LOS ANGELES

Transit News Here’s a one way to market light rail: highlighting the ethnic eats along the route. The new Gold Line in L.A. has mad culinary appeal. In Seattle, Sound Transit’s new “Link” light rail line might also benefit from a promotional campaign highlighting adjacent dining and other neighborhood attractions. Just one of many points of interest: In between the Othello and Edmunds stops, and right across from the Link tracks at Graham Street, is Joy Palace, one of the region’s best restaurants for Hong Kong style Chinese entrees, and the bite-sized savories and sweets known as dim sum. Take it from me, or Yelp fans of the place. In the same urban mall is a wondrous Asian supermarket, Viet Read More ›

I had a telling conversation with an old friend several months ago, a devoted environmentalist who’s a community college biology teacher living south of San Francisco in a pleasant small town abutting the Pacific. I don’t recall how it came up, but she declared, “We’ve just got to get more people out of their cars.” Then came a pregnant pause, followed by her admission that of course, because of where they lived and worked and their packed daily schedules, she and her husband drove themselves and their children everywhere. I’ve been thinking about this lately because, well, the roads are still chock full of cars and trucks, and despite an uptick in transit and bicycle use, traffic is still congested Read More ›

Suppose electricity was free, even at hours of peak usage. Think your power supply would be reliable, then? Exactly. Now apply the same common-sense approach to highway capacity. Or consider the Environmental Defense Fund’s Transportation Director Michael Replogle, who writes in the Washington Post: Congestion pricing may be controversial to some people, but it’s inevitable. Using tolls simply to build more roads is a costly way to end up with even more traffic and pollution….Done right, congestion pricing can boost the efficiency of our existing roads, raise revenue to invest in transit, and reduce pollution that causes asthma, cancer, heart disease, impaired lung development and global warming….In the long run, congestion pricing is the only effective and economically and politically Read More ›

According to the Association of American Railroads, freight railroads carry more than 40 percent of the nation’s freight measured in ton miles, and had aggregate revenues of $54 billion in 2006. The Association’s January 2008 report “Overview Of U.S. Freight Railroads” notes that “a typical train takes the freight equivalent of several hundred trucks of our highways.” And freight railroads are experiencing unprecedented expansion. “For the first time in nearly a century railroads are making large investments in their networks,” wrote Daniel Machalaba in the Wall Street Journal (“New Era Dawns For Rail Building,” February 13, 2008). He reports that since 2000, freight railroads have spent $10 billion to expand track, build freight yards and buy rolling stock and they have Read More ›