War on Transit
Posted: February 8, 2012 Filed under: Transportation, Washington Leave a comment »Switchboard on “the worst transportation bill ever”:
By essentially waging war on public transportation, House Republicans are bent on scuttling the 30-year old deal forged by President Reagan. Their bill would take the transit account –- now renamed the “alternative transportation account” — out of the transportation trust fund and throw it into the general fund. This will add $40-billion-dollars to the budget deficit, unless some unspecified offsets are found. It’s a shell game, and worse, it drives a dagger into the backs of millions of commuters (city-dwellers and suburbanites) who ride transit.
100 Miles
Posted: February 1, 2012 Filed under: Transportation, Washington Leave a comment »DC's street car system was 100 miles, ran from 1862 to 1962. New proposed system is 37 miles. Still more than any other city #dcstreetcar—
Tommy Wells (@TommyWells) February 01, 2012
The Train Was an Immediate Hit
Posted: January 31, 2012 Filed under: Transportation Leave a comment »Tony Dutzik at the Huffington Post:
Maine’s Downeaster rail line got its start as the improbable dream of a group of plucky citizen activists who envisioned running trains on a section of track between Boston and Portland, Maine, that last saw passenger traffic in 1965. After more than a decade of determined work, capped by passage of a citizen ballot initiative, the Downeaster made its initial run in December 2001.
The train was an immediate hit — a 1990 study projected that the line would ultimately attract about 167,000 passengers each year, a figure that it quickly surpassed. Last year, the train carried more than half a million passengers — twice as many as in 2005.
Streetcars on 14th Street
Posted: January 27, 2012 Filed under: Photography, Transportation, Washington Leave a comment »Via District Department of Transportation on Google+
Vibrant and Walkable
Posted: January 23, 2012 Filed under: Transportation Leave a comment »The most successful and best-loved cities in the world have vibrant and walkable streets. They put great and constant care into improving them. Great cities start with great pedestrian environments.
Around the U.S. in Seven Minutes, with a Phish Soundtrack
Posted: December 27, 2011 Filed under: Listening, Transportation, Videos Leave a comment »H/T to YEMBlog for this one.
Long Way to Go
Posted: December 22, 2011 Filed under: Transportation Leave a comment »From a nice item at Next American City:
By 2020, China is projected to have spent $300 billion on high-speed rail and to have a 16,000-mile network. By then, Spain is projected to have spent $100 billion and to have a 6,200-mile network. In the United States, comparable figures are harder to determine because the fate of high-speed rail is more uncertain, but projections are that by 2014, we might have spent over $12 billion and have one 800-mile north-south line in California. We have a long way to go to catch up.
Here’s to Classy Cabs for D.C.
Posted: December 19, 2011 Filed under: Transportation, Washington Leave a comment »I was just grumbling about D.C.’s taxi hodgepodge. It turns out this is a bigger issue in the city than I had realized. The Washington Post reports on a bill unveiled today:
The mayor, not the Taxicab Commission, would be charged with deciding whether cabs should be a single color and which color that should be. All cabs will also have “an emblem symbolizing the flag of the District of Columbia”; taxi companies would be allowed to have an unique insignia on their cabs. The deadline would be one year from enactment.
We’re not just talking about credit-card readers and GPS here. The law would digitize record keeping within a year, mandating devices that send trip data to the commission in real time and “can record and report all fares and earnings for tax purposes.” Expect big time pushback from the cab industry on this; it means real financial accountability for the first time.
The Future?
Posted: December 12, 2011 Filed under: Environment, Technology, Transportation Leave a comment »I love this story. Green Car Congress:
The operational début of [the new hydrogen fuel cell NH2 tractor] is scheduled for summer 2012, on the La Bellotta farm in Venaria, near Turin, New Holland’s first Energy Independent Farm. This concept centers on the ability of farms to produce electrical energy from natural sources that have a low environmental impact, and to store it conveniently in the form of hydrogen for subsequent reuse.
Three methods are being evaluated for the production of hydrogen:
1. Electrolysis of water, using electrical energy produced by a photovoltaic system already installed on the farm.
2. Small-scale steam reforming of natural gas; should this prove practically feasible and economically viable, it would be possible to use the methane produced by the digesters of the one MegaWatt biogas generator that has been in operation at La Bellotta for over a year.
3. Exploiting the dark anaerobic fermentation of biomass: a biological process generating a blend of gases that contains a significant proportion of hydrogen. This method will also be evaluated in terms of feasibility, costs and benefits.
Enormous Potential
Posted: December 8, 2011 Filed under: Transportation, Washington Leave a comment »On the record, all the interested parties dwell on the station’s enormous potential, and indeed, it’s hard to overestimate. In 15 years, Union Station could be something much more catalytic: a portal for high-speed rail service that will get people from here to New York in 90 minutes, the hub of a streetcar system that stretches from Oklahoma Avenue NE to Washington Circle, the beating heart of a new mixed-use neighborhood that knits NoMa together with H Street. It could be a place you don’t just go to in order to get somewhere else. But all that has a price tag that hasn’t even been determined yet. It’s likely north of a billion dollars—and only $80 million is currently accounted for.
