Over two weeks this spring, bus riders on Boston’s Silver Line got a glimpse of how much better service can be with all-door boarding.

The MBTA tested out all-door boarding on the two branches of the Silver Line that terminate at Dudley Square. It was the first in a series of demonstrations supported by the Barr Foundation in its BostonBRT initiative, which aims to accelerate implementation of best practices for fast, reliable bus service.

With all-door boarding, buses spent 30 percent less time stopped while passengers got off and on.

The initiative has helped persuade the MBTA to commit to systemwide all-door boarding by 2020, as part of its transition to a new fare payment platform.

For the two-week experiment, riders did not pay fares on the Silver Line’s 4 and 5 branches. (The Barr Foundation covered the cost of foregone fare revenue.)

This footage from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy shows the difference:

By speeding up trips, faster boarding could also enable running buses more frequently, meaning riders would spend less time waiting for the bus. “Bus schedules are determined based on the slowest trips,” MBTA said in its press release. “Reducing the amount of time it takes for passengers to board on the slowest trips opens up possibilities for updating MBTA bus schedules to have buses arrive more frequently.”

While all-door boarding is standard in other countries, it remains rare in the U.S. Only San Francisco has citywide all-door boarding, while others, like New York, use it on special bus lines where riders pay fares before boarding.

Andrew McFarland of Boston’s Livable Streets Alliance, which worked with the Barr Foundation and MBTA on the pilot, said it “really helps show the potential” of all-door boarding.

“The Silver Line is a pretty high ridership bus corridor,” McFarland said. “It’s got some elements of BRT to it, some signal priority and some bus only lanes. One of the huge sources of delay is definitely boarding times. Sometimes it can take two minutes for riders to board, especially high-capacity stops by an Orange Line station.”

The MBTA recently issued an RFP to upgrade its fare collection system, and the agency promises that lining up to pay one-by-one at the front of the bus will be a thing of the past by 2020. The exact fare media has yet to be determined, but paying for the bus will be a cashless transaction.

The BostonBRT initiative, meanwhile, will continue to show the possibilities of bus service upgrades in more than 100 Boston-area municipalities served by the MBTA.

The next demonstration, for example, will bring bus-only lanes to Watertown, said McFarland. BostonBRT also plans to demonstrate features like like transit priority at traffic signals and raised bus stations for level boarding.

“The T owns the buses but they don’t own the signals or the streets that they operate on — same goes for the shelters,” said McFarland. “It’s an opportunity to engage cities on this work.”

On a typical weekday, bus riders make 19,000 trips on a one-mile section of Washington Street in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston. At rush hour, they put up with bus speeds that are slower than walking.

The intense traffic congestion can drag out the approximately 1.2 mile-long trip between Roslindale Square and the Forest Hills Orange Line station as long as 45 minutes, according to Andrew McFarland of Boston’s LivableStreets Alliance. Even though buses carry 60 percent of the total number of people moving through the corridor at rush hour, transit has no dedicated street space.

Until this morning.

Bus riders got a dramatically faster ride thanks to a one-day pilot in which Boston DOT and the MBTA converted a parking lane and a bike lane into a bus lane using just orange cones. The “pop-up” bus lane was in effect from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. People on bikes were allowed to use the transit lane, while car drivers were not.

Transit riders noticed the difference and have been singing the praises of the bus lane on Twitter:

Wow! Dedicated @MBTA bus lane on Washington St in #Roslindale shaved 30 mins off my morning commute. Before, it could take 45 min to go 1mi.

— Carter Wilkie (@carterwilkie3) December 12, 2017

I support the Washington St #mbta bus lane!!! What a game changer. Thanks @MBTA for piloting– my occasionally 40 min trek to Forest Hills in the AM was maybe 11 minutes!!!

— Jackie[z] Gonzalez (@mmm_jackiez) December 12, 2017

The experiment shows that the same low-cost approach that cities have used to quickly reallocate street space to walking and biking can also be used to try out transit improvements.

In addition to the cones, MBTA workers were stationed to keep cars out of the bus lane.

“This is an incredibly cost-effective way to move more people more efficiently along our streets without the time and resources required for capital projects,” said McFarland. “We’ve seen a similar pilot roll-out nearby in Everett that needed only four city staff members to operate daily (two public works officials to put down cones and two parking enforcement agents to thwart cars from parking in the lane).”

Today’s experiment will be followed by another on Tuesday, then a longer three- to four-week pilot planned for the spring. The spring project will include a bus lane for the p.m. peak (though not as the same time as the morning bus lane), as well as other bus priority treatments like off-board fare collection and stop consolidation, says McFarland.

McFarland says he’d like to see the bus lane made permanent.

“Today is about trying to get riders engaged,” he said. “This is what we can have every day if we go to the city and ask for it.”

On the morning of August 7, 2015, Matthew Levari drove a semi-truck across the path of Anita Kurmann, who was riding straight ahead on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay.

Kurmann, a well-known endocrinologist and medical researcher, died at the scene.

Levari did not stop and did not notify the authorities. He was located by police that night.

Despite the evidence that Kurmann was doing nothing wrong, and that Levari caused the collision, police and prosecutors in Boston refused to bring charges.

Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley, told the Boston Globe that because the driver wasn’t drinking, speeding, or distracted, and didn’t “disregard” a “known risk,” they could not charge him.

In many cases, the exact circumstances of a fatal crash are difficult to pin down because the victim can’t tell her story. But in this case, there is clear video footage of the collision and the moments that preceded it. The Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition put together the following video to demonstrate that Levari should have known not to turn across Kurmann’s path.

Warning: This video contains upsetting footage of a fatal crash, proceed with caution.

