Transit

The Board of Supervisors today approved a five-year, $30 million umbrella purchasing agreement between the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency and Thales Transport & Security, Inc. for Advanced Train Control System (ATCS) "improvement services and upgrades." The ATCS system controls the speed, location, and routing of Muni's light rail vehicles when they're underground between Embarcadero and West Portal stations. The MTA says the upgrades are necessary to keep the ATCS in working order for the coming decades.

It has become one of the most enduring anecdotes surrounding the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus law: Democrats’ contention that White House adviser Larry Summers sliced transit aid by more than half, to $8.4 billion, out of concerns that projects were not “shovel-ready” enough. (Photo: DMI Blog) Has Summers been vindicated by the data? … Continued

Yesterday, Freakonomics linked to a new piece of research [PDF] on congestion that I'd been musing over for a few days. Let me quote the abstract here (paragraph break and emphasis mine):

In what the California Transit Association called a resounding victory for transit providers and riders, the California Supreme Court has rejected Governor Schwarzenegger's appeal of a lower court ruling declaring raids on transit funds illegal.

Mayor Gavin Newsom has been quietly pressuring MTA Chief Nat Ford to delay or prevent proposals to extend parking meter hours on weeknights and Sundays, despite a looming mid-year MTA budget deficit and studies that show it's good policy, Streetsblog has learned.

Last December, Muni invited riders to begin using TransLink universal fare cards on its trains and buses as part of a soft-launch trial period. By August, there were 6,775 average weekday TransLink boardings, making up 1.04 percent of Muni rides. The MTA hopes that by next year, the daily average will be 120,000, once TransLink-only fare gates are in place at its underground Muni Metro stations.

Flanked by fellow Democrats, members of the military, and a crowd hoisting signs with buzzwords like "clean energy" and "green jobs," Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) today released the first draft of their legislation to curb U.S. emissions and combat climate change.

The Senate's climate change legislation will finally make its debut tomorrow, courtesy of environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and foreign relations committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA). But the Washington Post has already obtained a "close-to-final" version of the bill [PDF], which provides some details but leaves unanswered the key question of how much aid will go towards clean transport.

"Subsidy" is a word used quite often in transportation policy-making circles, whether by road acolytes who claim (falsely) that highways are not federally subsidized because of the gas tax or by transit boosters who lament Washington's unceasing focus on paying for more local asphalt.