Public Transport

As a taxpayer, you should become acquainted with how much the latest light rail project your city is planning to build will cost. A good first start would be to review my list of the capital costs of recent rail projects in the United States and Canada .

The publictransport book of the month is: Bird on Fire: Lessons From the World's Least Sustainable City by Andrew Ross. While spending (too) little time on transportation, Bird is overall a very fascinating look at how Phoenix, Arizona has become the sprawling mess it is today. Imagine a city in the desert where water is cheaper than in Seattle and where nuclear energy counts as "renewable". Overall, his point that in order to have a sustainable future EVERYONE, from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich, has to lead a sustainable life is well-taken. Bringing your renewable shopping bag to Whole Foods is meaningless if a poor service worker has to spend his or her meager earnings on a polluting gas guzzler due to a non-functioning transit system. Read my full review of Bird on Fire .

Every so often a well-meaning member of the public with no knowledge of transit makes a suggestion that sounds good on its face but is really a disaster waiting to happen. San Francisco is currently in the process of deciding whether to allow low-income youth to ride for free. As I explain in the accompanying article, offering free fares in this manner will have terrible consequences . What kind of consequences? Begin with severe overcrowding of buses - if you have to pay nothing to ride, then why not ride all day? Continue with rowdy behavior and vandalism that has had the effect in places that have tried this of driving other passengers away. Before this is implemented, the San Francisco Bay Metropolitan Transportation Commission should interview Austin, Denver, Trenton, and especially Broward County in Florida to find out their experiences with free public transit. Loyal Muni riders, prepare for even more harassment from truant children than you experience currently.

Have you ever wondered what happens when a bus driver calls in sick or goes on vacation? After all, the bus still needs to be driven. The answer is: an extra board driver takes over. Learn more about extra board drivers .

Despite the high unemployment rate and high rate of bus driver pay, many transit agencies continually struggle with recruiting enough drivers to meet demand. Learn more about why this is happening and what transit agencies can do about it .

It is a great time to be a transit enthusiast in Los Angeles. Thanks to the sales tax revenue from Measure R , a large number of rapid transit projects are scheduled to be completed in the next thirty years. However, today we are celebrating the opening of the Metro Expo Line, which restores rapid transit to the westside of Los Angeles for the first time since 1953. Learn more about recent updates to Los Angeles's current and planned rapid transit network .

In the United States, transit agencies can get federal funding to replace buses once they reach twelve years of age. What happens to these buses, which in most cases of lots of life yet? If they're lucky, they can live out their retirement shuttling passengers back and forth from Disneyland to the Goofy Parking Lot. Or maybe you could buy one and cruise around in style. Learn more about what buses do in retirement .

Most employees have a set place of work and set time they report to every day. One of the unusual aspects of being a bus driver is that the time and place you report for duty can be different every single day. No matter where and when the driver reports to work, there is one constant - the driver is reporting to work at a relief point. Learn more about the importance of relief points .

In April 2012 the California High Speed Rail Authority, in response to criticism of its original business plan, put out a revised version that counters a lot of the arguments made by foes of the project. Overall, the revision is a significant improvement over the original; learn more here .

In Curb Rights the authors argue that only completely deregulation of public transit (with one exception, described below) can save the industry. The exception is a system of enforceable curb rights, similar to the terminal at LAX roadway which divides all vehicles into different colored zones that only some kinds of vehicles can stop at. Unfortunately, their solution has a large number of drawbacks, which are discussed more in my review .