Since 2015, nine cyclist fatalities in the Boston region have involved heavy trucks, nearly 30 percent of the total. MassBike is pushing legislation at the statehouse that would require trucks like Levari’s to be equipped with mirrors to make cyclists more visible to truck operators, and to reduce the severity of injuries in the event of a collision.

Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are exacerbating rush-hour traffic jams in Boston, according to new research by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council. The results should be a wake-up call about the need to improve bus and train service and prevent further shifts to car travel.

MAPC surveyed 944 ride-hailing passengers in greater Boston about their travel habits, using questionnaires administered via tablets during ride-hailing trips. More than two out of every five — 42 percent — said they would have taken transit if the ride-hailing service were not available. Another 12 percent said they would have walked or biked.

Combining those results with time-of-day data, MAPC estimates that 15 percent of ride-hailing trips are substituting for more spatially efficient modes of travel during the morning or evening peak (defined as 6-10 a.m. and 3-7 p.m.).

In addition, most of the trips either began or terminated in the center of the region — the area with the worst traffic congestion and the best transit access.

The findings underscore the premium regular transit riders are willing to pay for ride-hailing trips, MAPC notes. A large share of people who substituted ride-hailing for transit — 51 percent — had unlimited fare passes, and that figure didn’t change much even for ride-hail trips that cost more than $10 or $20. On average, these passengers also tended to be poorer than the ride-hailing population overall.

These trip substitution patterns are an indication of how badly MBTA needs to improve bus and train service, MAPC says. Residents should be able to rely on the transit system instead of feeling compelled to shell out for ride-hailing fares, especially for trips to the center city. And not only are streets getting more congested as riders opt out of transit, but the agency is losing fare revenue.

MAPC also recommends increasing and restructuring Massachusetts’ flat 20-cent fee on each ride-hailing trip. The current fee is so low it barely registers in the price of a trip, and doesn’t vary in accordance with congestion levels.

Boston has reduced illegal parking by adjusting meter rates, according to new a report from the city [PDF].

The price of on-street parking is a powerful lever to reduce street dysfunction. But in most cities, not much thought goes into managing curb space, and the problems created by underpriced parking fester, creating congested conditions that slow down surface transit and other traffic.

Prior to Boston’s one-year experiment in pricing the curb, the standard rate for on-street parking was $1.25 per hour. That’s far lower than the price of off-street parking, which creates a huge economic incentive to circle for cheap curb space. It also leads people to occupy the same parking spot for long periods of time, which also creates traffic and double-parking by limiting the availability of on-street spots.

Boston officials changed that by raising parking prices in the Back Bay Area to $3.75 per hour. Simultaneously, in the Seaport area, parking prices were adjusted according to location and time of day in response to variations in demand, with the goal of keeping two spaces open on each block.

In both cases, there were measurable improvements. In the Back Bay, the rate of double parking decreased 14 percent, and illegal parking spillover into spaces reserved for residents dropped 12 percent. Meanwhile, the length of the average stay at a meter fell 17 percent, and occupancy fell 11 percent, so drivers don’t spend as long in search of an open space.

In Seaport, where prices varied from $1 to $4 per hour, parking occupancy barely changed. But double parking dropped 24 percent and parking in residential zones dropped 35 percent.

Other factors at work complicate the attempt to isolate why one method of pricing the curb had a different effect than the other. In the Seaport area, for instance, extensive development and construction work disrupted the on-street parking supply. But it’s possible that the Seaport parking prices remained too low to significantly affect behavior. Only toward the end of the 12 months did peak prices reach the $3-$4 range.

Given the results, Boston officials prefer the “zone pricing,” which had a bigger effect on parking occupancy and is much easier to manage.

Now it’s up to Mayor Marty Walsh to decide whether to make these parking reforms permanent and expand them to other neighborhoods.

Boston commuter rail has the pieces for an expansive modern system. What it needs isn’t a big extension, but a fresh approach to service.

That’s according to a new report from local advocacy group Transit Matters.

The 398-mile MTBA Commuter Rail system carries an unremarkable 130,000 passengers a day. But that’s not surprising given its slow and limited service.

Transit Matters has proposed a $2-3 billion “Regional Rail” overhaul that would make it much more useful.

Here is what the group proposes:

1. Increase service

Boston commuter rail provides patchy, irregular service. Transit Matters staffer Jarred Johnson says some lines have mid-day service gaps as long as three or four hours. Or a line might offer service only once every two hours after 7 p.m. Some trains don’t run at all on weekends. As a result the network is of limited usefulness.

“Our current Commuter Rail system is a vestige of mid-20th century thinking, based on an antiquated assumptions about the kind of mobility choices people expect to have,” said Transit Matters president and co-founder Marc Ebuña in a statement. “Many people today do not have 9 to 5 jobs; they require more flexibility from their transit system.”

Transit Matters proposes more regular service between 6 a.m. and midnight. To be useful, Regional Rail should operate at least every 30 minutes in the suburbs and at least every 15 minutes in the city.

2. Electrify the system

The current system needs a technical revamp as well. With an operating cost of $400 million a year, MBTA fiscal management chair Joe Aiello recently said the current system “costs way too much for too little ridership.”

Transit Matters says the system should be converted from diesel to electric power. It costs MBTA $544 per hour to operate each car it runs on commuter rail — much higher than $311 per hour for Philadelphia regional rail, which is electrified.

Transit Matters says the system should be electrified line by line. One route — the Providence Line — is already partly electrified already for Amtrak service. The region could begin the process by completing its electrification.

Many Boston rail cars are in need of replacement. When they are finally aged out, says Transit Matters, they should be replaced with electric ones.

Transit Matters also calls for station revamps that would offer level boarding. The group estimates that electrification combined with level boarding would cut travel times on most lines by 40 percent.

