TAKE ACTION

As local elections approach, make sure you read through these three candidate questionnaires:

• For folks living in the City, I went a head and pulled all of the transportation-related questions from the 5th District questionnaires we recently worked on with a bunch of cool local organizations. All of the bus, bike, and walk stuff you need now in one spot!
• For Chesterfieldians, we just got Board of Supervisor Candidate Kevin Carroll’s responses to our questionnaire. Make sure you give them a read—and the rest of the candidates’ responses if you haven’t already.
• For Henricoans, no updates. Sorry! But you can still read through what your candidates for Board of Supervisors have to say about local transportation policy.

AROUND THE REGION

Earlier this week, I talked with Greater Greater Washington’s Wyatt Gordon about the GRTC Pulse crash that killed a pedestrian. We went through some of things the City could do to improve our streets and focus on the safety of people—including painting the bus-only lanes red. A 2017 study from the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board puts the cost of red lanes at $308,000 per mile. If we do some back-of-the-napkin math, I think we’re looking at around $2.5 million to fully roll out the red (paint) carpet for the Pulse. There are, of course, some interesting ways to save money on red lanes, including red striping like Indianapolis and narrow red lanes like Seattle.

This coming spring, GRTC and Chesterfield County will pilot a new bus route from the city limits to John Tyler Community College along Route 1. New bus service is just one part of the work to bring more services, amenities, and development to that corridor.

ELSEWHERE

More great news, including lessons learned, from NYC’s 14th Street bus project where the City banned cars and created dedicated bus lanes. This sentence gets to the heart of it: “Bus-only lanes are among the simplest, most cost-effective ways of moving people through a region while cutting carbon emissions and congestion, eliminating parking, and ultimately returning some urban spaces to cyclists and pedestrians.”

Streetsblog has an interesting article about Chicago’s mayor increasing taxes and fees on ride sharing services like Uber and Lyft for trips that start in transit-heavy areas like downtown. Of note: “...the downtown tax won’t be in effect during prime nightlife hours, so it won’t be a disincentive to using Uber or Lyft to get home safely after a night of drinking” and “a portion of the $40 million in revenue projected as a part of the 2020 budget will be earmarked for the CTA and Chicago Department of Transportation’s Bus Priority Zones program.”

After two fatal crashes involving pedestrians, Oakland’s Department of Transportation has installed rapid response infrastructure to make the streets safer—just weeks after the crashes.

—Ross Catrow