Rail

Mere hours after the Washington Metro system suffered a shocking accident, two senior senators released a letter to their colleagues asking for $50 million in grants to improve rail safety technology. The scene of yesterday’s D.C. Metro crash. (Photo: NYT) The letter was sent by two chairmen with a central role in transportation policy — … Continued

The rider went down -- Boom! -- just as she turned to see if the streetcar was getting close to her. Turning to look was her undoing, because her wheel got caught in the big gap between rail and street, toppling her hard. The big blue streetcar was only ten feet or so behind her, but luckily was slowing down and did not run her over. Scary though.

Yesterday, Vice President Joe Biden, met with governors from eight different states that are competing for High Speed Rail funding.  Streetsblog's D.C. Correspondent wrote a story about the national implications of the meeting available at our New York site.  While neither Schwarzenegger nor another representative from California was present, there was good news for California.  From today's Times,

Last week regional transit bloggers sat down with BART management and asked questions of General Manager Dorothy Dugger about her transit operation.  This is part two of that roundtable:

Last week, BART hosted a brunch meeting for Bay Area transit bloggers, explicitly acknowledging that journalism is trending away from traditional media to online and niche outlets. Organized by BART spokesperson Linton Johnson, writers from Streetsblog, The SF Appeal, The Overhead Wire, N-Judah Chronicles, and Transbay Blog had the opportunity to ask BART General Manager Dorothy Dugger and her team unvarnished questions, to which we received fairly straightforward answers.

This morning much of the nation's news outlets are devoted to the demise of General Motors, which represents the fourth largest bankruptcy in U.S. history and the largest of any industrial titan. Perhaps most entertaining of all the articles is P.J. O'Rourke's onanistic fetish piece about horsepower and the "masculinity" emblematic in the growl of American muscle cars, in which he bemoans the passing of the automotive giant as the emasculation of the American Dream. 

Down in balmy South Florida, D-Day is approaching for riders of the the popular Tri-Rail transit system. A looming $18 million shortfall has forced the Tri-Rail board to approve a budget that slices daily service and stops all trains by 2011 -- although ridership has doubled since 2005.

The first new BART cars won't come online until 2014, but BART's Board of Directors, in a special meeting yesterday, reviewed staff's proposals (PDF) for procuring 700 new cars (there are currently 669 cars system-wide) and the possibility of upgrading them with new technology for customer communication, new interior fabrics and colors, and new modular seat configurations.  After months of somber meetings full of protests, arrests, and budget doomsday scenarios, directors were visibly excited to discuss details for improving cars that hearken to the 1970s era, when most were built, and by the possibility of experimenting with innovation and best practices from other major transit systems the world over.

Let's hope California rail passengers can look back on the drama playing out between the Transbay Joint Powers Authority (TJPA) and the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) as a small hiccup on the way to building the nation's preeminent rail network into one of the most impressive rail stations in the world. And for our sake, let's hope Washington isn't paying too much attention to the infighting and will still award California the lion's share of the $8 billion in federal stimulus money slated for high speed rail.