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Three planning principles for better transportation projects - Mobility Lab
Washington, DC’s Southwest and Capitol Riverfront neighborhoods are changing. According to Michael Stevens of the Capitol Riverfront BID, this area of DC is rapidly developing into a sort of “new downtown”—the number of residents is expected to double in the next 10 years, and planned development projects range from commercial real estate to hospitality and performance venues. The neighborhoods have complicated histories. Before the 1950s, Southwest DC was a vibrant black wor
Ready or Not, Here Comes the Micromobility Revolution - City Lab
Inside a luminous former factory on the Bay Area waterfront last week, software geeks, VCs, and sundry tech evangelizers zipped around on electric bikes, scooters, and hoverboards. Industry representatives from Jump, Spin, and Lyft hawked their compact transportation widgets. This was the Micromobility Conference, billed online as “an event focused on unbundling the car with lightweight electric vehicles.” It wasn’t the world’s first summit for aficionados of tiny shared urba
Minneapolis and Seattle Have Achieved the Holy Grail for Sustainable Transportation - Streets Blog U
Two American cities have finally cracked one of the hardest codes in city planning: Even with low gas prices, even with population growth, even with Uber and Lyft circling 24/7, Minneapolis and Seattle have reduced the amount of driving in their cities. Vehicle miles traveled are down 2 percent in Minneapolis between 2007 and 2016, according to city officials. During that time the city gained roughly 30,000 residents. Average daily traffic declined 5 percent in Seattle over r
Uber new feature will let you pay transit fares through its app - Curbed
With options to rent scooters and electric bikes via its Jump subsidiary, a ride with Uber today doesn’t always mean getting in a car. Now, thanks to a new feature, it may soon mean hopping onto a train. Today, Uber will launch a new Transit feature in Denver that allows users to plan their trips with public transportation in mind, and in the near future, pay for rides on buses and trains in-app. The new feature will include real-time transit information for the Denver Region
Why biking must be explicitly added to the Green New Deal - Mobility Lab
Now’s the time for sweeping climate change legislation that will reduce carbon emissions in the United States. That’s where the popular Green New Deal (GND) comes in, a proposal from newly-elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that, if passed, would set goals for future climate lawmaking. The first draft of the resolution leaked this morning, so the goals outlined might change. But as of this writing, there’s one glaring omission: biking. The surprisingly lackluster transport
How to reimagine public transit and get people out of cars - TreeHugger
Years ago, Alex Steffen wrote: There is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive. The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car, but eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go. We are seeing this play out in real time in California, which has more electric cars than any other state, but where tailpipe emissions continue to rise. According to Nichola Groom in Reuters, Houston's
6 ways trip-planning apps can change your commute - Curbed
In the final weeks of 2018, I caught a glimpse of transportation’s future on my way to an appointment. I was walking briskly to catch a bus I knew had 20-minute headways. If I missed it, I’d be late. I fired up a trip-planning app on my phone, which gave me a real-time countdown to when the bus would arrive. I had five minutes to go three blocks. Crap! Now walk-jogging, I toggled over to the ride-hailing option, ready to reluctantly summon a car as a fallback. But then my thu
Self-driving cars could make city centers like old airport arrival areas - Mobility Lab
People who are authorities on autonomous vehicles (AVs) often say a major benefit will be the accompanying mass reduction in parking needed. And replacing parking with places where people can socialize, lounge, and generally enjoy living does indeed sound like a utopian vision for our cities of the future. But new research from the University of California, Santa Cruz in the current issue of Transport Policy finds a dark side when AVs replace all that wasteful parking. Author
