TAKE ACTION

GRTC has released a survey that you can fill out to help them decide what our new bus stop shelters should look like. First, it’s excellent that we’re getting new shelters—the existing ones are...suboptimal. Second, the background to this is that GRTC had designs for new shelters in front of the City’s Urban Design Committee late last year and someone (someone who may or may not write a weekly email about transportation-related topics) submitted a comment that the chosen design looked dated and didn’t feel like part of the same transportation system as our fancy new Pulse Stations. GRTC pulled the paper from UDC (😬), and now we have this very thorough survey about what folks might want out of a bus stop shelter. Unsolicited opinion, should you decide to fill out this survey: Choose something modern, mostly glass, and as far away from anything that looks like it belongs in Colonial Williamsburg. Almost ten years ago San Francisco redesigned their bus top shelters to something modern, useful, and even solar-powered—we can do it, too!

AROUND THE REGION

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a story about GRTC missing their revenue projection by $1 million. Note that’s a revenue projection and that GRTC’s budget is still balanced. Regardless of what this means for the transit company moving forward, riders should not shoulder the burden of revenue shortfall through service cuts—it’s something to keep an eye on.

ELSEWHERE

TransitCenter has a good article about the reasons to decriminalize fare evasion. Richmond’s fare enforcement officers are not police officers, and if you are caught evading fare on the Pulse it is a not a criminal offense. This is good policy and should remain GRTC’s policy moving forward. Many studies have shown “that fare enforcement disproportionately targets black and brown people, and that people of color face harsher penalties when they are stopped.”

Also from TransitCenter, check out this Open Transit Data Toolkit. Are you interested in wrangling the data GRTC makes available into useful tools for the rest of us? This is an excellent resource to get you started.

The CEO of MARTA (Atlanta’s transit company), says he wants the region to spend $100 billion dollars over 40 years on transportation projects. The last sentence of that editorial is a good one: “To maximize a prosperous future that seems in the cards for this metro, we must be willing to dream and build aggressively toward it, we believe.”

—Ross Catrow