Month: June 2016

In case you're looking for a good visual to show how bike lanes can be extremely efficient transportation infrastructure, check out this short video from the UK-based advocacy group Sustrans. It shows rush hour on the Blackfriars Bridge "cycle superhighway" in London on a Tuesday morning.

A new payment option rolled out by Capital Bikeshare in DC last week makes it easier to grab a bike if you just want to make a single trip. The pilot program offers a base fare of $2 to check out a bike, with additional fees after the first 30 minutes. Previously, you would have had to commit to at least an $8 24-hour pass to use the system.

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[Last year the Chicago Reader launched a weekly transportation column written by Streetsblog Chicago editor John Greenfield. This partnership allows Streetsblog to extend the reach of our livable streets advocacy. We syndicate a portion of the column after it comes out online; you can read the remainder on the Reader’s website or in print. The paper hits the streets on Thursdays.]

Kevin DeGood of the Center for American Progress and Deron Lovaas of NRDC join the podcast this week to talk about rules proposed by U.S. DOT to measure congestion and greenhouse gas emissions. These rules matter because they'll create new feedback loops for transportation agencies -- the feds can create incentives to reduce car trips and carbon pollution if they choose. A draft released in April was not very encouraging, but the final rules could be much better.

A driver struck and killed a woman last week in St. Paul on what Bill Lindeke at Streets.mn calls a "four-lane death road."

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Commuter trains rumble by every few minutes while four Metra workers tell me inside a control tower how they keep 370 trains moving every day. The machine that controls switches between tracks has been operating since 1937. There needs to be more reliable and resilient equipment in place, but it's not a cheap or easy job to replace an ancient system.

Sometimes the worst transportation plan is having no plan at all, and northeast Ohio could be the poster child for what goes wrong when regions aren't intentional about investments in transportation infrastructure.