Issues & Insights

The COVID-19 pandemic took a massive toll on public transit, as commuter buses and trains were nearly empty during the early months of the pandemic. Passenger fares and other transit agency revenue dropped by 30 percent between 2020 and 2021. The federal government intervened, spending more than $69 billion in relief funds – five times the amount spent on public transportation in 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service

HopSkipDrive started out in 2014 as a network of vetted ridesharing drivers who could supplement existing school transportation networks by safely ferrying students to and from school. Although the CareDriver network, as it's called, is still its core product, the company launched an artificial intelligence-powered transportation network optimization software, now called RouteWise AI, in 2023 in response to the bus driver shortage. It is currently used in about 20 school districts and counting.

Our nation’s climate-changing carbon emissions have declined overall since 1990, but one sector — transportation — is headed in the opposite direction. Transportation remains the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for 29 percent of the country’s total. After a brief, pandemic-related drop of 13 percent in 2020, transportation emissions accelerated in 2021, increasing by 12 percent.

California could eventually join the European Union in requiring all new cars to alert drivers when they break the speed limit, a proposal aimed at reducing traffic deaths that would likely impact motorists across the country should it become law.

Nia Smith, a born-and-bred Brooklyn resident, has long Covid and drives just about everywhere, every day. Finding a spot to park is never easy. She has gotten up as early as 4 a.m. to move her car if it is double-parked, and there just aren’t as many spaces in her neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, as there used to be.

More than 20,000 trucks travel the network of roads in the U.S. Northeast corridor every day, many delivering goods from the harbors of New York, New Jersey, and Boston to factories and consumers throughout the country. Several signs now point to these trucks beginning the electric transition.

Wherever Charles Marohn travels in America, he finds a similar type of road, lined with strip malls, fast-food joints, gas stations, car dealers and dying malls. Marohn calls these arterial roads “stroads”—a mix of a neighborhood street, where people want to live and shop, and a road, which is designed to move traffic quickly between two places. Stroads are trying to do two things at once, he says, and failing at both.

As bike lanes have expanded across Massachusetts, Transportation Secretary Monica Tibbits-Nutt said safety concerns are cropping up along the new public ways — but, perhaps surprisingly, not just with cars. Cyclists moving quickly are dangerous for pedestrians, she said, and crashes could even endanger their lives.

The city will take control of 120 acres from Brooklyn Bridge Park to Red Hook to develop a neighborhood around a modernized port.

Infill stations are an increasingly popular solution in cities whose rail transit systems were originally designed to shuttle suburban commuters to and from downtown. At a time when laying new tracks can be prohibitively expensive, they’re an affordable way to make the most of infrastructure that’s already in place.