2008 « The Transport Politic

Charlotte Ridership; HSR in the UK and China

December 31st, 2008 |

Charlotte‘s year old light rail system, according to the Observer, experienced a slight drop in ridership in November, from 16,470 average weekday trips in October to 15,551. There are several reasonable explanations for this drop – colder whether, a broken economy (including the collapse of the city’s largest employer, Wachovia), and the Thanksgiving vacation. But even the new ridership numbers are far higher than those originally predicted for first year ridership – 9,100 a day.

The south’s second city, then, remains an example for how new LRT projects can be implemented successfully. Charlotte’s focused land use program, which encouraged dense development around

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Updated «Under Construction» and «Planned» Pages

December 30th, 2008 |

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It’s a slow news day here in the transportation world, but we’ve been working hard to give you more information on transit expansion that you’ll be able to find at the tip of your fingers.

We’ve updated our Under Construction and Planned pages, links to which you can obviously also find above, with the most recent information we’ve been able to find about major mass transit projects being built or being considered around the nation. We hope you’ll find the information useful and take advantage of this resource when you need some quick facts or a link or two.

We’ll also try to

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Mass Transit in the Stimulus; Shanghai's Rail Boom

December 29th, 2008 |

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The New York Daily News and Newsday report that New York State stands to gain billions of dollars in the upcoming stimulus bill, enough to not only iron out the enormous expected budget deficit that is coming as a result of decreasing tax revenues, but also enough to provide for the improvement of transportation in the Empire State. Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Jerry Nadler had a press conference yesterday in Manhattan to announce that they were busy negotiating with the incoming administration on the specific terms of the now $675-775 billion stimulus. And they suggest that transit capital projects will

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Phoenix Light Rail Opens

December 28th, 2008 |

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This weekend, Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the United States with 1.5 million people, opened its first rail line in sixty years. This light rail line, a part of the region-wide Valley Metro system, will also serve the cities of Tempe and Mesa, with populations of 174,000 and 453,000, respectively, and the airport in the middle, called Phoenix Sky Harbor International. This passes the honor of “largest U.S. city without a rail transit system” to San Antonio, Texas, with a population of 1.3 million (#7), which, as far as we know, has no plans to build one (other than a

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