Year: 2009

The good people at Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com have narrowed submissions in their Reburbia: A Suburban Design Competition to the top twenty proposals for re-envisioning the sprawl that blights the American landscape and keeps us locked in our foreign-oil dependent, ever-expanding commute patterns.

With BART's operators' union declaring an imminent strike that will shut down the entire system starting this Monday, Bay Area commuters are scrambling to find other options for getting to work, particularly from the East Bay, where BART and the Bay Bridge are the two primary transportation links across the water.

The White House's commitment to electrified cars, fulfilling an Obama campaign promise to put 1 million plug-in hybrids into service by 2015, is bound to have serious ramifications for the nation's already-crumbling system of paying for transportation.

As Senator Barbara Boxer works on her upcoming climate change bill, the Senate environment committee chairman is "definitely looking at" a plan to give green transport 10 percent of the revenue generated from carbon emissions caps, according to a new report from BNA's Transportation Watch.

Today from the Streetsblog Network, a look back at the early days of paved roads in the United States and the vehicle operators who led the way for their paving. The vehicles some of these men were operating, as Detroit's  M-Bike.org reminds us, were bicycles:

More headlines over at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

BART riders braced themselves today as word got out that train service will shut down Monday due to a strike. At Montgomery Station in San Francisco, riders expressed mixed feelings about the politics of the strike, but they were unanimous on one thing: the commute is going to be a pain.

A BART strike will leave hundreds of thousands of riders in search of an alternate commute on Monday. Since most of the region's largest transit agencies are already operating near capacity during peak hours, new riders - as well as current riders - will have to squeeze onto already-crowded buses and trains.

Standing in front of union headquarters in downtown Oakland this afternoon, leadership for BART's Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1555 announced that their rank and file would walk off the job after the last trains finish their run this Sunday night, effectively shutting down BART across the Bay Area.  ATU 1555 represents train operators and station agents and is the second largest union working for BART, representing roughly 900 employees.