In March, we told you about a proposal on the ballot in Georgia that would vastly expand Atlanta’s public transit system. Called the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or T-SPLOST, the proposal would levy a 1-percent sales tax over 10 years, providing $8 billion for transit projects. Proponents created an interactive map of the results, numerous maps and fact sheets, and a series of video flyovers showing what the investment would bring.

Transportation activists are on board, as are regional politicians like Atlanta’s mayor and the governor. Passing the elegantly named T-SPLOST would vastly improve transit access for Atlantans stymied since a 1971 vote rejected the construction of a regional mass transit system. For a city with the worst access to jobs via transit and a struggling economy, that would be huge.

And there’s almost no way it will pass.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution polled early voters in the region and found that only 32 percent supported T-SPLOST. Early voters tend to be older and more conservative — but for a measure that needs 51 percent to pass, it’s a bad sign.

The paper offered results from a broader poll over the weekend. That survey suggests that 51 percent oppose the plan, compared to 42 percent in favor. Seven percent were undecided — but undecided voters tend to break in opposition to ballot initiatives. The real differentiation, though, came by region. Voters in urban Atlanta areas favor T-SPLOST by a margin of 51 to 41. In the outer areas, only 35 percent support it.

Poll results from the Journal-Constitution. Click to embiggen.

Which is similar — though not identical! — to the vote breakdown in 1971.

The city wants improved transit; outer areas don’t want to pay for it. It’s a problem as old as the Republic: how to get public support for something that doesn’t benefit everyone in the public equally. Not that there is no benefit from T-SPLOST outside of Atlanta — but the benefits of transportation multiply with population density. Extending a rail line or new highway to the suburbs necessarily reaches fewer people than doing so in more tightly packed area. So suburbs tend to be less inclined to support broad transportation packages. Today’s vote will very likely reflect that.

Maybe by 2053, Atlanta will have figured it out.

Update: This image says it all. (Via Chris Mims.)

The Edible Bus Stop began as “a guerrilla garden project” alongside a South London bus stop. A small strip of land was being offered up for sale, and a group of locals started growing things in it. The group’s founder, Mark Gilchrist, told The Guardian:

The space was humble and neglected by the council, but rather than see it sold, I rallied the neighbourhood into taking it over and guerrilla gardening it as a community garden for all to share and enjoy.

Now there’s a second Edible Bus Stop going, and three more in the works. The goal is to have a network of community gardens that parallels the bus network. Here’s a lovely little video explaining the concept:

The group relies on volunteers to plant and care for the gardens. They’re also looking for sponsors to help the project grow. Little green spaces like these can make cities just that much more magical — imagine tracking the progress of blooming flowers and bulging squash every day as you wait for the bus to come.

This picture came originally via Reddit, so there’s little context, other than that it was taken in England and there’s a relevant Simpsons reference:

But England would not win a recursive truck contest. It’s China, apparently, that has mastered the art of turtrucken:

Four’s better than three, obviously:

It’s turtruckens all the way down:

Turtruckens mating:

This cannot be the most efficient way move trucks around — can it?

Waiting for a bus is never the most fun part of a commute, but if you lived in Isahaya City, Japan, you could at least pretend you were some kind of magic bus-riding mouse in a fairy tale. Bus shelters in the city are sculpted and painted to look like giant fruit.

The fruit shelters were installed in 1990 for a travel expo, but are so popular that they’ve stuck around. They’d be a little out of place in, say, New York — “Big Apple” or not, I don’t really see a large American city being willing to cosplay as a fruit salad. But they’re a nice reminder that bus stops don’t have to look grim, and that they can even add some whimsy to your commute.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has rounded up some other ideas, some of which are a little less precious.

Back in mid-19th century England, public transportation was popular enough that even dead people had their own railway. P. D. Smith writes:

The London Necropolis Railway station was constructed by the London Necropolis & National Mausoleum Company, specifically to serve their Brookwood Cemetery, 25 miles away in Woking, Surrey. The Company’s logo was, somewhat ghoulishly, a skull and crossbones.

