Transportation

The Coronavirus public health emergency is an existentialist crisis for many sectors of the U.S. economy and government services. The transit industry is one of the most impacted of all.

Transit began losing relevance decades prior to this event. Transit ridership and transportation market share have decreased even as operating costs and taxpayer subsidies increased. Expenditures for major capital projects have reached a billion dollars per mile and more while essential services for transportation-disadvantaged residents have withered away.  read more »

Amazon Air is 2020’s transportation juggernaut, flying high above the many airlines struggling to keep aloft during the coronavirus epidemic. This wholly owned subsidiary of retailing giant Amazon is growing rapidly in response to another surge in online buying. Amazon Air’s expansion marks one of the most significant developments in the U.S. air-cargo business in years—and is giving a shot-in-the-arm to smaller airports oriented primarily towards freight shipments.  read more »

Once widely seen in the media as “the next great transit city”, the Los Angeles area’s rapid transit boom was turning to a bust — and well before the Covid19 crisis. As we can see below, transit ridership in greater Los Angeles, the nation’s densest urban region, has been declining for years, and things are not likely to get much better with the impact of the pandemic.  read more »

Like so many of us, Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times is stunned at the concentration of COVID-19 virus deaths in New York City, as well as the rest of the metropolitan area. In an April 25, 2019 article entitled “America Should Not Have to Play by New York Rules,” Stephens points out that the “number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (8).”  read more »

By late spring, the most severe impacts from the coronavirus may be fading, but its impact on how we live and work will not go away. Indeed, many of the most relevant trends — including the rise of dispersed work and living arrangements — were already emerging even before the pandemic emerged.  read more »

In Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous and core of the nation’s most densely populated urban area, transit commuting is dropping fastest in areas with the most comprehensive transit service. This is illustrated by an examination of the 5-year trend from 2008-2012 (middle year 2010) to 2013-2017 (middle year 2015) for Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs).  read more »

We’re constantly being bombarded with the EV movement, but Americans must have a multitude of subconscious reasons for not buying into one of the major movements to save the world from itself as they are showing their lack of enthusiasm by avoiding the dealerships.  read more »

This week, WSDOT leadership testified before the House Committee on Transportation in support of House Bill 2688, which removes the goal of congestion relief from the state’s transportation policy goals and replaces the rest. The agency said the bill supports its strategic plan, pictured in the diagram.  read more »

In a recent paper, David King of Arizona State University, Michael Smart of Rutgers University and Michael Manville of UCLA cited the legendary urbanist Mel Weber on the importance of facilitating sufficient mobility for low-income citizens: “Our central mission is to redress the social inequities thrown up by widespread auto use, and our central task is to invent ways of extending the benefits of auto-like transportation to those who are presently carless.”  read more »

In a preceding article, I argued that a "city-as-an-artifact" approach to planning misses the organic nature of cities, and, when used in action, this approach could result in disappointing, if well-intended, outcomes. Similarly, biomorphic models for cities fail to construct a unified, actionable theory of planning.  read more »