public transportation
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Only cyclists and walkers remain calm
At around 4:30am today, a powerful storm swept through New York City and surrounding areas, dumping nearly two inches of rain over Central Park in just one hour before spinning into "tornado-like" gusts in Brooklyn.
The downpour was over soon enough, but the sudden surge of water flooded our subway system, causing every major line to be shut down. Service on buses and trains into the city was either suspended or delayed, right in the midst of rush hour on a sweltering hot day.
By now, most people have either made it to work or given up trying, and at City Room, a blog in the NY Times regional section, many are weighing in about their morning commutes.
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The next generation of riding transit
Riding transit just got way, way, easier. A new website called SpotBus is wildly better than existing online trip planners. For one thing, you can enter destinations like a normal person -- "Ballard," or "Ikea," or "ferry," or whatever -- not some arcane intersection. It's so much faster and more intuitive that it feels like giving up your old gimcrack five-disc CD changer for an iPod.
It only works in the Puget Sound area, but there's no reason something similar couldn't be devised for other regions.
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Greyhound gets some competition from Megabus.com
Buses, on average, get low passenger miles per gallon in the U.S., because they stop often and don't use most of their capacity. Coach buses -- providing prebooked travel between cities -- don't suffer from these limitations.
Megabus.com, a new niche player in this market, provides cheap, comfortable travel between nearby cities with travel time comparable to driving or taking commuter airlines (in a very small portion of the U.S.). Efficiency is 184 passenger miles per gallon -- without using hybrid buses or using any particular efficiency technology. They just use yield management ticket booking, where the earlier you book a ticket (relative to other passengers) the less you pay for your seat. (Thanks, Jordan Hayes for the tip.) -
A perspective from Eric Mann
A Latina woman addresses the board of the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). She is part of a crowd of 1,500 people opposing the agency's proposed bus-fare increases. She holds her 3-year-old child up to the board and says, "What would you like me to do? Take the clothes off his back or the food out of his mouth?"
L.A., with 10 million people and 7 million cars on the road, is the freeway capital of the U.S. For more than 14 years, the MTA on one side and the Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union (BRU) on the other have been fighting over the future of L.A.'s public transportation -- a fight with important implications for the future of the environmental movement. The heavyweight bout has grown more high-profile this year. Despite massive opposition, on May 24, 2007, the MTA board of directors voted to raise the daily bus fare from $3 to $5 a day and the cost of a monthly bus pass from $52 to $62 a month. This is just the first step in a draconian trajectory that will, if not stopped, push the monthly bus pass to $75 and then $90, force many low-income people off the buses, and compel people to use or buy old cars instead of taking public transit. These policies will increase toxic air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions, and make the bus riders poorer while making rail contractors richer.
The fight over the fare hikes has become a cause célèbre. The Bus Riders Union and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are in state court trying to reverse the fare hikes on environmental grounds. The BRU is also in front of the federal courts asking for a five-year extension of a federal civil-rights consent decree controlling MTA actions. Dozens of BRU organizers are on the buses, talking to thousands of bus riders, holding community meetings to plan our next countermove. The fight to reverse those fare increases, buy more buses, and stop future money-sucking rail projects is far from over. This dramatic expansion in the breadth and impact of the environmental movement in L.A. could be a model for urban coalitions throughout the U.S.
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While planet burns, Boeing scores a PR victory
At the gym, in between hearing an EMT talk about the heat stroke issues he expects tomorrow, I marveled at how awful news programs were today, devoting huge chunks of time to talking up Boeing's new "Dreamliner" jet, which the blow-drieds say will consume 20 percent less fuel per mile. I even heard one blow say "eventually reducing the cost of air travel."
Man, talk about delusional.
(Oh, and I know I'm not supposed to connect things like our craze for jet travel and high temperatures, as if to suggest a connection between another spate of record breaking temperatures in what's shaping up to be a record breaking year ... bad me. I'll report to reprogramming.)
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Can text messaging solve some of our cities’ climate & traffic challenges?
A story in the new Plenty magazine gives details on a cab company that's giving the late-night clubbing crowd of Liverpool great green service with the magic of text messages:
It's a solution any 14-year-old would love: The challenges of foreign oil dependency, global warming, and gridlock are not so big that you can't text-message your way out of them.
The Texxi text-dispatchers arrange carpool cab rides based on who's texting from where and their desired destinations. Besides the other benefits, it also saves its riders money, which is proving popular. The company is planning to leap the pond and expand to cities in Texas, California, and North Carolina -- but of course, you need to have a mobile phone that can text message, leaving this here Luddite out.
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Public transit
For over two weeks I’ve been meaning to link to this post on public transit from Michael O’Hare and say something interesting about it. So as not to delay it indefinitely, I’m dropping the "say something interesting about it" requirement. Just go read it.
