Seven Southwestern U.S. states that depend on the overtaxed Colorado River have reached landmark agreements on how to manage the waterway amid an unprecedented drought, including a commitment by California to bear part of the burden before it is legally required to do so, officials said Tuesday. The agreements are tentative and must be approved […]
Ride-haling such as Uber and Lyft are changing the ways people travel. Despite widespread claims that these services help reduce driving, there is little research on this topic. This research paper uses a quasi-natural experiment in the Denver, Colorado, region to analyze basic impacts of ride-hailing on transportation efficiency in terms of deadheading, vehicle occupancy, […]
Even on a good day, Simmons’ commute and the commutes of several hundred more residents of this city are among the worst in the United States. Roughly 21 percent of Los Banos workers have at a least a 90-minute ride to and from work, the highest percentage in the nation, according to a McClatchy analysis […]
The $2.2 billion Transbay Transit Center opened Aug. 12 after years of delays and cost overruns. Six weeks later, the Salesforce Transit Center, as its now known, has been shut down after “crews today discovered a fissure in one of the steel beams in the ceiling,” according to the Transbay Joint Powers Authority, the public […]
San Francisco officials who took light rail Monday morning to kick off a citywide Transit Week event were held up when trains broke down on two Muni lines. What was supposed to be a celebration of mass transit became an indictment of the city’s unreliable light rail system. “This just shows how we need reinvestment […]
Among major metropolitan areas, the nation’s capital trailed only New York, where the average one-way trip to work reached 37 minutes – a full two minutes longer than a decade prior. Washington’s commute times ticked up to 34.9 minutes from 34.8 in 2016, but they are a minute and a half longer than they were […]
The payouts highlight the fact that sidewalks in many city neighborhoods are crumbling, partly because city officials neglected infrastructure for many years before reviving it as a high priority in 2014. Some council members lobbied last year for a 90-day deadline to fix reported sidewalk damage, and for a policy change eliminating the responsibility of […]
The new American Community Survey data indicates at least two significant narratives with respect to work access trends (commuting and working at home). One is transit work is becoming even more concentrated in only six of the nation’s 20,000 municipalities, the six transit legacy cities. The second is that working at home has passed transit […]
California officials have been pushing for more natural water storage since the last large-scale facility was built in 1979. Now they’re finally going to get it, thanks to political pressure, President Donald Trump and some congressional creativity. The House approved several provisions Thursday that help fund water storage projects. The Senate is expected to concur […]
The price tag for the 2017 crisis at Oroville Dam has surged past $1 billion. On Wednesday, the state Department of Water Resources revealed a $1.1 billion cost estimate for the massive repair work at America’s tallest dam. The cost of the emergency response, and the subsequent repairs to the dam’s two flood-control spillways, has […]
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 […]
RT ridership peaked more than a decade ago, before the recession, at more than 30 million boardings annually. That dropped to 24 million by 2016, when the agency increased fares. Ridership this year declined to 21 million. RT officials attributed much of the initial ridership decline to several years of dramatic service cuts during the […]
San Francisco has 900 housing units stuck in the approval pipeline, and Mayor London Breed plans to do something about that Thursday. Breed is set to hand down an executive order to dramatically accelerate the city’s process for assessing and approving accessory dwelling units — starting with clearing the big backlog mired in various stages […]
The Trump administration is accelerating efforts to pump more of Northern California’s water to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley, setting up a bruising conflict with state officials and environmentalists. As farmers and others prepared for a water rally Monday on the steps of the Capitol in Sacramento, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke sent a memo […]
The Trump administration is trying a bold new tactic to bring more water to Central Valley farmers — one that could come at the expense of millions of urban Southern Californians. In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation served notice to California officials Aug. 17, stating it wants to renegotiate a landmark 1986 […]