3. Free Transfers

The regional rail system should be seamlessly integrated into the larger transit system to better serve riders, especially those with lower incomes. Without fare integration, transferring from Commuter Rail to the subway could cost one rider as much as $9.50. With free transfers, the price would come down to $2.75.

Local experience shows fare integration can be a powerful tool to encourage ridership. MBTA’s Fairmount Line, for example, saw ridership triple since 2012, when it was moved into “Zone A,” which allows riders to pay the same fare as they would for the subway.

4. North-south rail link

Finally, a modern “Regional Rail” system shouldn’t be a hub and spoke model. A subway-style system would broaden access to the city. That would require the construction of a north-south rail link connecting North Station and South Station, an idea that has been bandied about in Boston for a long time.

This feature would take 10 to 20 years to construct, and is not included in Transit Matters’ $2-3 billion estimates. But it would be an important final step to making the Regional Rail system rider-friendly. It would allow, for example, riders to commute from the northern suburbs to the Back Bay and Financial District.

But the North-South rail link might not be worth it without other steps to boost ridership, said Johnson.

Federal funding for city transit projects is uncertain at this point. Transit Matters says Massachusetts should fund the proposal, if necessary. It could bond against future cost savings to generate some of the funding.

Ultimately, this kind of investment could help “draw the region closer together,” Transit Matters says, expanding job access for people in working class suburbs and relieving pressure on the highway system.

In Boston, like many U.S. cities, fewer people are riding the bus. MBTA bus ridership fell 8 percent in 2016  compared to the previous year, even as the Boston region adds people and jobs.

The reason people are abandoning the bus is clear enough: Service is slow and unreliable. The region’s most important bus routes tend to be the worst performers — mired in congestion and delayed by a boarding process that takes forever. The slowest bus route in the system, the 1, also has the fifth-highest ridership.

The burden of bad bus service falls disproportionately on people of color and low-income people, who comprise a greater share of bus riders in the region compared to other modes of transit.

Making bus service work well again for all these riders isn’t a huge, complicated undertaking. A new report from the local advocacy group LivableStreets Alliance highlights a few changes that could have a major impact on bus service in less than four years [PDF].

One key is dedicated bus lanes. By prioritizing transit on a relatively small number of streets, huge numbers of bus riders would get faster trips.

The LivableStreets Alliance has identified seven miles of congested streets where buses carry 92,000 passengers on weekdays — about a fifth of all MBTA bus ridership. Converting general traffic lanes into bus lanes on these seven miles of streets would have a huge impact.

The MBTA tested out bus lanes on Washington Street with a low-cost experiment last year, using orange cones to convert a parking lane into a temporary bus lane. Passengers reported huge time savings.

What bus riders need, says the Alliance, is political leadership to make the leap from short-term experiments to permanent upgrades.

In addition to bus lanes, the Alliance recommends implementing traffic signals that can hold green lights for buses and creating better passenger environments bus stops. Only about 8 percent of MBTA bus stops have shelters. All high-ridership stops (with 70 or more daily boardings) should have shelters and be ADA accessible by 2021, the organization says.

Because these changes all involve city infrastructure, and most MBTA bus ridership is within Boston proper, the Alliance wants to see Mayor Marty Walsh hire staff to oversee and implement bus upgrades. Cities including Seattle, Baltimore, New York, and San Francisco all employ people who work specifically on improving bus service.

To generate funding for this initiative, the Alliance recommends a 15-cent surcharge on ride-hailing trips. A recent study from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council showed app-based services like Uber have been clogging streets, feeding a vicious cycle of declining bus service quality and worsening congestion.

One other major change the Alliance recommends is the adoption of all-door boarding to speed trips. The MBTA tested all-door boarding on the Silver Line last year and found it reduced the “dwell time” for buses by 30 percent. The agency says it aims to have all-door boarding in place systemwide by 2020.

“We’re not doomed to poor transit service. At a local level, there are plenty of tools in our toolbox to fix this crisis,” said LivableStreets Director Stacy Thompson. “Now’s the time to step up and put them to work.”

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh wants City Hall to staff up to improve bus service, increase cycling, and reduce traffic fatalities. It could be a breakthrough for a city where advocates have ramped up the pressure on the mayor to follow through on his transportation promises with real policy change.

Walsh’s upcoming budget will direct $5 million to hire 20 employees to better manage bus priority treatments, parking, sidewalks, and traffic signals, he announced earlier this week. To fund the positions, the city will increase parking violation fines from the $30-45 range to the $55-75 range, which is more in line with peer cities.

The staffers will be charged with carrying out the mayor’s Go Boston 2030 plan, which aims to increase transit ridership by a third, quadruple biking rates, and cut solo driving in half.

Five of the new city employees will be assigned to speed up bus service by designing and managing bus lanes and implementing transit signals that give buses fewer red lights.

The bus lanes are sorely needed and could make a big difference for riders. A recent report by Boston’s LivableStreets Alliance identified seven miles of streets where traffic congestion slows down service for 92,000 bus riders — about a fifth of all MBTA ridership.

Earlier this year, Boston tested out a dedicated bus lane on a busy stretch of Washington Street in Roslindale. Riders reported that travel times improved dramatically.

Under Walsh’s budget, Boston would join cities including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Baltimore, and Providence that have city staff dedicated to improving bus service. Many of the ingredients that make bus service more useful — dedicated lanes, signal priority, comfortable bus stops, and safe walking and biking networks — fall under the city’s jurisdiction, not the transit agency’s.

The mayor also plans to hire two planners and two engineers to reduce traffic deaths and injuries under the city’s Vision Zero program, and he’s allocating $700,000 to complete missing links in the bike network. His announcement promises to add protected bike lanes, neighborhood slow-speed zones, and intersection redesigns over the next four years.

The LivableStreets Alliance and other advocates had pressed Walsh to start making good on his traffic safety promises. Until now, there wasn’t much evidence that the mayor would follow through, but LivableStreets Executive Director Stacy Thompson thinks Walsh’s budget is a promising sign.

“This is exactly the kind of investment needed to meet the ambition of the Go Boston 2030 action plan,” Thompson said in a statement.

For the last month, one of Boston’s most important and most frustrating bus corridors got a big upgrade.

Each weekday, half a dozen bus routes carrying 19,000 riders travel the 1.2-mile stretch of Washington Street to the Forest Hill Orange Line Station. Most people on the street at rush hour are in a bus. But the commute can be terribly slow and unpredictable, because the buses don’t have priority.

Council Member Michelle Wu, who commutes daily by bus along the route with her kids, says sometimes it takes half an hour just to go a mile.

That changed during a one-month pilot, when the city converted a parking lane on Washington Street into a bus lane during the morning rush hour. Cyclists were also allowed to use the lane.

Once the city cordoned off the lane for buses using orange cones, the improvement was noticeable immediately. Wu said the makeshift bus lane shaved the trip on Washington Street down to 10 minutes or less.

“Everybody’s been thrilled at what a difference it’s made,” Wu told Streetsblog, “whether it’s on the bus or driving along side or on a bike.”

But instead of keeping the temporary bus improvement in place while evaluating its impact, the city let Washington Street go “back to gridlock” Monday, reports the Boston community news site Universal Hub.

Wu was disppointed. “My initial hope was that the pilot would roll right into a permanent [bus lane],” she said. “I have not heard a single complaint from residents about how this worked until today when the pilot ended.”

It’s up to Mayor Marty Walsh to make the bus lane permanent. Walsh, for his part, has made speeding up bus service a priority in his upcoming budget cycle.

The cost of designating a permanent bus lane would be relatively small. But by letting the pilot expire, said Andrew McFarland of the local advocacy organization LivableStreets Alliance, “the city [is] actually electing to make more congestion for their residents.”

It doesn’t take much money to make riding the bus a lot more convenient. With little more than orange cones, Boston set up a bus lane on one of its most important but congested bus corridors — and it worked wonders.

At first, the city let the one-month bus lane experiment on Washington Street expire, frustrating bus riders and advocates who expected the test run to transition seamlessly to a permanent improvement.

But the administration of Mayor Marty Walsh quickly came around and announced yesterday that the bus lane will be back beginning June 18. The city won’t wait for permanent markings and signage to reinstitute bus priority each weekday morning from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

The bus lane speeds up trips for six bus routes carrying 19,000 daily trips on Washington Street in the Roslindale neighborhood, connecting to the Forest Hills Orange Line Station. Previously, the curb lane was reserved for parked cars during rush hours and buses operated at a snail’s pace in general traffic, weaving in and out of rush-hour congestion at every stop.

Beginning in early May, the city converted a parking lane during the morning rush hour to a buses-and-bikes-only lane using orange cones. Bus riders and cyclists got a taste for how much better their commute could be.

During the most congested hour (7:30 to 8:30 a.m.), when about 1,100 bus riders travel the corridor, bus travel times dropped 20 to 25 percent, the city reports.

According to survey data from the City of Boston, 94 percent of bike and bus riders said they wanted the pilot made permanent.

Andrew McFarland of the advocacy group LivableStreets Boston hopes to see that success replicated elsewhere. Boston has identified a number of other streets as high-impact locations for dedicated bus lanes.

“This is all the more reason the city should looking at the other four or five corridors that are really congested,” McFarland said.

Here’s some encouraging news for cities trying to reduce speeding: New research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows that lowering posted speed limits appears to be effective at reducing driver speeds.

The IIHS study compared speeds before and after Boston lowered its speed limit from 30 mph to 25 mph in January, 2017 — and the results were clear: “Vehicles exceeding 25 mph, 30 mph, and 35 mph all declined at sites in Boston, with the largest reduction in proportions of vehicles exceeding 35 mph,” wrote the study authors Wen Hu and Jessica Cicchino.

In fact, the odds of a Boston driver exceeding 35 miles per hour after the speed limit change decreased 29 percent and that a driver would exceed 30 mph declined 8.5 percent (the study offered “odds” because it tracked speeds at specific sites rather than following the same drivers before and after the change).

The study did not examine the impacts on crashes, but prior research shows that slower speeds reduce collisions, said Hu and Cicchino.

IIHS President David Harkey said in a statement that the study should encourage other cities to adopt lower speed limits to reverse the dramatic increases in pedestrian fatalities that have occurred over the last five years. Cities like Seattle, Portland and New York that have lowered their speed limits in recent years.

Two Boston City Council members — Ed Flynn and Frank Baker — have proposed lowering speed limits in the Hub even further, to 20 miles per hour.

They’re taking the bike out of bike share.

It wasn’t much more than a year ago that dockless bikes — the kind you rent for a half-hour or so to pedal to your destination — were the new tech innovation that were going to transform urban mobility and make millions for their venture capital investors.

But cities around the country have already started switching from the heavy bikes to the Next Big Thing: pedal-assist e-bikes and e-scooters.

The latest developments:

• In Seattle, Lime has informed city officials that its new contract will only offer e-bikes and e-scooters, starting in 2019, the Seattle Times reported.
• In Washington, D.C., dockless pedal bikes have all but vanished. Mark Sussman at Greater Greater Washington reports that 96 percent of the dockless pedal bikes in metro Washington have disappeared, partly as a result of MoBike and ofo pulling out of the country this summer. Spin packed up in August, but says it will return with e-scooters. Jump still has a few hundred pedal bikes in D.C, but they’re e-assist and it’s a small fraction of what four companies were providing just a few months ago.
• Dallas, which had a fleet of 18,000 bikes, lost them almost overnight. In August, Texas Monthly, in its obituary for the “deeply flawed” one-year experiment, showed thousands of bikes piled in a recycling center.
• Camden’s bike share was initially seen as a big bike share equity success, but ended up a complete flop when, ofo, the only provider, went belly up.
• In Chicago, ofo pulled out and Lime and Jump only offer e-bikes. The only company still ordering pedal dockless bikes is Pace, which has about 350 bikes.
• In Boston, Spin ended its dockless bike plans before it even started, announcing in July that it was switching to e-scooters.