The railway transported the deceased, in their coffins, to the cemetery, as well as some living people — the mourners headed to the cemetery for the funeral. In the late 19th century, the train ran every day, a “daily funeral express.” Public transportation was popular enough across all strata of society that the train had different cars and different entrances for different groups of people, Smith says:

In class-conscious Britain, even funeral trains were divided according to class, and this applied to both the living and the dead passengers — although of course these only needed a one-way ticket. Indeed, the trains had carriages reserved for different classes (First, Second and Third) as well as for Anglicans or Nonconformists. At Brookwood there were even two stations, one for Anglicans and the other for Nonconformists. Each station was also provided with its own licensed bar. The divisions in Victorian society lasted up to the very edge of the grave.

World War II bombing destroyed most of the station, but the facade of one entrance still stands, a ghost of a ghost train station. Can we please get Neil Gaiman to write a book about this?

Last month, we looked at a business owner in Pittsburgh who was forced to cancel plans to hire more staff when the city cut bus service near his office. The problem is not unique to Pittsburgh: The relationship between jobs and transit is an intricate one — albeit one that hasn’t received much study.

The Brookings Institution released a report today that provides some insight. “Where the Jobs Are: Employer Access to Labor by Transit” assesses the public transit access to jobs in urban and suburban areas. The findings:

• More than three-quarters of all jobs in the 100 largest metropolitan areas are in neighborhoods with transit service … Regardless of region, city jobs across every metro area and industry category have better access to transit than their suburban counterparts.
• The typical job is accessible to only about 27 percent of its metropolitan workforce by transit in 90 minutes or less.

The first point — jobs accessible by transit in the 100 largest cities — is illustrated below, by city.

Click to embiggen.

When a metropolitan area fails to extend transit into the suburbs, workers have a much harder time accessing jobs. Here’s an example of how that works for several cities, taken from the full report [PDF]:

For example, consider the cases of San Jose and Richmond. Both metropolitan areas offer transit service to over 97 percent of city jobs. But while San Jose’s suburban transit routes extend well beyond the city core, offering service to 84 percent of its suburban jobs, Richmond’s suburban routes stop close to the municipal borders, offering service to only 29 percent of suburban jobs. The end result is that San Jose’s overall transit coverage rate ranks fourth and Richmond’s ranks 94th. And Richmond isn’t the only metro that registers this extreme city/suburban dichotomy. Atlanta, Grand Rapids, and McAllen all show near-ubiquitous transit coverage in their primary cities and limited suburban coverage, pushing their overall coverage rates to the bottom quintile.

But even if a job is accessible by transit, that doesn’t mean that using transit to get to work is feasible. Below, a map of the second metric: the percent of a city’s population that is within a 90 minute window of a job.

Click to embiggen.

One conclusion Brookings draws:

Taken together, these two accessibility shares provide a sobering account of the costs of continuous decentralization. While the majority of households and jobs are near transit stops — proving that metropolitan transit networks do reach most of our neighborhoods — the distances between people and their regional jobs are too great to generate higher accessibility rates.

Brookings includes a city-by-city assessment of labor access using public transit, if you’d like to see how your municipality fares. Pittsburgh, if you’re wondering, ranks 69th out of 100 [PDF] in labor access rate.

Continuing the recent trend of zombies in the news: High-speed rail in America isn’t dead after all.

This morning, Amtrak released a proposal for a $151 billion high-speed line in the Northeast. From Talking Points Memo:

The proposed high-speed rail line would travel at top speeds of 220 miles-per-hour in some sections and be able to deliver passengers from Washington, D.C. to Boston in a little over 3 hours.

Travel times between other major Northeastern cities would be shortened even more markedly, with travel times between New York and Boston or New York and Washington, D.C. down to 94 minutes, and a little over a half-hour between New York and Philadelphia.

(Please note: Amtrak’s existing high-speed rail, the Acela, is “high speed” in the sense that driving kind of fast is “high speed.”)

Probably don’t need to tell you to hold off on buying tickets. If Congress signs off, the soonest the line would be operational would be 2025. Also, the “if” in the preceding sentence is not only a big if, it is the Guinness Book of World Records’ record-holder for biggest if in the history of ifs. If it were a building, it would be Jupiter, if Jupiter were a building.

