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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Large employers like hospitals, universities, and big corporations often contract with private transit operators to ferry their employees around, usually between parking lots and office buildings or other facilities. Would there be a resulting economy of scale if these services were consolidated into, say, the transit operations of a public agency?
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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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Three counties in Southeast Michigan will vote on transit funding next week. There are also a number of other transit and infrastructure-related votes around the country.
Read MoreFor reasons that don’t seem to make any sense but were probably completely predictable, a nonprofit advocacy group in the northern suburbs of Detroit has enlisted a prominent Nazi sympathizer to fight against the real scourge of America: modern transportation infrastructure!
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It’s official: Oakland County will have an opportunity to vote on transit investment in the fall! Such was the determination
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One of Michigan’s most visible mobility spokespeople recently said in a webinar that smartphone ownership and profitable markets were the two hindrances to developing sustainable mobility solutions in the state. It’s a politically horrific, functionally dubious, but baffling thing to say.
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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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Martha Connell looks at some hard questions about the future of Detroit’s transit.
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A rare, intense blizzard in the Midatlantic US snarled traffic on I-95, leading us to wonder: how is the car obsession even so engrained on the East Coast that people can’t imagine not driving cars?
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