Mass Transit

That’s the assessment from US Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who just released a 300-page report (PDF) detailing key findings, including “missed deadlines, budget shortfalls, and overrepresentation of projected ridership.” Duffy is ordering the agency in charge of the project to respond in 37 days, or risk contract terminations. And he frames the demand as being “good stewards” of US tax dollars — even as Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is projected to grow the federal deficit to $2.4 trillion. Of course, Trump has been angling to kneecap California’s high-speed rail project for years now.

It’s scheduled to last until midnight Friday due to an early morning fire at an electrical substation in West London that powers the European continent’s busiest airport. Passengers have been told not to travel to the airport “under any circumstances” with “significant disruption” expected over the next few days.

France has unveiled the fifth generation of its TGV Inoui high-speed intercity trains. The gorgeous retro-inspired ‘Atomic Age’ design influence throughout the interior almost made me overlook that the seat power outlets are still USB-A. Something that will seem all the more dated when these trains enter service in 2026.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued a memo ordering officials to halt all Biden-era discretionary grants related to “green infrastructure,” which includes bike lanes, walkable cities, and electric vehicle charging stations, according to Streetsblog. The plan is to cancel all projects that don’t adhere to President Trump’s anti-DEI/pro-climate change agenda. Urban Institute’s Yonah Freemark, who shared screenshots of the memo on BlueSky, called canceling bike lane infrastructure counterproductive. “On a per-dollar basis, cycling improvements are some of the most efficient ways to increase mobility, and they enable people from all backgrounds and income levels to get around,” he said in an email.

This isn’t much of a shock, considering Trump has been loudly considering this for weeks. But today, the Federal Highway Administration made it official by rescinding its approval for congestion pricing in New York City. Interestingly, one of reasons given for cancelling the toll was that the price was “set primarily to raise revenue for transit, rather than at an amount needed to reduce congestion.” (You’ll remember NY Gov. Kathy Hochul tweaked the price before its launch.) Data has shown that congestion pricing is succeeding in both aspects, raising needed cash for transit and discouraging drivers from entering congested Manhattan. Anyway, this seems like yet another Trump thing headed for the courts.

The new tolling scheme that charges people $9 to drive below 60th Street in Manhattan went live at 12:00:01AM on Sunday. New York joins London, Singapore, Milan, and other global cities to force drivers to shoulder some of the burden in paying for good public transportation. I wrote about how congestion pricing can save cities from robot-powered gridlock back in 2019 — check it out.

Can self-driving shuttles give people a reason to ride the bus or a train? Waymo says it will test the idea with a credit for riders who connect “to or from eligible Bay Area transit stations.”

In a press release festooned with enough emoji to confuse it with a X post from a cryptobro, American’s major passenger train company announced it wants to figure out how to get high speed Wi-Fi blanketing its Northeast Corridor.

That’s how many turns the subway system’s most high-traffic turnstile — No. 602 in Fare Control Area R238, located in Grand Central-42nd Street station — is estimated to do in a year. That’s more throughput than some whole transit systems combined. These durable three-armed machines called tripods are designed by a company called Cubic, which also oversees the MTA’s fare collection system. And boy are they built to last.

Some big changes include the addition of real-time ETA, live train and bus tracking, service alerts, and multi-modal trip planning. If you already have the MTA app, it will automatically update. If not, it’s available for Android or iOS. I’m no New Yorker, but this looks way better than the app we have for Los Angeles public transit.

We don’t know whether the leg came from a man or woman, nor do we know how old the leg is. We do know, however, that “a human leg has been found abandoned on a New York subway track, police said, sparking an investigation into who it once belonged to and how they lost it.”

As noticed by Jalopnik, the bus will display the digital symbol for “hang lose” if you let it merge — which is just delightful. Most drivers are big babies that need to be patted on the head when they do something good, so this is exactly the right kind of energy we need to be bringing to our roads.

After New York’s MTA announced it was leaving Twitter yesterday, The Verge contacted Bay Area Rapid Transit — which like the MTA was knocked offline earlier this month by Twitter’s API changes — to see if it would follow suit. “We are continuing to use Twitter while closely monitoring the situation,” media relations manager James Allison tells us.

The photos and videos in this ProPublica piece about blocked train crossings really help sell how utterly atrocious it is that the rail industry is forcing kids to risk their lives just to get to school. This part in particular made me want to tear my hair out.

According to Bloomberg, the city of San Jose just approved a personal rapid transit (PRT) system in which pod-sized autonomous vehicles would travel on their own dedicated road back-and-forth between the airport and a nearby rail connection. It’s an incredibly dumb idea and a repudiation of proven high-capacity transportation systems like buses and trains. Nobody asked for this, and yet...

A private bus route from my town in New Jersey to New York City was just cancelled because the pandemic has wiped out ridership. But apparently the problem is much, much worse than just that one route.

A half dozen cities and states have been ghosted by Musk’s tunneling venture. It seems that once things get serious, and governments start talking about permitting and environmental review, the Boring Company vanishes. Take Maryland for example: