This New York Times article on the planned, 53-hour mid-July shutdown of the Los Angeles area’s Interstate 405 has the same hysterical, nearly apocalyptic tone as an Onion article. Apparently for two days, residents of America’s second city will be marooned in their own homes, forced to resort to pre-industrial means of transportation.
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Photo by Steve Roberts
Potentially-important news on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. The popular passenger route’s locomotives are going to be replaced with 70 state-of-the-art and energy-efficient models by 2013, thanks to a massive, low-interested federal loan secured by the national rail carrier. Transportation Nation says this is “big news”
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Photo from Lorianne DiSabato via Flickr
Boston’s City Council voted unanimously last week to ban Segways from its sidewalks. With exceptions made for persons with disabilities, the electric two-wheelers used by tour guides and participants will have to be driven in the streets.
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A couple weeks ago, Republican congressmen John Mica and Bill Shuster introduced a bill that would effectively privatize Amtrak’s northeast corridor, a move that would strip the passenger service of it’s most important line and result in the probable breakup of the national rail carrier. In a caustic and, at times, sarcastic column at Railway Age, William C. Vantuono dismisses the Mica/Shuster plan wholesale. Republicans try to break up Amtrak once a decade without really pushing the issue that hard, he says. Threatening to break up Amtrak is (probably-harmless) partisan window-dressing, and after all, lawmakers aren’t railroad people and therefore have close to no idea what they’re talking about.
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Transportation Alternatives, New York’s powerful pro-public transit, bicycling and pedestrian advocacy organization, is touting a bi-partisan solution to the deterioration of New York’s public transit infrastructure. In a press release last month, TA noted that both Republican and Democratic state senators were in favor of the Transit Funding Lockbox Act, a law that would prohibit New York from diverting Metropolitan Transit Administration money to the state’s general fund. The New York state legislative session is currently winding down, and there’s been no movement on the lockbox measure.
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Over the past three days, over a million YouTube viewers have had a first-hand look at the absurd state of New York City bike lanes. In this video, cyclist Casey Neistat records an encounter with a police officer, who fines him for not biking in an available bike lane. As it turns out, this isn’t even illegal in New York, and the ticket is a textbook case of police harassment. Being the victim of a government-authorized shakedown is disheartening. But Neistat approaches New York’s notoriously arbitrary traffic enforcement, and sometimes-unsafe bike lanes, with slapstick humor:
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The unpleasantness of Washington, DC’s Metro system is now international news. China Daily editor in chief Li Xing took to the pages of China’s largest English-language newspaper to do a quick comparison between the experience of riding the Beijing subway and Washington, DC’s Metro, which has the second-highest daily ridership of any American subway system. She admits that Beijing has its problems—between the crowded platforms and the even more dangerously crowded trains, riders basically have to swap a bit of their basic human dignity for a ride across town. But she says that the DC Metro is even worse.
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Daily Record photograph by Steve Davis
What’s more dangerous in your community? Walking or not walking? If walking isn’t a safe way to travel in your city, not walking may be just as dangerous.
The American Colleges of Sports Medicine’s American Fitness Index (AFI) and Transportaton for America’s Pedestrian Danger Index (PDI) may not at first blush appear to have much in common with one another, except for the fact that they were both released this week. The American Fitness Index is a “scientific snapshot of the state of health and fitness at the metropolitan level,” while the Pedestrian Danger Index is a “measure of the relative risk of walking, adjusted for exposure.” So where’s the connection?
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As Texas legislators prepare to cut $4 billion from education, they also plan to spend $4.4 billion on a 28 mile expansion of Interstate 35E between Dallas and Denton. The expansion would more than double the number of existing lanes to a total of 14 lanes (eight regular, four tolled HOV, four to six frontage), paid for through controversial public-private partnerships. Denton county voters are on the hook for $55 million from road bond funds, while local toll revenues add another $535 million. The project is poised to be the state’s most expensive road project in history, surpassing the $3.6 billion Central Texas Turnpike.
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The Montreal Gazette is reporting a troubling development in the bike-sharing world. Bixi, a world-renowned designer and operator of bike-share systems, is facing some dire financial difficulties and may have to be bailed out by the government of Quebec in order to continue operating. Bixi got its start in Montreal, whose bike share was successful enough to convince several major American cities, including Washington, DC and Minneapolis, to contract their own bike shares out to the pioneering Canadian company. But Bixi, like Amtrak, is learning that success doesn’t necessarily translate into cash.
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