June 21st, 2010 |
» With municipal and state funds aligned for transit project, a more livable downtown on its way.
Cincinnati is thinking seriously about how to make its proposed streetcar system a vital element of a growing downtown, not simply a trophy piece to parade around in demonstration of its progress. The city’s Planning Commission has taken a major step in that direction by signaling its support last week to significantly reducing parking requirements in areas within two blocks of future streetcar stops. The city council will have to approve the decision for the zoning code to be altered.
If it goes through
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June 9th, 2010 |
» When cities, states, and even regions consider how to improve transportation connections, they should be forced to evaluate a whole range of modes.
If, as I have suggested over the past few days, states are to take an increasingly important role in the transportation funding process, they must similarly become more implicated in the planning program for all modes, not just highways, typically their reserved domain. Though there are some exceptions, like New Jersey and Connecticut, most states currently assign decision-making about public transit to separate local or regional authorities, which receive direct funding from the federal government.
This separation
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May 12th, 2010 |
» North Carolina Railroad studies new commuter rail system in the state’s center, but its ridership estimates may be unrealistic considering the region’s demographics.
The fastest-growing tech hubs in the United States are unified in their sprawling nature and provide definitive proof for at least one uncomfortable truth: the country’s smartest inhabitants aren’t necessarily rushing off to urban hubs. Despite the recent increase of wealthy, young, white inhabitants in many central cities — a reverse “white flight” — the overall trend suggests that the fastest-growing high-education metropolitan areas continue to be places with low overall density.
According to a new
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April 5th, 2010 |
» Residents fear light rail would cause accidents, gentrification, and displacement. Can any transportation project be so influential?
Like many sunbelt cities, Houston is rushing to build a transit system that can provide an alternative to the congestion caused by a population that has exploded by more than a million people over the past forty years. Now with about 2.3 million inhabitants, the city has developed a five-line light rail plan that would extend rapid transit across the densest areas of the metropolis. Though fiscal difficulties may result in a delay in the construction of two of the planned corridors,
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March 18th, 2010 |
» Faster travel times result in larger commute markets. Whether that means more suburban sprawl, however, is a decision left to municipal planners.
We’re told that French and Spanish villages, once too far from major cities to have any national consequence in an information age, have seen their fates reverse thanks to high-speed rail systems that have put them far closer than ever before to the centers of politics and finance. The result, apparently, has been a re-population of formerly dying towns with long-distance commuters working in the big city but interested in living at the
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February 10th, 2010 |
» Sound Transit advances plans for East Link light rail; Bellevue council member leads push for I-405 alignment.
In few places in the country is the choice between a quality transit alignment and a miserable one as stark as in Bellevue, Washington, through which light rail trains from Seattle will run by 2020.
The Puget Sound’s Central Link light rail line opened last year between downtown Seattle and SeaTac Airport. It forms the spine of what will be a much larger system that eventually extends south, north, east, and potentially west. The East Link,
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