What’s going on?

Simply put, electric vehicles such as e-bikes and scooters are just more popular than traditional bikes, micro-mobility firms say. E-bikes are twice as popular as pedal bikes, Lime told the Seattle Times. And e-scooters are even more popular, having been checked out five times more than pedal bikes in their same markets.

The companies also blame government regulations. Many cities put caps on the number of total vehicles a company can provide. And companies are responding by shifting to the more-popular modes. Seattle limits each company to 5,000 devices, for example.

But even in Seattle, which had no public competitor and a relatively strong cycling culture, ridership for dockless pedal bike share was underwhelming. Data showed dockless pedal bikes were only being rented an average of 0.85 times a day — well below what we see in high-performing public bike share systems.

In contrast, docked bike share is still doing well, showing relatively strong year over year growth. In New York City, for example, the dock-based Citi Bike system remains popular and makes a profit, despite no public subsidies. But like many cities, New York, hit the pause button on its docked monopoly, offering pilot programs so officials could see which companies might emerge with a better system — or not (Boston was one notable exception).

“We are finding they are having difficulty keeping the number of bikes we’ve authorized,” NYC DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg told my Streetsblog colleague Gersh Kuntzman two months ago, in the middle of a pilot dockless program that included failures of one kind or another by ofo, Jump, Lime and Pace.

“And even when they have the bikes, is the app working, is the pedal-assist working? There are growing pains in New York. We are a little surprised that they haven’t hit the ground with more bikes. … Is this how these companies roll or can they do better? I don’t know the future of the dockless pilot, but we have told them to bring in more bikes and do a better job. Let’s see if they can do that. … We will come back soon with what we’ve learned.”

As Trottenberg suggested, cities faced a risk in outsourcing bike share to private firms motivated by profit — especially when many of them, such as ofo, didn’t stick around.

For now, it appears, the only future in micro-mobility is e-bikes or e-scooters.

Hat tip: AsherdeMontreal

Correction: Original article misstated which bike share company pulled out of the Boston area. It is Spin not Lime. 

It was a momentous 2018 year for bus riders in greater Boston as municipalities around the region took bold steps to pilot elements of Bus Rapid Transit. Empowered by grants, the city-led regional effort showcased small but salient service and street design improvements that garnered public and political support for better buses and the vision of Gold Standard BRT.

The demonstrated BRT elements included dedicated bus lane segments, queue jumps, transit signal priority and level platforms, and were enhanced by creative art installations and community group partnerships.

This short film shows how easily other cities could adapt these strategies:

The practice of street design evolves slowly, but it does evolve.

Every decade or so, a new technology like the bulb-out or the cycle track arrives on the scene to help us make our streets better. This quick article — for serious street geeks only — addresses a new type of street modification that holds great promise for improving the safety and walkability of a certain type of intersection: the fork. If your community has no forks — or you are not a serious street geek — please feel free to stop reading here. But that does mean that you will miss the awesome video.

Forks often need fixing because they create complicated intersections with dangerous sight lines and signals with too many phases, impeding the flow of both vehicles and pedestrians. Forks are fixable because they hold redundant roadway, an excess of asphalt that serves no purpose except to encourage higher speeds and lengthen crossing times. 

The first person in the current era to have acted upon this crisis/opportunity may have been Janette Sadik-Khan, who oversaw the reconfiguration of a number of forks along Broadway in Manhattan, most notably at Times Square. Her team’s interventions simplified those intersections in a way that improved both public safety and traffic flow while converting driving space into much-needed public space. 

What makes forks fixable are the cross-streets: by rerouting traffic to a cross-street at the base of the fork’s triangle, one leg of the fork can usually be closed and turned into public space. Fork repair is easy in Manhattan due to the prevalence of cross-streets — 20 per mile — in the island’s tight grid. The simplest type of fork fix looks like this:

Notice how one block of one of the merging roadways is eliminated, replacing an unwieldy five-point intersection with something standard, and allowing the expansion of the small open space at the fork. The simplification of the traffic pattern explains why, in Times Square, the reduction of roadway led to improved safety and fewer delays.  

A recent fork repair in my area, Cambridge’s Lafayette Square, shows a slight twist on the model pictured above. One leg of the fork has been snipped and replaced by a public plaza, as usual. But, because the north-south cross-street staggers, a dogleg curve was needed to resolve the traffic flow. It looks awkward. . . and works just fine.

These successes were on my mind when a new client asked me to meet him one morning in Boston’s very forky Kenmore Square, to review a tower he was building at a prominent flatiron corner — in the middle of the Square’s western fork.

“Got any ideas for the public space?” he asked. Realizing that the best outcome would require moving his tower—already submitted for approvals — I answered cautiously: “Probably nothing you are going to like.”

The challenge in Kenmore Square is that there are no cross-streets for rerouting traffic as in the above examples. The only opportunity lay in my client’s own site, which, if vacated, could become a cross-street instead. The good news was that the resulting street layout would create a new building site much larger than the old one. 

The four-step diagrams below illustrate what seemed to be the best solution. Rather than fully closing one leg of the fork, it seemed wiser to close half of each, to limit the width of any one leg. In image two, a new cross-street through my client’s site allows one eastbound leg to be closed. In image three, it allows one westbound leg to be closed. The result is a new island big enough to hold both the displaced building and a public plaza.

