Transportation

Transit best serves commuting destinations that have high concentrations of employment. For the most part, this means downtowns, or central business districts (CBDs). This is where transit lives up to its “mass transit" name, carrying many people concurrently and efficiently to concentrated destinations.  read more »

Maryland officials have announced that a proposal to build a maglev line from Washington to Baltimore has received a commitment for the feasibility study of $2 million from Japanese government.  read more »

I was walking home from downtown San Francisco and passed through the South of Market neighborhood. The area is full of tech company offices like Twitter, Uber, and Airbnb. I saw this minivan advertising, “Low Cost Commuting” and “Ride Share” with the Enterprise Rent-A-Car logo and thought hmmmmm.  read more »

The Port of Shanghai is by far the largest seaport in the world, according to the authoritative 2014 figures published by the American Association of Port Authorities. AAPA is an "alliance of the ports of Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States."  read more »

Most discussions of our slow economic growth includes a seemingly compulsory demand for increased public capital spending, so-called infrastructure spending or simply “roads and bridges.”  Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton promise increased public capital spending on their websites.   Larry Summers made perhaps the best case for public spending when he claimed that our failure to invest in public capital creates the “worst and most toxic debts.”  read more »

There is no better way to see China than by train. This is especially true because foreigners are not allowed to drive rental cars without first obtaining a Chinese drivers license. China has developed the world's largest high-speed rail system, which includes one of only three profitable routes in the world, along with Tokyo to Osaka and Paris to Lyon.  read more »

How will new carpool options like LyftLine and UberPool affect the marketplace of transit services? When mobility conversations turn to Lyft, Uber and other ridesourcing — or ridesharing — companies, the discussion typically centers on their effects on the taxicab business. Here in Chicago, Lyft and Uber recently survived a turbo-charged regulatory battle with cabbies that could have forced them to entirely withdraw from our city.  read more »

An examination of American Community Survey (ACS) data in the major metropolitan areas of the United States shows that suburbs and exurbs have the shortest one-way work trip travel times for the largest number of people. The analysis covers metropolitan areas with more than 1,000,000 population in 2012, from the 2010-2014 ACS (2012 average data) using the City Sector Model.

The City Sector Model  read more »

The statistical authorities of various nations survey commuting behavior of their citizens in periodic population censuses and related surveys. Most of this data relates to the residential location of workers, but not to the work location. Both sets of data are important for understanding the dynamics of mobility within urban areas. However, in some countries, like Canada and the United States work location is not readily available.  read more »

Infrastructure investment is a hot topic and the focus of that discussion tends to lean towards transport infrastructure over other categories (like energy or water for example). When it comes to transport, trains seem to feature prominently on the wish lists of big investment or ‘nation building’ projects. But how far could billions of dollars in new rail infrastructure actually go in improving congestion across our cities?  Will cars inevitably win? If so, why?  read more »