Maryland

The governor who killed a $3 billion Baltimore light rail project out of faux fiscal prudence yesterday announced $9 billion in highway expansions.

The decades-long saga of the Maryland Purple Line reached a happy milestone yesterday.

Pandering to NIMBYs, Catherine Pugh wants to rip out a protected bike lane that has been in the works for years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to design and build.

This is the final piece in a three-part series about privately-financed roads. In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the Indiana Toll Road as an example of the growth in privately financed highways, and how financial firms can turn these assets into profits, even if the road itself is a big money loser. In this piece, we examine the shaky assumptions that toll road investments are based on, and how that is putting the public at risk.

Yesterday's elections returned some of the nation's most anti-urban, anti-transit governors to power in races where they were supposed to be vulnerable. Pro-transit candidates were unexpectedly routed in some states, though a few did manage to hang on.

At a talk Wednesday at City Lit Books, transit advocate Ben Ross, author of the new book “Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism,” discussed the battle for a new light rail line in the D.C. suburbs. This well-run campaign offers lessons for Chicagoans pushing for sensible transportation and development policy, whether the issue is bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue, or high-density housing near ‘L’ stations.