This is what California’s high-speed rail system will look like, which, wow. (Click to embiggen.)

Not that elected officials won’t vote for high-speed rail! They just need to be lefty elected officials in hippie states like California.

California lawmakers gave the green light to start building the nation’s first dedicated high-speed rail line, a multibillion dollar project that will eventually link Los Angeles and San Francisco. …

In a narrow 21-16 party-line vote that involved intense lobbying by the governor, legislative leaders and labor groups, the state Senate approved the measure marking the launch of California’s ambitious bullet train, which has spent years in the planning stages.

Which means that California is actually going to start building this thing. The California High-Speed Rail Authority has a very cool trip planner feature at its website, featuring little animations of the rail coming to town with whole little neighborhoods popping up around the new stations. The first stretch of rail will go between Madera and Bakersfield, which should sell a few dozen tickets over a 50-year span.

True train junkies are, of course, holding out for the 2,500-mph New York-to-London super train that will never ever happen. Well, that’s not fair. It’s more likely to happen than the current Congress giving Amtrak $151 billion to improve travel times between New York City and Massachusetts.

Both the House and the Senate voted to okay a compromise of a compromise that is a major letdown for fans of bikes and clean transit. President Obama is expected to sign it into law today or tomorrow.

Despite much back-patting and talk of bipartisanship, a semi-decent Senate version of the bill was gutted during the conference-committee process. First House lawmakers loaded it up with “poison pills,” including a provision that would have forced the approval of the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline. Those pills were dropped from the final bill, but so were measures that would have promoted public transit, walking and biking infrastructure, air quality, accountability, and environmental review.

What was left? Highways, highways, and more highways.

“The final bill looks a lot like HR7,” a never-passed House version of the bill that would have slashed funds for transit, bike paths, and safe routes to school, says David Goldberg of the nonprofit Transportation for America. “This is the last gasp of a spent, 20th-century transportation program.”

When last seen, members of Congress were hightailing it for their Fourth of July recess, kicking up a cloud of exhaust. They were quickly caught in pre-holiday traffic, however, giving them a taste of what we’re all in for in the years ahead.

“If you’re not a paving contractor, you didn’t get much out of this bill,” says David Goldberg of the nonprofit Transportation for America. “This is just a really disappointing day.”

If there’s good news here, it’s that some of the worst provisions that House Republicans tried to attach to the bill have been removed. Those include language that would have halted EPA regulations on coal ash and forced the approval of the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline. Yesterday, Grist’s own Philip Bump likened the Keystone provision to “the political equivalent of crossing your arms and holding your breath until you turn blue.”

The resoundingly bad news, however, is that the Republicans’ political shenanigans seem to have worked. “It looks like [Democratic leaders] traded away the store to get Keystone off the political agenda,” Goldberg says. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, “ended up capitulating on almost everything.”

Among the concessions in the final bill:

• Language was dropped that would have increased funding for public transit and allowed transit agencies to use a portion of their capital funding to keep bus lines in service — important in a time when cash-strapped agencies are cutting service even as demand for transit soars.

• Funding for walking and biking infrastructure was slashed by at least 40 percent from the Senate version of the bill, and states will have the ability to use up to half of what remains for other purposes.

• Improvements to the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, which helps clean up the air in areas that don’t meet federal air-quality standards, were dropped.

• Also gone is a provision that would have increased funding for maintenance and performance measurement. Translation: States can let existing roads crumble, while stoking sprawl and air pollution by building new ones.

• The bill contains language that will allow agencies to “streamline” environmental reviews for road projects, though it is apparently not as damaging as it was in earlier drafts.

Wrapped up in all the muck of the bill is language that will reform federal flood insurance policy and direct fines paid by BP for its role in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to coastal restoration.

But that’s cold comfort for transportation advocates, who, assuming Congress passes this thing and the president signs it (and it looks like they will),  now have two years to rally the troops for a better bill when this one expires.