In addition to removing asphalt and drastically shortening crossing distances, this change should also reduce dangerous driving by interrupting sight lines through the square. While it requires more turning motions, the new configuration adds efficiency by simplifying the main traffic signal from four phases to three. This outcome is the result of pulling the transition from Commonwealth to Beacon out of the square, so that it no longer conflicts with pedestrian flows. The result is a Kenmore Square whose heart is a public space rather than a busy roadway.

When explaining such a complicated street reconfiguration, conventional graphics can fall short. For that reason, we commissioned a video from a former game designer, Spencer Boomhower of Cupola Media. Any confusion that persists at this point should be clarified by the video.

Kenmore Square Square from Cupola Media on Vimeo.

So, how did my client feel about the new square? Excited enough to replace his already-submitted plan. More to the point, it became clear that this alternative proposal, with its traffic improvements and large new public space, addressed head-on a number of concerns already raised in the community.

City planner Jeff Speck, AICP, CNU-A, LEED-AP, Honorary ASLA, is the principal of Speck & Associates and the author of the best-selling book Walkable City and the just-released Walkable City Rules, 101 Steps to Making Better Places.

The Boston-area city of Cambridge is poised to become one of the most-progressive safe-biking cities in the country, thanks to the passage of a bill requiring protected bike lanes on all city streets.

The “Cycling Safety Ordinance” requires city streets to be upgraded to include the safest bike paths whenever a roadway is reconstructed. Advocates hope it to secure a 20-mile network of protected bike lanes in five years for the city of 113,000.

The ordinance, which passed 7-0, with one voting present, will bind the city to provide protected bike infrastructure for streets that are included in its bike master plan except in “rare” circumstances, which city officials will be required to justify. The ordinance requires that vertical physical barriers be included.

“With the Cycling Safety Ordinance, the Council codifies a lasting commitment to the users of our roadways that Cambridge intends to have a modern, safe, and accessible network of separated bicycle lanes for all residents regardless of their age or ability,” Mayor Marc McGovern said in a statement.

The bike advocacy group Cambridge Bike Safety plans to lobby the city to adjust its construction schedule to increase the pace of change on streets included in the city’s bike plan. Unde the city’s normal construction schedule, sometimes streets go decades between full reconstruction.

“Increased bicycle use is most appropriate in our city, which is the fourth-densest city in the country,” said City Councilor Dennis Carlone in a statement. “This emerging way of travel promotes personal health, a cleaner environment, and even greater retail sales.”

Some observers say the ordinance will put the city on par with some European leaders on infrastructure and ridership.

Cambridge is unquestionably better positioned to achieve Dutch-level cycling share than any city in the US.
With @jobar73 at the helm, this kind of public support & flush public coffers, I predict 20% by 2025.https://t.co/Hdq4iziGzc

— Jonathan Fertig (@rightlegpegged) March 15, 2019

It’s also chock full of extremely smart and well-organized advocates.
The best part is that the city isn’t only installing typical flex-post retrofits, they’re building the real deal shit. https://t.co/g6hI8ADsVG

— Jonathan Fertig (@rightlegpegged) March 15, 2019

Cities are struggling to make good on their Vision Zero promises and, just maybe, starting to make progress toward the goal of zero deaths.

It’s too soon to say definitively for sure. But there are some encouraging signs in the fatality data from a handful of Vision Zero cities since 2010.

The above graph, compiled by Streetsblog, shows the rate of change in traffic fatalities using 2010 as a baseline. The national fatality trend is shown in black for reference. As you can see, there appears to be some progress happening since 2016 in at least a handful of cities. (Note: Each city started Vision Zero at different dates and the selection of 2010 as the baseline is arbitrary.)

Seattle, Boston, Portland, New York have seen fairly steady declines over the last few years — a good sign that their programs are starting to have an impact. But the trend is so recent that a single bad year could wipe out any sign of progress.

In at least two cities — New York and San Francisco — a pattern toward lower deaths seemed to be emerging when we checked in last year. The picture, however, looked a lot more mixed overall then.

New York’s progress is especially illuminating because, being such a large city, it mutes some of the noise that one or two random deaths could add to the overall trend. There is a lot more noise — variation year to year — in smaller cities like Portland and Denver (in brown and dark blue, respectively, on the graph).

Advocates in a variety of cities say they see progress, but are also quick to point out that not enough is being done to reduce traffic deaths to zero or to dramatically lower serious injuries.

Jonathan Maus, publisher of the advocacy news site Bike Portland, said the Rose City has made some admirable strides, including lowering the default speed limit to 20 miles per hour citywide, for example.

“But not nearly fast enough,” Maus told Streetsblog. “The only way we achieve Vision Zero is with a radical change to how we regulate, design for, and talk about cars and driving. I think the City of Portland understands this; but I don’t think they are strong enough politically speaking to make it happen yet.”

Randy LoBasso at the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia said so far that city’s effort has been underwhelming.

“Philadelphia’s current mayor came into office with a strong mandate for big transportation changes, but, at least in the short-term, has so far fallen short,” he said.

Mayor Jim Kenney promised 30 miles of protected bike lanes when he took office in 2016.

“We’ve got about 2.5 miles, so far. That’s not good,” said LoBasso. “But there are, by our count, at least 14 protected bike lane projects in the pipeline that’ve been approved to be installed on streets that are up for repaving in 2019 and 2020.”

Advocates in Washington, D.C., and New York also said their mayors are not doing enough. So far in 2019, traffic deaths in New York are up 20 percent over the same period last year. If fatalities continue at their current pace, the city will have 280 fatalities next year, StreetsblogNYC reports.

