Photo courtesy flickr user ngochieu

It's not every day that a new public transit technology pops up that can claim:

1. faster real-world speed than Light Rail
2. marginally cheaper to construct
3. <1 minute waits
4. powered by the grid
5. proven in multiple cities
6. travels above grade, ignoring street level obstacles
7. plenty of capacity (by Louisville standards)
8. ennobling and fun to ride

Ladies and Gentlemen, from the continent that invented Bus Rapid Transit, we give you Cable Propelled Transit. This technology has just gone mainstream in the North American Transit Blogosphere. There's a technology overview here. Wow.

May 10, 6pm, Chao Auditorium, Ekstrom Library, University of Louisville

A Documentary Film about the Past and Future of Transportation

Watch the trailer:

Need a map? Ekstrom Library is served by TARC routes 2, 4, 29, and 94. It is also served by a plethora of bicycle facilities. Coming by car? There is pay parking at the Speed Museum or the "green lot" off 3rd street right past the overpass on the left.

Help spread the word: tell your friends about it on Facebook.

SFWeekly is running a tremendously in-depth (and long) article about their TARC equivalent, MUNI. It's called "The MUNI Death Spiral", and some words apply equally well to River City:

This leads to the last group of people responsible for Muni's woes: its owners, we the riders. We enjoy boasting about how you never need to walk more than two blocks to find a stop, but we don't seem to ponder how costly and inefficient this is. We are quick to rail against moves affecting the most vulnerable among us — but we seem to accept hardships affecting everyone, which render the system unreliable. ...

Once again, Muni exists for you. Not the drivers, not the managers, not the politicians — you. And you have some difficult decisions to make about what kind of transit service you want to have, and what, if anything, you'll do to get it. Complaining about Muni is easy. Owning it is not.

Yonah Freemark writes:

"It’s nothing less than a roaring comeback for public transportation in St. Louis: After a narrow loss at the polls for a proposed tax increase for transit in 2008, voters came out massively yesterday for similar measure, with 63% in favor. This approval will increase sales taxes by half a cent in St. Louis County, increasing contributions to the Metro transit agency by an estimated $75 million a year."

"St. Louis’ passage of a sales tax increase in the midst of a serious economic downturn serves as a powerful rebuke to anti-tax zealotry such as is promoted by conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Tea Party. More than that, though, it demonstrates that a well-run campaign premised on the promise of palpable improvements in a public service can succeed, even in a difficult environment."

Public Meetings are scheduled to discuss the proposal. See this article on the KIPDA blog for details.

CTA now requires all their operators to watch this video twice a year. Awwww, that's just mean, CTA!!

But, seriously, there is some interesting stuff in this. The fact that half of it targets bus operators, and half of it targets cyclists actually works in its favor - you get to see the other user's point of view. 

Share the Road - Buses and Bicycles from Chicago Bicycle Program on Vimeo.

"Evaluating Household Savings From High Quality Public Transit Service"

Today's TARC topic is the paper from Todd Litman at Victoria Transport Policy Institute. The whole paper is a fascinating collection of previous studies, and its worth reading the whole thing, but I wanted to bring out one or two particularly telling examples from it.

One new approach Litman takes it compare the total household transportation costs when high quality transit is put into the mix. Even though there's a higher tax rate, the overall personal transportation expenses go down:

Residents of communities with high quality public transportation spend significantly less on average on motor vehicles and transport overall, even taking into account additional subsidies.

Next interesting tidbit is the summary of benefits of supporting transit, even if you personally for some reason will never ride it no matter how great it is: