The RTA recently started operating a direct bus connection between downtown Detroit and the Airport. It’s ambitious, seamless and easy to use, and comfortable. But how many people are actually using it?
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City buses have historically been powered by dirty diesel engines. Upgrading to CNG improves emissions and reduces smog, but doesn’t improve efficiency. Electrification, on the other hand, could drastically improve efficiency, drastically reduce emissions, and reduce operating costs to boot. There is a higher capital cost up front, which can potentially be amortized over a longer lifespan.
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For one of the first times ever, the state’s road agency is proposing narrowing a major arterial street and producing a dedicated bus lane. Sort of.
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This piece looks at the question of whether an EV-charging roadway could actually work.
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Fahrkarte, bitte! We’re going on a lingusitic-infrastructural journey to learn about how infrastructure thinking is baked into the very language we use to describe it.
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In one of the farthest-north suburbs of Detroit, a municipality’s elected representatives are discussing the possibility of eliminating fixed-route transit, which has the support of an overwhelming percentage of the electorate, to save around $800,000 per year. In this guest co-editorial, Calley Wang and Nat Zorach argue that this is a really, really terrible idea.
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Nat is attending the Michigan Association of Planning’s annual conference. It’s going great– especially with regard to figuring out new ways to refashion state agencies that aren’t doing their jobs.
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In town for a long weekend that involved a multi-part wedding extravaganza, I headed down south, as it were, to
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Representatives of Michigan’s Department of Transportation have, at two recent public meetings, firmly pushed back on the proposal that the agency must tie a reduction in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) to funding considerations for new projects– using a dubious rationale.
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My temporary DC digs are a 40-minute commute from the office. They’re also a 40-minute drive from the office. What is this magical land I’ve arrived in?!
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