning cars in city centers) to solve the last-mile problem. (Horizon)
  • Curb-to-curb microtransit that’s somewhere between a bus and an Uber is the latest trend among transit agencies, including Sacramento, Seattle and Los Angeles. (Government Technology)
  • A rather meandering New York Times article talks about how cities are hopeful that data collected from e-scooters can help them plan infrastructure and reduce congestion.
  • Bloomberg has a long feature on Brightline, the startup that runs a high-speed passenger rail line in South Florida, with plans to go from California to Las Vegas, and to link up other cities that are too far apart to drive and too close to fly as well.
  • California Assembly Member David Chiu thinks more people would ride transit if the Bay Area’s 27 transit agencies were unified. (San Francisco Chronicle)
  • Portland’s TriMet unveiled plans for the Southwest Corridor light rail line (KATU). And Madison officials have recommended routes for downtown and westside bus rapid transit (Wisconsin State Journal).
  • So many people lost, stole or forgot to return e-bikes in Philadelphia that the city is temporarily pulling what’s left of the fleet. (Inquirer)
  • Speaking of which, people are stealing Toronto’s speed cameras even before they can start giving out tickets. (Narcity)
  • A Georgia bill would tax ride-hailing, limousine and taxi rides to pay for transit in rural areas. (AJC)
  • Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto is floating gondolas — the cable cars, not the boats — as a key to modernizing the city’s transit system. (Post-Gazette)
  • Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to transform the City of Light so people can find everything they need within 15 minutes — without getting into a car. Her plan includes a bike path on every street by 2024 and removing three-quarters of the city’s on-street parking spaces. (Eltis)
  • Obeying parking rules is for the little people, according to Jeff Bezos. (The Verge)
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