Color-coding buses is a great idea. Who cares if all the buses in a city match? That they’re from the same system is typically a given.

Wonderful article about how Perugia replaced cars with escalators and a people mover. The result was a better city.

I’m all for creative arguments to get people to swap cars for transit.

This is an important issue. If we want families living in cities, the transit needs to accommodate them. I also liked this point:

Children who grow up comfortable with transit are more likely to use it as adults; those who grow up in the suburbs—and whose main exposure to “transit” is an uncomfortable yellow school bus—are more likely to continue an auto-centric lifestyle when they grow up.

This is a repeat from The Urbanophile, but he makes a great point that should be repeated:

Why have a fare in the first place? It is odd that we pay per use on transit. We don’t pay to check books out of a library. We don’t pay to visit most city parks. We don’t pay when the police or fire department come to our house for a legitimate emergency. Most non-utility municipal services are provided for free to users and funded by taxes. So why is transit different?

Rail is good politics. And there’s this bit, too:

More than four in five (83 percent) Americans agree public transit and high-speed rail infrastructure should receive a larger share of federal funding than they do now.

Pittsburgh officials hope to get private developers to create a transit link between downtown Pittsburgh and Oakland, a second large commercial zone in the area. In return, the developers will get rights to build along the route. Nobody has stepped up yet, but it will be interesting to see how this goes.

This directly relates to my post yesterday about why transit isn’t profitable now. Before, transit lines were built by developers who wanted to do greenfield development. Cars weren’t prevalent, so the only way developers could get people to move there was to create transit. This is kind of the same thing; developers in Pittsburgh would reap the real-estate benefits of their line.