Starting A National Rail Electrification Plan
Something momentous may be about to happen in United States passenger rail: Amtrak is going to gain electrified trackage. If recently-released proposals for $424M worth of passenger rail improvements in Indiana and Illinois are realized, regional and long-distance Amtrak services between Chicago and Northwestern Indiana…
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Pittsburgh’s Infrastructure-Saving Open Street
Nearly six months ago, Pittsburgh’s Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed into Frick Park. The collapse of the bridge, which severed one of Pittsburgh’s most important traffic arteries, drew the nation’s attention to the sorry state of infrastructure around the country. In the wake of the bridge…
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Improving Subway Cars’ Exterior Signage
(This post is an elaboration of a Twitter thread on the same topic). Digital destination signs have occupied their familiar place on the side of subway cars for nearly thirty years. In the early 1990s, the original rollsigns on the R44 and R46 cars were…
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Reopen The Subway Bathrooms
One of the many things made suddenly more obvious by the COVID-19 pandemic was the dire lack of public restrooms in New York City. As shops shut their doors to the public to curb the spread of the virus, it quickly became harder than ever…
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Updated: Multilingual Transit & Inclusive Wayfinding
I recently wrote a post about how New York City’s transit system could be made more accessible by incorporating more multilingual signage and announcements. That post included a few examples of other transit systems’ (especially Paris’s) multilingual wayfinding. This post is an addendum to that,…
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NYC’s transit should be more multilingual
Cities, by nature, are multilingual. New York City (especially Queens) is one of the most linguistically-diverse places on Earth. On top of that, major cities such as New York attract (when there isn’t a pandemic happening) tens of millions of visitors every year from around…
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How Pittsburgh should electrify its buses
Electric buses are coming to Pittsburgh. The Port Authority of Allegheny County (PAAC) introduced a handful of battery-electric buses to service in the past year, and has placed orders for additional electric buses to be used on the forthcoming bus rapid transit service between Downtown…
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Pittsburgh should extend the T
Every city has that transit fantasy: a proposal for transit along a certain corridor, or in a certain neighborhood, which goes back generations, has been the subject of numerous studies and proposals, but has yet to materialize. New York City has the Second Avenue Subway…
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Liam O'Connell 