Mass Transit, Mass Evacuation

The cell phones kept ringing.  As Kevin Price, the Safety and Training Coordinator for Blacksburg Transit remembers, those brutal ring tones made April 16, 2007 so terribly hard to bear.  As victims were brought out of Norris Hall after a shooting rampage that left 33 people dead, the incessant ring tones coming from purses, pockets, and backpacks of victims made panicked family and friends a constant...

Through the Looking Glass

This is a visual metaphor of the Philly streetcar, an anachronistic machine that does not fit well into the contemporary urban fabric. Photo by Scheib. It looks like transit, sounds like money, and smells like politics.  It must be Philly’s Girard Streetcar Line. Philadelphia is home to over 118 miles of bona fide, in-the-asphalt, exposed streetcar rails, the greatest quantity in the country. ...

Ye Olde Transit Village

     Park Street Station, 1903. The state house is in the distance. Photo from Library of Congress.   When it Comes to TOD, Boston’s Track Record Is Uncommonly Good    Dover Street Station on Boston's Orange Line, the city's first elevated line. This was the last of the elevated stations and marks the height of Boston's first wave of transit planning and construction. Photo from...

The Streetcar in American Life

From 1888 when Frank Sprague implemented the world’s first successful streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia through the 1920s, the electric streetcar symbolized the American transit industry.  In cities throughout the country the press followed the expansion and financial scandals of the traction industry, “traction” being the term that the public then used for streetcars.   Baltimore streetcars...

A Distinction Subtle and Broad

A SEPTA maintenance streetcar is followed by a passenger streetcar in west Philadelphia. Photo by Bill Mohnahan of Friends of the Philadelphia Trolleys. It is one of the great ironies of American life that suburban sprawl—a low-density pattern of development that is difficult to serve with public transit—was created by public transit.  Frank J. Sprague created the first successful electric...

The ABCs of TOD

by Hannah Twadell Lindbergh City Center, home to two towers of the Bell South Corporation and a MARTA station in Atlanta, has struggled to get tenants in its ground-floor retail. While the development is quality, the land uses around it are auto-oriented and do not connect with Lindbergh. Photo by Scheib. When rail transit was privately run and large tracts of land were owned by a few tycoons (often...

Charter Rules

The breathtaking view from the sky of Husky Stadium, a multimodal place on gameday. That could be a problem. Photo by Mary Levin.         Husky Stadium is a point of convergence.  From its lofty seats sky, mountains, verdant land, and water are layered in undulating shades of blue and green; the built and the natural environments blend as multi-story towers wave through the trees; and here...