Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads: • Alternative Holden/Green Tube stations (Londonist) • Urban rooms where people design their city’s future (TheConversation) • The role of rail in tackling loneliness (RailwayTech) • Largest drive-free vehicle at Canadian Auto Show (Metrolinx) • Landscape enhancements for strip malls (UrbanGeographer) • NY subway map, Tube map style (TransitMaps) • America without Greyhound (RailwayAge) • The sound of the (SFO) underground ...

This paper provides a short description of the current condition and utilization of US highways, public transit buses, and urban rail cars. It surveys what we know about how highway and transit usage responds to changes in infrastructure capacity or condition, and it describes what is known about how investments in highways and public transportation affect the organization, location, and level of economic activity in our urban and rural areas, and in particular, how these investments affect ...

India has made promising early steps in its aspirations to lower rail carbon emissions after Narendra Modi, the country’s Prime Minister, unveiled the first of many planned electric locomotives – part of its policy to remove fossil fuel-powered trains from the tracks by 2022. The 5,000-horsepower electric train, which was converted from diesel, will reportedly be followed by 107 more each year – a rate of nine a month. Work to overhaul the engines began in December 2017, work that has ...

Here’s the latest evidence that Uber and Lyft are destroying our world: Students at the University of California Los Angeles are taking an astonishing 11,000 app-based taxi trips every week that begin and end within the boundaries of the campus. The report in the Daily Bruin revealed anew that Uber, Lyft, Via and the like are massively increasing car trips in many of the most walkable and transit friendly places in US. It comes after a raft of recent studies have found negative effects from ...

IRELAND’s National Transport Authority (NTA) has published a contract notice seeking 60-80 second-hand DMUs for operation on the Irish Rail (IE) network. The transaction would take the form of either a lease with a minimum term of seven years or an outright purchase by the NTA, which is the Contracting Authority, or by IE. The trains will operate in three or four-car formations and must be available for delivery by February 28 2020. The trains would need to be regauged to operate on ...

Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads: • The first Underground fare zones map, by Phil Roe (TransitMap) • Europe’s 5 most epic sounding modern trains (TransportDesigned) • Railway station vision accessibility pilot project (VIARail) • NYC’s new Penn Station (Fordham) •

A report into the condition, usage and prospects of almost 9 000 route-km of secondary railway is to be handed to government before the end of March. According to Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne, the report will form part of a ‘battle plan’ to save a broad swathe of the French network. Rail advocates and transport user groups such as FNAUT have been monitoring with growing concern the retrenchment of rural passenger services over recent years, with several routes seeing their trains ...

It’s meetup time! This happens on 14th February from 6pm. As always, these are informal affairs where the beer flows, offering an opportunity to put faces to the names of a few LR writers as well as regular commentators. All are welcome, and conversation is often as much general as it is transport-specific. Where to find us We will be in the upstairs room at The Royal Oak on Tabard Street. Its location makes it easy to get to from a number of stations. A map is below. The pub is about 700m ...

Over the past few months, a number of rail companies have launched upcycling and recycling initiatives aimed at tackling climate change and preserving the environment. With their minds set on preventing waste from ending up in landfill, they are saving used materials and repurposing them in creative ways. In October 2018, a report published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed the world only has a dozen years left to stop climate change. Failing to do so would lead to ...

Companies increasingly are buying electric cars and trucks to replace gas and diesel-powered vehicles to move goods and people. This week, the non-profit The Climate Group released an annual report reviewing the progress that companies have made committing to electrify their fleets and to build out charging infrastructure for employees’ EVs. The group says 31 companies have committed to its EV100 program, and there are company pledges to convert 145,000 vehicles to electric by 2030. ...

At a Bay Area summit devoted to electric scooters and other new mobility devices, fans evangelized about the potential of technology. But safety was an afterthought. Inside a luminous former factory on the Bay Area waterfront last week, software geeks, VCs, and sundry tech evangelizers zipped around on electric bikes, scooters, and hoverboards. Industry representatives from Jump, Spin, and Lyft hawked their compact transportation widgets. This was the Micromobility Conference, billed online as ...

Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads: • London Underground line chyrons (Baggma) • Abandoned Tube station conversion to co-working space proposal (Dezeen) • Euston Green Link (HydeParkNow) • How Black train porters transformed Canada (TheStar) • Vancouver considers gondola cable car to mountaintop university (DailyHive) • The infrastructural humiliation of America (TechCrunch) • Making Russian cities worth living in (Bloomberg) • LA considers freeway tolls & ...

Mobility as a Service is a term oft mentioned as a potential saviour of cities, but its advocates typically describe the concept in generalities. Fortunately, the Movin’On 2018 Montréal conference had a number of sessions which explained the concept in simple terms with real world examples. MaaS has numerous definitions, but the concept is essentially to use a single payment plan to cost-effectively access multiple mobility modes such as transit, bikeshare, carshare, micromobility ...

LUXEMBOURG: Transport Minister François Bausch announced details on January 21 of plans to offer free nationwide public transport. Free public transport is to be offered to all passengers, whether or not they are resident in Luxembourg, from March 1 2020 on all modes financed by the state and operating within the country’s boundaries. Funding would come from tax revenue, with no new taxes being introduced specifically for this purpose. Transport provided by local authorities would not be ...

The North American light rail transit (LRT) renaissance began in the late 1970s and early 1980s, starting with Edmonton in 1978 and followed by Calgary and San Diego. More than 40 years later, LRT remains the most appealing mode of new public transportation for many North American cities. Billions of dollars of local, state and federal funding has been spent, and development continues today with 129 miles of lines under construction in cities across North America representing an investment of ...