By Wyatt Gordon Note: A version of this article was originally published by Greater Greater Washington, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing racial, economic, and environmental justice in land use, transportation, and housing throughout the Greater Washington region. This is part one of a series on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA)’s fiscal cliff, which refers to the drastic shortage of funding to cover the costs of the region’s transit system from mid-2024 onwards. Last month, while most Americans were decking the halls and stuffing their stockings, the W ..read more

The TransitCenter board of trustees elected Fred Neal Jr. as Chair for the 2024-2025 term, effective as of December 13, 2023. Fred has served on the TransitCenter board of trustees since 2019, and has deep experience in land use and environmental planning, government, and transit advocacy.  Fred Neal Jr., AICP, is the current Director of Planning with Villavaso and Associates, where he supports a practice of land use and resiliency planning, land use regulations and code development, environmental planning, community engagement, and grant writing. In 2018, Fred accepted a mayoral appointm ..read more

By  Ryan Warsing, Jackie Lombardi, Miguel Moravec, Drew Veysey Editors note: This piece originally appeared on RMI’s blog.  State departments of transportation (DOTs) are uniquely positioned to accelerate the shift to clean transportation. While many have made heartening progress in areas like vehicle electrification, most have neglected other necessary solutions — namely, equitably expanding access to mobility choices and reducing the miles we have to drive (“vehicle miles traveled” or “VMT”). These solutions go hand-in-hand. Expanding and enhancing mobility choices — that is ..read more

This post was written by Catherina Gioino  The dire fiscal situation facing U.S. transit agencies has recently made headlines. But most agencies are also facing a less visible crisis. Staff shortages and poor employee retention rates are putting additional pressure on already struggling systems. As TransitCenter’s “People First” report chronicled, agencies have vacancies in administrative, capital, and planning roles in addition to frontline positions. These vacancies have delayed long-term capital and infrastructure projects, hindering much-needed service improvements. “People First” adv ..read more

This piece was co-authored by TransitCenter, the Central Maryland Transportation Alliance and Willem Klumpenhouwer, a public transit research consultant. The Red Line is a proposed 14-mile rapid transit line that would run through Baltimore’s east-west corridor. It is the missing link between Black, working-class neighborhoods to the east and west and job-rich areas like Woodlawn, downtown Baltimore, and Bayview, as well as connections to existing rapid transit lines. The Red Line project – which has been in the works since 2011 – is long overdue. Since the removal of the streetcar network, th ..read more

This article was written by Steven Higashide, and first appeared on The Equation, a blog by the Union of Concerned Scientists By expanding renewable power, phasing out fossil fuels, electrifying as much of the economy as possible, and deploying other technologies, the U.S. can achieve its climate goals by 2050—and a new report from UCS shows how. Transportation is the largest contributor to US global warming emissions, and we have choices around how we transform it. Electrifying cars and trucks is essential to solving the challenge. But vehicles are energy-intensive. By expanding pub ..read more

Today the federal government issued a new Greenhouse Gas Rule. It creates a national reporting standard for State DOTs and Metropolitan Planning Organizations – a way to measure what impact transportation projects are having on our future. From Georgia to Montana to California, Americans work hard for their families and should be able to count on clean air and the ability to get around how they choose.  In the U.S., most funding for transportation projects flows to the states from the federal government. For too long, many states – influenced by lobbyists for the road-building industry ..read more

This post was written by Yonah Freemark and Lindiwe Rennert of the Urban Institute.  The COVID-19 pandemic threatened the ability of public transportation providers throughout the United States to offer the comprehensive service millions of people rely upon every day. Though the federal government provided aid that prevented massive cuts during the pandemic’s first two years, many transit agencies are now facing a fiscal cliff because that funding is coming to an end and ridership has failed to fully return to prepandemic levels in most places, limiting fare revenues. For many agencies, t ..read more

The experience of being a WMATA rider has substantially improved over the last 18 months, thanks to changes the agency has made like adding off-peak service and simplifying fares. Things are about to get even better with the launch of all-door boarding later this fall, overnight bus service on some lines starting in December, and an ambitious plan to redesign the Metrobus network. But all of this could go away by July 1, 2024.  Someone once said, “We can have nice things” and then the person next to them leaned over and whispered, “But nice things require money.”  In June of this yea ..read more

This post was written by Eric Goldwyn. Every week there’s a new story about an American transit project that is behind schedule, over budget, or “paused”. Why is it so difficult to build subway and light rail projects in America? Our research team at the Transit Costs Project at NYU’s Marron Institute has identified specific issues like governance, physical structure, and procurement as central issues that drive costs and add delay. Streamlining and even eliminating these barriers is all the more urgent as the federal government has increased transit funding. If costs continue to rise faster t ..read more