Category Archives: Transportation

U.S. Mass Transit Needs To Stop Focusing Only On Commuting

Posted on September 7, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

Obviously, a fair amount of traveling in the U.S. involves the daily work commute. But U.S. mass transit, in city after city, focuses too much on commuting. This is the end result (boldface mine): One hundred years ago, the United … Continue reading →

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Cherry Picking And The Problem With Urban Scooters

Posted on September 5, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

Recently, there has been a bunch of articles about the phenomenon of urban, for-rent scooters, such as Bird. While most of the stories have taken the ‘slow down you damn kids!’ approach, there is a real problem that scooters cause. … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | 2 Comments

The Sum Of All Inchoate Fears: The Mass Transit Edition

Posted on August 23, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

Whenever well-off and/or well-educated people get snooty about how their lessers are ignorant, it’s always worth remembering that there are plenty of instances where the Good People happen to Know Things That Are Not True™. One example is the notion … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | 5 Comments

Bad Service Leads To Low Ridership: The Orange Line Edition

Posted on August 10, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

It’s pretty clear that D.C. Metro’s horrible weekend service has led to a massive decline in weekend ridership–and it accounts for a disproportionate amount of the total loss in riders since the beginning of SafeTrack, WMATA’s attempt to repair the … Continue reading →

Posted in DC, Transportation | 1 Comment

Too Much Parking

Posted on July 19, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

As cities are being recapitalized, albeit by private sources which brings its own problems, land is at a premium. A recent study estimates how many parking spaces five cities, New York, Seattle, Des Moines, Jackson (WY), and Philadelphia, have. It’s … Continue reading →

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You Are The Traffic: The Metro Repair Edition

Posted on July 17, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

One maxim transportation engineers always quote is “You are the traffic” (the good ones anyway). The D.C. area, thanks to the never-ending clusterfuck that is de facto SafeTrack, provides a natural experiment in just how important mass transit is, even … Continue reading →

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Of Course, Until We Can Guarantee Complete Safety, We Will Limit I-66 To One Lane And 25mph

Posted on July 11, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

This happened (boldface mine): The suspect who authorities are still looking for after leading a Secret Service uniformed division officer on a wrong-way car chase in D.C. and I-66 in Northern Virginia before crashing into another vehicle has been identified. … Continue reading →

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A Modest Proposal: We Should Shut Down The Entire Capital Beltway

Posted on June 24, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

This was a recent news item (boldface mine): If you felt like traffic around the D.C. area was particularly awful Wednesday, it really was: The effects of a fatal crash on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge rippled throughout the Capital Beltway. … Continue reading →

Posted in Automobiles, DC, Transportation | 4 Comments

How City Streets Used To Work

Posted on June 4, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

It really wasn’t until the 1930s when city streets became the sole domain of cars: before then, people walked across city streets however they liked (though there was the risk of horse shit). I’ve wondered what it would be like … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation, Urban Planning | 4 Comments

Transportation, Geometry, And Hyperloops

Posted on May 31, 2018 by mikethemadbiologist

The basic problem that self-driving cars can’t solve is geometry: you simply can’t fit that many cars into certain spaces. For example, replacing D.C’s Metro with cars (or even buses) would make the Farragut Square area utterly inaccessible. David Dayen … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | 2 Comments