Created Monday 20 January 2020

See also: Transportation

January 17, 2020 by Jake Berman

They don’t build neighborhoods like they used to. That’s at the root of the housing crisis that plagues rich coastal cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

I’m going to use LA as an illustration. In the popular mind, Los Angeles is defined by the freeway, the automobile, and endless suburban sprawl. Four million people live in the city proper, and nineteen million live in the megalopolis. Four in five Angelenos drive to work, while only one in twenty takes mass transit.

The horrible irony of all of this is that LA was never designed to be a car city. Quite the opposite. The bulk of Los Angeles was laid out before World War II around the old Red Car system of the Pacific Electric Railway. They just overlaid the postwar freeway system on top of it. At its peak, the Red Car system had over 1000 miles of track, but the system went into a terminal decline as the automobile and the bus gained popularity.

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/17/las-lost-transit

Darrell Etherington / 8:56 am PDT•October 14, 2020

The city of Toronto is going to start operating autonomous shuttles on a trial basis, through an agreement with Local Motors that will see that company’s Olli 2.0 all-electric self-driving shuttle ferry passengers beginning in Spring 2021. The trial is being conducted with Pacific Western Transportation, a transportation operations company, and each ride over the course of the trial will include two full-time staffers, an operator on board from that partner, as well as a customer service rep from either TTC or Metrolinx, the company Toronto engages for much of its commuter transportation services.

The Olli 2.0 vehicle has a passenger capacity of up to eight people at a time, and includes accessibility features like a wheelchair ramp and securing points. It also includes an AV system for providing information and updates to passengers. The safety operator onboard the vehicle has the ability to take over manual control at any time, should the need arise due to safety concerns or for any other reason.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/14/toronto-will-trial-automated-shuttles-from-local-motors-in-new-pilot-program/

The U.S. is one of the most expensive countries in the world for building transit, according to the Transit Costs Project. A research group at the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management is working to understand why.

Nov. 1, 2022 - Jared Brey

For the last two years, a group of researchers at the New York University Marron Institute of Urban Management has been building a big database of public transit projects around the world. Their goal: To understand what drives the costs of transit projects, what makes some places more expensive than others, and how costs can be brought down.

The Transit Costs Project is led by Eric Goldwyn, an assistant professor and program director in the Transportation and Land Use Program at the NYU Marron Institute, along with research scholars Alon Levy, Elif Ensari, Marco Chitti and a group of international contributors. To date, the group has built a database with details on hundreds of projects, sourced from popular media, trade publications and official plans. And they’ve begun publishing in-depth case studies on a handful of individual cities, including projects in Boston and New York in the high-cost category, and Stockholm, Italy and Istanbul in the low-cost category, based on additional data gathering and hundreds of interviews.

https://www.governing.com/finance/why-are-u-s-transit-projects-so-costly-this-group-is-on-the-case