

State transportation departments need to give up on cars - Curbed
With a one-mile tunnel below a convention center set to join Las Vegas’s many transportation spectacles, another important detail got sidelined in last week’s hoopla: Vegas might be the Boring Company’s first paying customer, but Maryland’s transportation department is seriously considering building a similar tunnel for cars that would run from Washington D.C. to Baltimore. The Maryland project was first proposed by Elon Musk as a hyperloop, which would have transported passe


City streets safer than suburban roads, study finds - Plan Philly
New research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that denser cities and towns can save lives. The four-year long study compared Pennsylvania Department of Transportation records of all car accidents in a five-county region with population data, socioeconomic factors, different road types, and other factors. The resulting analysis, which examined collision data from 2010 and 2014, showed that the densest parts of the region –– like downtown Philly or suburban town center


Protect Yourself! Separated Bike Lanes Means Safer Streets, Study Says - Streets Blog USA
Cities that build protected lanes for cyclists end up with safer roads for people on bikes and people in cars and on foot, a new study of 12 large metropolises revealed Wednesday. Researchers at the University of Colorado Denver and the University of New Mexico discovered cities with protected and separated bike lanes had 44 percent fewer deaths than the average city. “Protected separated bike facilities was one of our biggest factors with being associated with lower fataliti


Maryland county looks to build on the success of a new, limited-stop bus route - Mobility Lab
Buses traversing Montgomery County, Md.’s limited-stop Ride On ExtRa Route 101 have gotten fuller and fuller since they began operating in October 2017. The Bethesda-Gaithersburg route’s 12 percent ridership increase over the past year and a half was achieved despite competition from low gas prices and investor-subsidized ride hailing. This contrasts strongly with national trends, as well as the county’s overall bus ridership numbers, which have fallen 11 percent during that


Can the U.S. curb gas-powered cars by 2040? - Curbed
Last week, federal legislation was proposed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that could radically shift the way the U.S. tackles its climate crisis. The Zero-Emission Vehicles Act would eliminate the sale of gas-powered passenger cars in the U.S. by 2040. “The climate crisis is a defining issue of our time, and we must pursue bold measures commensurate with the enormous challenge we face,” said Rep. Mike Levin, a Democrat from Southern California, who intro


Bicycle sharing pilot program to launch Monday in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge - The Record
A new bicycle-sharing pilot program described as smart, dockless and on-demand is finally set to launch Monday in Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge. The program including more than 100 orange-and-white Dropbikes was supposed to begin last year. But Matthew Lumsden, manager of operations and strategic initiatives with Drop Mobility, the company that operates the transportation service in numerous North American markets, said finalizing details such as stakeholder involvement a


A Great Big Freeway — Thanks to Induced Demand - StreetsBlog USA
Los Angeles is getting what it paid for when it widened 10 miles of its most infamous freeways — another lane of traffic. The extra lane of the I-405 between the 10 and the 101 freeways that opened in May, 2014, to supposedly alleviate congestion actually ended up adding a minute of travel time for drivers of the 10-mile stretch — and new data shows congestion is even worse. The $1.6-billion infrastructure investment, known as the I-405 Sepulveda Pass Improvement Project, sti


Berkeley, California, Plans for a Transit-Oriented Future - Next City
There are a lot of reasons that Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín is excited for San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit to build homes on a series of parking lots around the North Berkeley BART Station. Most obviously, the whole Bay Area — the whole state of California — is facing an acute housing crisis. North Berkeley specifically has seen little residential development over the years, he says, with exclusive housing patterns going back to racist policies like redlining and restr