In cities across the United States, you can find examples of “streetcar suburbs”—enclaves of mostly single-family homes built between the turn of the century and the 1930s. These are often good-looking, tree-lined places full of heterogeneous character and history, in many ways so different from contemporary suburban sprawl.
Popularity: 36% [?]
It’s been more than a generation since the Brazilian city of Curitiba pioneered Bus Rapid Transit. Since then this cost-effective and flexible transit system — which repurposes existing roadways into bus routes rather than constructing capital-intensive new railways — has become a worldwide model for urban mobility in both affluent and developing nations. A new addition to the BRT network was recently launched in India. Last year the northwestern city of Ahmedabad opened the first phase of the Janmarg — the People’s Way. Though still in its infancy, the system has already attracted favorable attention: early this year the U.S.-based Institute for Transportation & Development Policy awarded Janmarg its Sustainable Transport Award.
Popularity: 32% [?]
The recession has hit public transit hard. Government funding is being slashed at all levels, and rising ridership isn’t bringing in enough revenue to keep systems running at full capacity. That’s got transit agencies cutting services or raising fares even as more people depend upon them. So it seems like an odd time for Baltimore to introduce a free bus system.
Popularity: 36% [?]
Advanced community design models are emerging to provide some of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use, climate-disrupting emissions and traffic congestion, while also offering affordable, high-quality lifestyles.
Envision living in a community that offers an abundance of local shopping, services and entertainment. The community is focused on a mobility center well connected to the region with transit and vanpools. The need to drive to work and other destinations is minimized. When you do drive, it is in an electric vehicle charged at your house or a fast charge station located in the mobility center park-and-ride.
Popularity: 40% [?]
One of Hong Kong’s smartest residential areas is called Mid-levels, and is served by an unusual form of transport: the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world. The Central-Mid-levels system consists of twenty escalators and three moving walkways - and it runs in one direction in the morning, and another in the afternoon.
Popularity: 27% [?]
By requiring car drivers to pay a fee to drive in a city at peak hours, congestion pricing reduces traffic and raises money that can be used to support public transit—both worthy goals.
Yet congestion pricing has dubious environmental value. Traffic jams, if they’re managed well, can actually be good for the environment. They maintain a level of frustration that turns drivers into subway riders or pedestrians.
Popularity: 33% [?]
A new report ranking the nation’s most dangerous metropolitan areas for walking finds that ‘incomplete’ streets are a major culprit in the deaths of thousands of Americans every year. Dangerous by Design, from Transportation for America and the Surface Transportation Policy Project, finds that as many as forty percent of fatal pedestrian crashes are in places where no crosswalk was available, and that arterials designed only for cars are the most dangerous.
Popularity: 27% [?]
We know climate change is happening and that its impacts on our society will be serious. Despite this knowledge, planners and elected leaders are not doing enough to prepare our transportation infrastructure for global warming’s effects. That was the message of Friday’s panel discussion, “Perspectives on Adaptation to Climate Change,” hosted by the Engineers Forum on Sustainability.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Orenco Station, the award winning neighborhood touted as an ideal of mass-transit oriented New Urbanism, has failed to persuade a majority of its residents to use mass transit to get to work.
About two out of three Orenco residents drive to work in cars, slightly less than some other suburbs but hardly the car-free utopia many idealists expect of the transit-oriented area. Even as the neighborhood has grown closer, block by block, to the MAX light rail station named for it, the use of cars for work trips remains relatively high.
Popularity: 30% [?]
When we talk about transportation, we tend to talk about things in motion. What is often left unremarked upon, in conversations about crowded highways, is something without which those crowds would not exist: parking. That humble 9-by-18-foot space (the standard size of a spot) is where traffic begins and ends. It is the fuel to traffic’s fire.
Popularity: 17% [?]