Congress normally revisits funding for transportation projects every several years, reevaluating spending, priority projects, and the like. That’s what they normally do. The current transportation legislation was passed in 2005 and repeatedly extended until revisiting the entire bill became impossible to avoid. In other words, until now. The most recent extension ends Saturday.

In March, the Senate passed a transportation reauthorization bill called Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century, clearing the normally contentious chamber by a nearly 3-to-1 vote. MAP-21 [PDF], as it’s lovingly called, is by most accounts a strong compromise, a two-year bill that includes a variety of new and revised programs that address maintenance, new road creation, transit, and beautification. Is it what many of us would want to see if we were given the government’s pocketbook? No. But it could be worse.

It could, for example, be the House’s version. The House has yet to pass full reauthorization legislation, instead signing off on short-term extensions. Recognizing the urgency and need of infrastructure investments, the House has decided to play its normal game: load the bill up with unrelated crap and negotiate to get the bill as far to the right as possible. Included in the House’s proposals are an effort to halt EPA regulations on coal ash (here’s EarthJustice on the issue) and to force authorization of the full Keystone pipeline. The former is at least sort of transportation-related; coal ash is a common component of concrete. The latter is the political equivalent of crossing your arms and holding your breath until you turn blue.

There have been ongoing rumors over the course of the week that a compromise between the two chambers would be reached. If anything other than a short-term extension is going to happen, a bill needs to be finalized and submitted by midnight tonight. Within the past few hours, in fact, there have been reports of a deal being reached. As of writing, that hasn’t been confirmed.

In politics, a short timeline favors those most willing to dig in their heels. In this scenario, as in so much of modern politics, that means the Republicans. It is impossible that the generally good Senate package — itself a compromise between Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and James Inhofe (R-Mars) — will survive unscathed. We spoke with representatives of Transportation for America and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to help determine which parts of MAP-21 were most worth protecting — and which elements of the House’s efforts were most alarming.

Good: Localized investments in smarter transportation. Thanks largely to an amendment filed by Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), MAP-21 set up a system (“Additional Activities”) that would have states sub-allocate federal money to municipalities and regions. As Daron Lovaas of NRDC noted to me, local and regional investment is more likely to result in spending on transit. States like highways; cities like buses.

Republicans have taken to disparaging this provision by focusing on the fact that it could promote beautification. “We just want to make sure it’s a bill that includes real reforms to ensure that taxpayer funds are paying for legitimate projects that support economic activity,” House Speaker John Boehner (R–Ohio) told The Hill, “not planting more flowers in beautification projects around the country.”

Bad: Shortened timelines for projects. Both the Senate and House proposals institute shorter project timelines in an effort to speed up completion. In concept, this is good: get money out the door faster and get roads and maintenance completed. In practice, though, this reduces the amount of time available for important community outreach and environmental reviews.

The House, in fact, suggests removing or undermining the application of a variety of federal environmental and historic preservation statutes, opting instead to delegate such protections to the states.

Good: Increased funding for maintenance and performance measurement. The last time transportation funding was authorized was two years before Minnesota’s I-35W bridge collapsed. Maintenance is sorely needed. MAP-21 allocates 60 percent of funding from a new National Highway Performance Program to maintenance projects. Note: this isn’t 60 percent of all funding, but of this new core program. More maintenance means less sprawl — and fewer emissions.

By also adding performance measures for state departments of transportation, MAP-21 also creates a pathway by which future reauthorizations could introduce new goals for states to meet, on energy use, pollution, etc.

Good: More funding for air quality. A 1991 initiative, Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program, provides funds for projects to more easily meet Clean Air Act standards. MAP-21 would focus that funding more directly on particulate-matter pollution, one of the more health-threatening types of pollution (and one closely associated with traffic).

Bad: Republican riders. The Republican base is fighting zoning and sustainable development. Little to nothing is immune to conspiracy theories (no, MAP-21 won’t somehow undo the Second Amendment). By comparison, efforts to slash funding and tie in unrelated items is practically rational.

Make no mistake: the Republicans in the House know how to negotiate. We’ll know shortly how effective they’ve been. With any luck, not very.