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The debate over transportation equity has heated up, given the sharp change in transit-rider demographics once the COVID-19 pandemic took most whiter and wealthier riders off of buses and (especially) trains. Not everyone sees eye-to-eye on just what transportation equity means. But a growing number of social-justice activists, urbanists and even transit-industry professionals now argue that making transit free for all should be one of the tools used to make transportation more equitable. Kansas City, Missouri, got the conversation started at the end of 2019 when its city council voted to ma...

The Manhattan skyline visible from Hoboken, NJ, which is becoming a walker's (and biker's and scoot-er's) paradise. (Photo by Shinya Suzuki / CC BY-ND 2.0) Walking is good exercise; it’s literally the first step on the road to better health. But it’s also more dangerous than it ought to be if crossing streets or roads is involved. According to a national highway safety organization, it looks like the pedestrian death rate on the nation’s roads is on track to set an all-time record in 2020 despite — or perhaps because of — the drop in vehicle miles traveled. One reason for the seemin...

President Joe Biden has spent just about all of his first month in office working to remove all traces of Trump policy in a wide range of areas, from foreign affairs to immigration to the environment to transportation. Those last two items are intimately linked, as transportation vehicle emissions make more than a non-trivial contribution to greenhouse-gas buildup. The majority of those emissions come from cars and trucks, and the administration has set as one of its goals making the nation’s transportation system a net-zero-carbon emitter. The auto industry had already indicated it was wil...

As just about everyone knows, the United States is way behind the curve on developing high-speed rail transport. Most of the developed countries of Europe and Asia have high-speed rail networks tying their cities together, while this country has only one such line that just barely qualifies. Some of those other countries, most notably China and Japan, are also investing in magnetic levitation, the next generation of superfast rail travel. To date, proposals to build a maglev line in America have not advanced past the “vaporware” stage, but that’s about to change, now that the Federal Tr...

First published on Last month, the City and County of Honolulu rolled out its first Climate Action Plan (CAP) — just one example of the "grunt work" cities have done to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement in the absence of federal leadership over the last four years, said Honolulu's Chief Resilience Officer​. The aggressive plan, which is open for public comment before being finalized, includes nine climate strategies with 46 specific climate actions to occur over the next five years, all to reduce local greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) 44% by 2025. The roadmap also intends to put Ho...