Concern over METRORail light rail vehicles collisions with cars, pedestrians, and motorists led the Kinder Institute to fund Rice Human Factors researchers to conduct a safety analysis of the rail line.
Uber saw its ridership decline sharply amid the pandemic, but it was saved by an expansion of its delivery service. Its future, however, is tied to growing its ride-hailing service as it confronts reduced transit use overall and as it charts a path to electrifying its fleet by 2030. Uber’s global head of cities and transportation policy, Shin-pei Tsay, said the company is focused on pragmatic wins that it can scale across thousands of cities rather than wait on a transportation utopia to arrive.
Shin-pei Tsay is the global head of cities and transportation policy at Uber. Her experience converges at the intersection of design, policy and governance to transform the built environment, with a focus on sustainable and inclusive transportation.
Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at the University of California, discusses the high costs associated with parking, as well as market-based parking reforms that can improve urban metro areas both economically and environmentally.
Amid all the high-profile constitutional amendments in this year’s Texas election (no COVID restrictions for religious services, property tax breaks for families of veterans and the disabled), one seemingly nerdy amendment stood out as important for urban and suburban areas such as unincorporated Harris County. That was Proposition 2, which allows counties to issue tax-increment bonds for transportation and other infrastructure.
It is now clear that the pandemic will not be behind us anytime soon. The pandemic variants and skepticism over the vaccine have made the potential for herd immunity (requiring a very high vaccination rate globally) difficult if not impossible to attain. This means that we are probably going to have to live with COVID for the foreseeable future and to adapt continuously to its impacts to our way of life.
What for some may be an anticipated return to “normal” is for others an anxiety-filled readjustment to pre-pandemic life. No matter which category you place yourself, there are some aspects of normalcy we’d all prefer to leave in 2019. Chief among them is the daily struggle to get where we need or want to go. Unfortunately, it’s not certain how long we have before traffic in Houston returns and exceeds levels we saw a couple of years ago.
There were 3,896 traffic deaths in Texas last year, 273 more than in 2019. That 7.5% increase followed year-over-year decreases in motor vehicle fatalities from 2017–19, and is the biggest jump since 2012. Traffic fatalities in Harris County went up by almost 19% last year. That’s despite the fact that we were driving far less, or so it seemed.
The city has eight months of ideal cycling weather each year and has taken some sizable steps in building out its bike infrastructure in the past decade. But is anyone outside of Houston paying attention?
Ridership and revenues plummeted during the pandemic, but transit service remained essential for many frontline workers. After the pandemic, it’s important that the lessons learned are used to create better, more equitable transit networks.
When a west Houston intersection was retrofitted with infrastructure to protect pedestrians, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright called the redesign hollow and ‘performative.’ But it’s not that simple.
How rebuilding freeways has helped heal mid-20th-century transportation scars in cities like San Francisco, Dallas, Syracuse and Washington, D.C., along with a cautionary tale from Houston.
Shifts in travel habits because of the pandemic, including less driving and more active transportation, drove the metro’s improved ranking among the most climate-friendly areas in the U.S.