Stories worth reading – August 13, 2015
Good afternoon. Here are a few curated stories we’re reading and talking about this week.
First, did you catch this story from the T4A blog?
Utah makes a bipartisan move to increase state and local transportation funding to help meet the demands of high population growth
From the T4A blog
Earlier this spring Utah became the third state in 2015 to pass a comprehensive transportation funding bill, raising the state’s gas tax and tying it to inflation. Unlike most other states acting this year, Utah raised revenues to invest in a variety of modes and also provided individual counties with the ability to go to the ballot to seek a voter-approved sales tax to fund additional local transportation priorities.
T4A in the news
Ten years after Katrina, a wait continues for restoring Gulf Coast passenger rail
AL.com
“The concern is whether there is a bill passed in the near future,” John Robert Smith, chairman of the board for Transportation for America. “Continuing extensions doesn’t bring into play the working group. These issues … are a timely issue and you wouldn’t want to wait for two years after a presidential election to getting into answering (questions about restoring passenger rail on the Gulf Coast). It’s been 10 years already.”
Headlines
Expanding transit is the dominant political issue in Phoenix’s mayoral and city council races
The Arizona Republic
By far, the dominant issue in this summer’s election for Phoenix mayor and City Council has been Proposition 104, a ballot initiative that would pay for a massive expansion of Phoenix’s transportation system. The $31.5 billion, 35-year plan would extend and increase the city’s current transit tax to fund operations and expansions of light rail and bus service, along with street improvements. Phoenix voters will decide Prop. 104’s fate in the city’s Aug. 25 election; early voting started last week.
Want a Bike Path? Why not try crowdsourcing one?
Bloomberg
“More and more, people are seeing this as a great alternative avenue … to going through your tax dollars or local public servant,” says Slava Rubin, the chief executive officer of Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform. Rubin says he started seeing public works projects on the site in 2011, with campaigns funding such small-scale infrastructure projects as a $1,000 dog park in Chicago, and that he expects interest only to increase.
‘Transportation Armageddon’ Is Coming to the Northeast Rail Corridor
CityLab
For the Hudson River rail crossing, it seems, the dystopian future is now. The existing rail tunnels are a fragile chokepoint whose failure could asphyxiate the entire Northeast rail corridor—all the way from Boston to Washington, D.C.—and, by extension, further strain the already nightmarish roads in the metro New York region.
The Environmental Impacts of Land Development Depend Largely on Where We Put It
SGA Board Member Kaid Benfield in the Huffington Post
But our nomenclature gets tricky when applied to new development located on or beyond the fringe of metropolitan areas. Outlying newer developments are typically built on what was formerly farmland or forests, sometimes “leapfrogging” over available closer-in sites to do so. Those are classic characteristics of suburban sprawl. Nevertheless, many of them today are designed to mimic the feel of older city neighborhoods, with higher densities, more walkable streets, and more diverse land uses than conventionally sprawling “pod” subdivisions? Does that make them “urban” and environmentally benign?
L.A. will add bike and bus lanes, cut car lanes in sweeping policy shift
Los Angeles Times
City leaders endorsed a sweeping policy that would rework some of the city’s mightiest boulevards, adding more lanes for buses and bikes and, in some places, leaving fewer for cars. The goal is to improve safety for cyclists and pedestrians while also luring more people out of their cars.