Transport for London (TfL) has announced that five new safety innovations are due to be trialed on buses in the UK capital this year as part of the agency’s Bus Safety Innovation Challenge program. Over the past decade the number of people killed or seriously injured as a result of a collision involving a bus or coach has decreased by 54%, but TfL and the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, recognize that much more needs to be done to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries altogether and to ...

Northern Irish bus manufacturer Wrightbus, most commonly identified in London with the manufacture of the New Bus for London (NBfL), has entered Administration. Questions first began to surface about the firm’s long-term viability in July, when the firm acknowledged it had begun working with Deloitte to seek either investment or a buyout, but Wrightbus’ future has looked troubled for some time. In 2018 it reported a loss of £1.7m, citing a difficult UK bus market and near non-existent ...

• Manchester to begin its own bus franchise (LGC) • 1876: Building a Channel Tunnel (TheEngineer) • Pedestrians pushing back in car-choked Brussels (CityLab) • Bus driver learns Punjabi from passengers (CBC) • Portland congestion drop ignored by media & Big Road (CityObservatory) • Are we seeing progress toward Vision Zero? (StreetsBlog) • Cycling with noodle barrier increases safety (SFGate) • Overcrowd game shows difficulty of building good rail stations (Verge) How Uber ...

On 10th April 2019 the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham suddenly and without notice announced that Hammersmith Bridge was closed to all traffic due to urgent concerns about its structural integrity. To anyone familiar with the bridge or its history the surprise must be that it had taken so long for this almost inevitable event to happen. Behind it lies a story of the failure to properly monitor the structure and fund repairs in a timely manner which in turn tells of the failure of ...

As transit agencies move away from fossil fuels, they are figuring out which environmentally friendly option is right for them. Public transit agencies are often among the first customers for vehicles that run on new types of fuel, whether it was cleaner-burning diesel in the 1990s or natural gas more recently. Today, eco-conscious agencies looking to switch to electric fleets face a big choice: power them with rechargeable batteries or with hydrogen fuel cells? There isn’t an obvious ...

• London tops most pricey public transport league table (Forbes) • Four new London Low Emission Neighbourhoods to be created (AirQualityNews) • New interactive map provides UK railway station accessibility info (SignDesignSoc) • The Magic of red painted bus lanes (StreetsBlog) • Subway station accessibility lawsuit against MTA proceeding (6SqFt) • Can cities curb parking rage? It’s personal now (CityLab) • French streets could lose thousands of parking spaces (TheLocal) • ...

Celebrating 18 Years of TransMilenio: Growing Pains and What Lies Ahead for Bogotá’s BRT Eighteen years ago, I was deputy general manager of TransMilenio S.A., the city agency running Bogotá’s brand new bus rapid transit (BRT) system. It was amazing to be there at the start of operations for this system knowing that it took just three years from idea to implementation. On our first day, December 21, 2000, we had 23,000 riders, a figure that grew very rapidly in the following weeks. Initial ...

• Thames Barrier pedestrian/cycling bridge proposal (IanVisits) • Tyne & Wear Metro modernisation video (RailBusinessDaily) • Bus use increasing in only one part of Britain (UrbanTransportGroup) • Living on top of a railway viaduct (PopUpCity) • Will Alsop’s quirky Toronto subway station (Azure) • Violent Uber backlash in Buenos Aires (CityLab) • Tokyo Metro Network on time & on track (NHK) How Uber operates in London and why it is being banned On Our Line Podcast #8: ...

Transportation is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, and amid the barrage of big-picture initiatives and bold pledges, one of the simplest, quickest-to-implement solutions is electrifying buses. Unlike so many other proposed climate change solutions, electrifying buses is literally plug-and-play: The technology exists and can immediately be added to existing transit systems. For example, in Shenzhen, China, the city’s entire fleet of just over 16,000 buses has transitioned to ...

Transport data and decision-making don't just under-represent women. In many cases they trivialise or ignore their needs completely.

The Orange Line [BRT] carries more than 20,000 people every weekday. But setting this route aside, bus ridership has gone off a cliff, here and nationwide. Some 2,300 buses run around LA every day — 165 routes covering almost 1,500 square miles, for a total of 73 million miles a year. Ridership is down 36 percent this decade, and most cities in the US have seen similar declines. Last year, the number of people using transit fell in most of the biggest metro systems — and that was an ...

Streetcar, bus, and metro systems have been ignoring one lesson for 100 years: Service drives demand. One hundred years ago, the United States had a public transportation system that was the envy of the world. Today, outside a few major urban centers, it is barely on life support. Even in New York City, subway ridership is well below its 1946 peak. Annual per capita transit trips in the U.S. plummeted from 115.8 in 1950 to 36.1 in 1970, where they have roughly remained since, even as population ...

Welcome to Reconnections’ Friday Reads: • Map of London’s 1947 tram & trolleybus routes (MappingLondon) • Will new larger Thames Clipper increase ridership? (BBC) • Thames Path opens between Woolwich & Charlton (FromTheMurkyDepths) • Pay your subway fare with recyclables in Istanbul (NextCity) • Underground and Metro signage (SmashingMag) • Looking for Manhattan’s Cow Tunnels (99%Invisible) • Durham’s plan to nudge drivers out of cars (CityLab) • ...

As TfL makes plans to reduce bus network capacity, one of the people in charge of running the capital’s bus services gives a rare interview. John Trayner is managing director of Go-Ahead London, the capital’s biggest bus service operator. We met last Friday at the company’s Waterloo garage, the most centrally-located in the capital and currently home to an all-electric fleet. The outcome of Transport for London’s review of bus services, which proposes a seven per cent cut in network ...

When transportation planners drool over the Emerald City’s transit successes, they shouldn’t overlook the decades of investments in this legacy asset. In transportation circles, the word “trolley” can sometimes come with decades-old reputational baggage. Getting around on one might seem antique and quaint, best suited for tourists taking in local attractions at a leisurely pace, not daily commuters trying to get from Point A to Point B. But that’s not the case in the Pacific ...