Transit

Not a day goes by without a raft of stories about "new mobility" providers -- ride-hailing companies like Uber or car-share services like Car2Go that have tapped into recent technological advances to provide new ways to get around.

Last week, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority joined the National Association of City Transportation Officials, the federation of local DOTs whose policy guidance and street design manuals are popularizing a more multi-modal approach to urban transportation policy.

Jeffrey Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy at NelsonNygaard Consulting, has until early next year to put together a Transportation Department, pretty much from scratch, for the City of Oakland.

Late Friday afternoon, I was already at a dinner meeting when I heard the news. Metro announced that the most recent, and likely last, lawsuit against the Purple Line Subway Extension under Beverly Hills has been completed.

Streetsblog has been calling attention to the dismal state of transit waiting areas with our Sorriest Bus Stop in America tournament. Transit riders have to put up with conditions that no one should stand for -- bus stops with nothing to sit on and no shelter, bus stops by dangerous, high-speed roads with no sidewalks, even "secret" bus stops with no visible marker that they exist.

Nearly two years ago, President Obama noted the need for greater and more equitable park accessibility while speaking at the San Gabriel Mountain national monument designation ceremony:

Yesterday's evening commute turned into a nightmare for passengers on the Altamont Corridor Express (ACE) train, when--according to the latest reports--a mudslide sent a tree onto the tracks and caused a major derailment.

The new Transbay Transit Center (TTC) is scheduled for completion in 2017. The foundation of the TTC, and the thing that makes it such an improvement over the old Transbay bus terminal it's replacing, is its underground train station for Caltrain and High Speed Rail. It will bring Caltrain, the connection between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, into close proximity with five Muni and four BART lines and over 40 bus connections, not to mention San Francisco's huge downtown employment center. The TTC should one day be the most important transit hub outside of New York City—a Grand Central Station of the West.

A federal policy that has encouraged Americans to drive to work instead of taking the bus or the train won't tilt the playing field toward car commuters so much.