Instead of mocking LA's public transportation while claiming the threat of long commutes will somehow drive away future startups, tech leaders need to leverage the power of their own industry to get behind the city's proven solution for tackling traffic. It's not Waze Carpool, it's not a Lyft Shuttle, it's not whatever Elon is digging up next-it's championing our own public transit systems.
For the last two weeks, Brad Miller, CEO of the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, has been experiencing something too few people in his position ever do: riding his agency's buses on a daily basis.
Using open data from 7,236 cities, researchers looked at factors like affordability, access to jobs, frequency of service, quality, and number of stops. The goal is to encourage policymakers to improve public transportation.
With limited budgets, transit agencies are competing with a plethora of ads-and free, earned media attention-from more prestigious and hipper corporations such as Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Uber, and Lyft.
From Detroit to Brooklyn, recently opened and proposed streetcar lines are popping up across the country, to mixed success. Here's a look at some of the important U.S. streetcar updates to keep an eye on in coming months.
The fact that Philadelphia's transit system has been lauded as one of the best in the country may come as a surprise to its daily riders. For many, a ride on a SEPTA rail was like a ride in their mom's old minivan, completely functional but never cool.
The joint legislative committee tasked with producing the package recognized from the start that this package had to be multimodal. While there was a focus on freeway projects that would address three bottlenecks in the Portland region, many committee members quickly recognized that these freeway projects were certainly not silver bullets and possibly wouldn't help much at all in the long term.
The Department of Transportation formally notified the Gateway Program Development Corporation board on Friday that the agency was pulling out of its board of trustees. The rail project is working to increase capacity between New York City and Newark, N.J.
Gateway is about much more than the tunnel itself - the second-biggest item in the portfolio is a massive redesign of Manhattan's Penn Station, for example - all of which is about giving Amtrak increased capacity on the Northeast Corridor (capacity which could be used by commuter railroads as well).
San Francisco is about to roll out the red carpet for buses. Currently, Muni buses travel in several bus-only routes, painted bright red. But according to the San Francisco Examiner, the agency is now contemplating a massive expansion for the pilot, involving about 50 new streets.
Crisis breeds opportunity, and NYC's buses should play a starring role. In very short order, Governor Cuomo and Chair Lhota should direct the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to expand off-the-bus fare collection, enabling people to board through all doors on high-ridership routes where long delays for getting on and off buses are an everyday, every-stop fact of life.
Beginning July 10, Metro and its contractor will test the use of a curtain grouting technique to add a waterproof membrane to the exterior of Red Line tunnel walls.
"This program is one of the methods Caltrans is using to help the state meet its ambitious goals to address climate change," says Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty.
A $1 trillion federal infrastructure program, as President Donald Trump has proposed, could indeed produce new jobs. It also could exacerbate the gap in skilled workers nationally and in Iowa. If Congress and the White House can agree on a plan, it must include funding for workforce training.