In D.C., where advocates complained Vision Zero was little more than a marketing slogan, a truly bold approach was recently put forth that would not only mandate the installation of protected bike lanes wherever the city’s master plan calls for it, but it would also ban the right-on-red, lower speed limits and even ramp up enforcement on bike lane parkers.

Leah Shahum, director of the Vision Zero Network, a nonprofit that helps promote cities traffic safety efforts, says it’s always difficult to see the success of Vision Zero in snapshots like the one at the top of this story.

“Progress toward Vision Zero is not likely to be linear,” she said in a statement. “It will take transformative change — which is not quick or easy — to shift from the traditional, reactive approach focused on influencing individual behavior toward a new systems-based approach that gives the policymakers and system designers the mandate and responsibility to prioritize safety in all their decision making.”

But there is one thing that always matters, Shahum added.

“This will take time and leadership and the political courage to do what works,” she said.

The city will eventually destroy the suburb — by making it unnecessary to rely completely on a car.

Over the past decade, Americans are increasingly seeking out homes in places where they can get to their work and school, as well as their favorite stores, restaurants, and parks by walking and biking.

These walkable urban places — about 761 neighborhoods in the 30 largest metro areas in the country — accounted for virtually all new office and rental multi-family construction while sprawling suburban districts around the country’s major cities have added no new development, or even lost occupancy, since 2010, a new report found.

These neighborhoods comprise a meager 1 percent of these metropolitan regions’ total area, but are so desirable that people are willing to pay 75 percent more to rent residential, retail and office space there, and 90 percent higher to own property in those hoods, according to the report, Foot Traffic Ahead 2019. 

“These metros that have the most walkable urban real estate also have a tremendous premium for what people are willing to pay for rental estate and for sale,” said one of the study’s co-authors, GWU Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis professor Christopher Leinberger. “Not only are people willing to pay a tremendous price premium, but this is also where the majority of net absorption of new space is going.”

Rent prices in these neighborhoods rose 19 percent since 2010 — and not just in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Property values in pedestrian-friendly urban areas grew in every metro region in the country while properties in the suburbs have been depopulating, the study’s authors found.

New York, thanks to an astounding 149 “walkable” neighborhoods, topped the list with 37 percent of its occupied properties located in walkable areas. Denver was second with 35 percent, followed by Boston (31 percent), Washington D.C. (30 percent), San Francisco (29 percent), and Chicago (29 percent)

At the bottom of the rankings was Las Vegas with only 3 percent of its real estate growth centered in pedestrian friendly neighborhoods, and only two walkable neighborhoods. Phoenix, San Antonio, Orlando, Tampa, San Diego, and Miami didn’t fare much better.

But there’s hope for cities looking to make a U-turn from catering too much to cars.

Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Baltimore, Cleveland, Las Vegas, and even Los Angeles made significant strides in the past decade to make their regions more walkable.

Residents are moving into homes and using office space in Detroit’s walkable neighborhoods at nearly six times the rate in 2018 as they were in 2010. And people in Pittsburgh moved into properties in walkable areas four times as much over the same period, the report found.

Leinberger credits the knowledge economy for igniting job growth and a population boom in many of these regions,

“All of these metros that are scoring high lead because they’re the centers of the knowledge economy where you can exchange that knowledge easily and quickly,” he said. “It allows rising companies to hire the people that they need to grow from existing companies that are there.”

But those population shifts are displacing longtime residents from their homes and in search of more affordable places to live far from a region’s central business district.

Yet Foot Traffic Ahead found that several cities with reputations for high property values and rapid gentrification, such as New York, Washington D.C., and Boston, still offered a combined cost of housing and transit at a lower value relative to the surrounding suburbs.

In New York, for instance, 39 percent of the earnings in households at or below 80 percent the median income in the city went towards rent — but only 9 percent was spent on transportation. In Washington D.C., 35 percent of earnings for similar families went toward housing, with 10 percent spent on transit.

A similar family in Los Angeles, on the other hand, spent 42 percent of its earnings on housing and another 18 percent of its paycheck to get around — making the region the least equitable place in the country to live.

LA’s suburbs are slowly urbanizing thanks to its investment in expanded rail and bus systems. And other metro areas like Miami are making long-term investments in transit that could change how millions of Americans live and work in the 21st century.

“Cars are going to be around forever, but condemning people to having one choice is not what a capitalist society thrives on,” Leinberger said. “It is very important for local regions to invest in rail transit, bus rapid transit, and bike lanes to give people options, particularly low-income people. But it’s really for everybody.”

Cities that turn to technology companies to save their transit systems are bound to be disappointed by the outcome.

Look no further than Pinellas County, Fla., whose transit authority was the first in the country to supplement its bus service with taxpayer-subsidized rides from Uber in February, 2016.

It all started when Tampa-area voters rejected a proposed increase in transit funding, prompting the Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, which provides 32,000 trips per day in Clearwater and St. Petersburg, to invite Uber, United Taxi, and Wheelchair Transport to pick up and drop off passengers in areas without existing bus service.

Initially, the PSTA subsidized the first $5 of any Uber ride that took a low-income passenger to a nearby bus station, and it later partnered with the tech company to provide free rides during overnight hours.The PSTA later extended the $5 subsidy to any trips taken in the county. To fund this “Direct Connect” program, the PSTA discontinued a low-performing bus route, which had cost $160,000 to operate.

Pinellas transit planners thought cutting bus service on little-used routes and supplementing them with Uber rides made sense financially. And they found support among county leaders like Florida State Senator Jeff Brandes.

“You need to bring in people who think differently,” Brandes told the Shared Mobility Center in 2016. “The first/last mile issue has been around forever. … Uber and Lyft have only been around for six years. It’s exciting to be able to use technology to help address some of these age-old problems.”

But a new report from the Shared Mobility Center shows that West Floridians were too optimistic about the effects that such taxi companies would have on transit in the Tampa area.

