Should Transit be Free?

Jarrett Walker at Human Transit has an interesting article about the free-fare experiment in Guangzhou China.  They are hosting the asian games this year and in order to ease traffic, they restricted driving and made the transit free.  The ridership doubled.  That was much more than the capacity of the system and delays occurred so [...]

Train Wraps for Safety

It looks like train wraps (where they ‘wrap’ a train with images for advertising or other purposes – the images do not block the windows, but covers the entire train) are not just for advertising.  Here is an article about a new safety message being implemented by Valley Metro in Phoenix.
I wonder if having the [...]

Relieving Inner City Congestion

A very interesting article at the Transport Politic about reducing congestion in city centers.  He compares the congestion pricing used in London to the traffic limiting plan in Paris.  To very briefly summarize (go read the article, he does a much better job) – in Paris they removed a lot of the parking in the [...]

No signal is no longer an excuse.

Pretty soon you will no longer be able to use the ‘no internet signal’ excuse for not working while commuting or while flying!  More and more transportation modes are adding wifi signals – so you will be able to work anywhere and everywhere!
San Jose Light Rail and Singapore Airlines are both adding wifi signals to [...]

Advertising on Trains

Karen Wilkinson at the Government Technology Blog has written an article about advertising on transit.  BART is looking at putting video monitors in the stations and in the trains.  It sounds like something similar to what’s in many elevators these days – news and advertising with no sound.  I think that’s a great idea to [...]

Ridership Numbers Increase

Steve Hymon over at the source posted a new article about the increase in transit ridership.  I remember riding the Blue Line when I lived in LA and how crowded it was then.  I can’t imagine how crowded it must be now.
Some people think that the downturn in the economy is responsible for reducing ridership.  [...]