Transportation

The West Seattle Link Extension Has Gone Off the Rails

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On September 20th Sound Transit published the Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the proposed light rail extension to West Seattle.  read more »

Gasoline Does the Lindy Effect

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Last week, I took my 2012 Acura to my longtime auto repair shop, Rising Sun Automotive, for an oil change.  read more »

Auto/Transit Job Access Ratios: 50 Large Metro Areas

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What a difference the remote work revolution has made. The University of Minnesota Accessibility Observation auto and transit access data for 2021  read more »

Has Transit Entered the "Death Spiral"?

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Transit ridership dropped sharply with the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020. The slow rebound in the years that followed has prompted discussion, sometimes in hushed tones, as to whether transit had entered a “death spiral.” That ominous description refers to a situation where a decrease in ridership leads to lower farebox revenue, which in turn leads to service cuts, which further reduces ridership, and so on in a vicious downward cycle.  read more »

Four Decades of Work Access (Commuting) in Los Angeles

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This article describes work access in the Los Angeles combined statistical area (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties) from 1980 to 2022, using US Census Bureau data.  read more »

Is Bicycling Improving?

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One of my many beefs with government planning advocates is that they tend to judge success by measuring inputs rather than outputs.  read more »

Mid-Day Traffic Now Worse Than AM Rush Hour

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Morning and afternoon rush-hour traffic has returned to pre-pandemic levels in many U.S. urban areas, according to INRIX’s 2023 Global Traffic Scorecard.<--break--> However, what INRIX finds most “astonishing” is that mid-day traffic has grown by an average of 23 percent and is now much greater than during the morning rush hour, and almost as great at around noon as the afternoon rush hour.  read more »

April 2024 Transit Ridership 74.6% of 2019

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Transit systems carried less than 75 percent as many riders in April 2024 as in the same month before the pandemic  read more »

Shanghaied

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On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on CBS’s “Face The Nation” to promote the Biden administration’s electric vehicle mandates  read more »

Transit $60 Million in the Hole? Build a Monorail!

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In case anyone believes that transit advocates haven’t completely lost their grip on reality, take a look at Memphis. The new CEO of the Memphis Area Transit Authority (MATA) has “discovered” a $60 million deficit in the agency’s budget that “prior leadership was unaware of.”  read more »