In the first phase of authority’s Direct Connect program, only two Uber rides were ordered per day. The second phase extended the service, allowing passengers to get rides to or from one of eight designated locations across the county, but trips rose to only 40 per day by October 2017. Uber also absorbed many of the riders who relied on the Pinellas Park Circulator, a poorly performing bus route that would be cut the following year.

The third phase expanded the number of designated locations to 24 which boosted ridership to 4,000 trips in September 2018, according to Uber. But Uber made a reporting error in giving the subsidy erroneously to customers ineligible to receive it, which inflated their ridership numbers 60 to 300 percent. Pinellas County renewed the service through 2021 anyway.

At $200,000 per year, Direct Connect is saving the PTSA money — it costs about half of the poorly performing bus route, the East Lake Connector. But Uber has not been transparent about its ridership data, limiting the PTSA from understanding whether ride share is truly the best way to increase public transit usage across the county.

“PSTA’s ability to evaluate Direct Connect’s efficacy in providing a desirable service alternative to those riders has been limited by a lack of agency rider surveys, field observations, or detailed trip data from Uber,” the report found. “Thus far, there has been no effective way for PSTA to understand how Direct Connect use interacts with its scheduled service, including which routes Direct Connect users are transferring to or from, or whether they are making a transfer at all.”

Despite the evidence, regions are still investing in on-demand transit.

In 2016, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority partnered with Uber and Lyft to provide taxpayer-subsidized rides for disabled passengers. But both companies’ ride share services has failed to pick up paratransit customers in the Boston area repeatedly, according to a Boston 25 investigation.

This month, the Utah Transit Authority Board approved one-year $2.5 million agreement with Via to provide on-demand bus-like rides for Salt Lake City residents heading in the same direction at a flat rate.

And just this week the Central Ohio Transit Authority launched an app-based on-demand van service with Via for residents in Grove City, a suburb of Columbus.

Their new app, which was recognized by the federal Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge, allows riders to catch a shuttle from a virtual bus stop which they would walk to and then pick up other passengers nearby along an algorithm-designed route.

Sounds almost like bus rapid transit.

Uber and Lyft have finally come clean: Their vehicles are causing a big share of the congestion in several American cities.

A new study jointly commissioned by the two app-based cab companies found that they have a massive footprint in San Francisco, Washington and Boston, but the companies are affecting traffic to a lesser degree in Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles, where private car ownership is much higher.

Both companies have experienced explosive growth in the past decade but haven’t acknowledged how much congestion they’ve caused in America’s cities — until now.

Transportation consultants Fehr & Peers compared miles traveled for ride share companies as well as private and commercial vehicles in six cities over the course of one month: September 2018. The analysis is a “high-level exercise” that help both companies understand how they contribute to congestion and “help them form appropriate narratives for both internal and external communication,” the study noted.

In other words, admit their role in jamming traffic in cities, conveniently blame household car ownership and commercial trucking for clogging most roadways, and eventually pivot to advocate for congestion pricing in other cities.

“At Uber, we’re focused on reducing the need for private car ownership while expanding transportation access for all,” the company’s Head of Global Policy for Public Transportation Chris Pangilinan wrote in a Medium post that accompanied the study. “As we continue to grow in the communities we serve, it’s important to understand how roads are being used so we can continue to work together with cities to develop the right policies that expand mobility.

Uber and Lyft are largely correct that private cars and commercial trucks, buses, and vans made up the vast majority of vehicle miles traveled in major metro areas where they have a presence. Ride share companies accounted for only one to three percent of traffic — the rest of the VMTs were made by private car drivers — but the results varied far more dramatically in each area’s urban core:

• In San Francisco, 12.8 percent of total vehicle miles traveled were made in an Uber or Lyft.
• In Boston, it was 7.7 percent.
• In Washington, 6.9 percent.
• In Chicago, 3.3 percent.
• In L.A., 2.6 percent
• In Seattle, 1.9 percent.

San Francisco, Boston, and Washington had a larger share of ride share vehicles than the other cities because they are “denser and more compact and contain less suburban, rural, and exurban land area,” the study said.

New York was not included in the six-city study because its transit system is so much larger than other cities in the rest of the country and car ownership remains comparatively low. Other studies have shown the crippling effects of ride share vehicles on Manhattan traffic — which led the New York State Legislature to adopt a congestion pricing surcharge on vehicles entering Manhattan’s central business district earlier this year.

But the study leaves out a lot of information, too. It doesn’t address Uber and Lyft’s effects on traffic over time or how many trips ride share companies take from public transit.

And while both companies have zealously guarded their ridership data, other traffic analysts have sought to provide a clearer view of their influence.

For instance, Schaller Consulting found in 2018 that private ride share vehicles accounted for a 180-percent increase in driving on city streets and that 60 percent of ride share users would have taken public transit or walked or biked if the vehicles weren’t available to them. And another independent study earlier this year found that ride hail companies made up more than half of San Francisco’s 62-percent jump in weekday traffic delays between 2010 and 2016.

CityLab reported that the companies, which have since gone public this spring, are being more transparent because they are looking to shape the public debate over congestion pricing. That could lead to more people choosing Uber and Lyft rides instead of commuting to work or driving into the city for a concert or a game in their own vehicles.

Uber and Lyft’s strategy for the future will be to acknowledge a role in creating more traffic in downtown areas, with plenty of supporting evidence, while vociferously blaming congestion on commercial trucks and families who choose to drive their own car over taking transit.

“The research shows that despite tremendous growth over the past decade, [Uber and Lyft] use still pales in comparison to all other traffic, and although [Uber and Lyft] are likely contributing to an increase in congestion, its scale is dwarfed by that of private cars and commercial traffic,” Pangilinan wrote in his Medium post.