On September 8, 1949, Toronto held a groundbreaking ceremony at the intersection of Yonge & Wellington to celebrate the start of construction for its very first subway line. (Formerly known as the Yonge line, now called line 1.) The scene looked like this: Some of… Read More
Joe Berridge’s recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail makes the case for why Shanghai is destined to become “the capital of future.” Brash city building, massive scale, and entrepreneurial hustle are among some of the reasons why he believes the city is on… Read More
Today, Google’s daily Doodle celebrates the work of Japanese inventor Seiichi Miyake. See above screenshot. (I wonder who at Google is responsible for coming up with these. Imagine having to post something new every day.) I am sure that most of you have come across… Read More
Fred Wilson wrote a great post on his blog today about New York City’s “transit mess.” In it he talks about congestion pricing (which, as you all know, I support); the mess that is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA); and this 37-page report on how to… Read More
Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the Partnership for New York City launched a new vertical accelerator dedicated to public transit. The mission is to make the city a global leader in this space. Applications are open until November 30, 2018 and… Read More
Later this month the new 9.7 km North-South metro line in Amsterdam will start service. Like most large scale infrastructure projects, its opening has been delayed many times. 8 times according to this source. But this post is not about that. It’s about a byproduct of… Read More
I was recently with some New Yorkers and we got on to the topic of their subway system. I made a comment about how extensive their network is and how their express trains work so well for traveling further distances. They responded by basically saying: “Yeah, it’s… Read More
Toronto is now a week into the King Street Transit Pilot. It’s still early days and transit guru Steve Munro hasn’t yet published any before and after route performance. He will. But already the sentiment seems to be clear: This shit is working. There are many recounts… Read More
Dylan Reid of Spacing was recently at the International Transport Forum in Leipzig, Germany and has been publishing some interesting posts related to transit. Here is one about what makes transit systems succeed and fail. I really like the point that we too often think… Read More
This morning I came across the below graph in a Medium article by Eric Jaffe of Sidewalk Labs. It is taken from a research paper by Elisabeth Ruth Perlman called, Dense Enough To Be Brilliant: Patents, Urbanization, and Transportation in Nineteenth Century America. What this… Read More
