Spain is ramping up to follow Germany's Deutschland Ticket, which gives nationwide public transit access for a flat rate.

I love our Deutschland Tickets. The subscription system is wonky, but once you have it running it's wonderful.

Nice work, Spain!

It's abundantly clear the urban freeways are a total an abject failure for cities and should be removed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/53805791

It looks like Macau's public transit system is seeing incredible increases in ridership. A 71% increase over 2020 is huge and that's wonderful, but the busses are hitting physical limits on how many people they can carry.

The city's been building out a LRT system that opened last year. Hopefully that will take some of the strain, but given the bus limitations, they'll need to keep adding rail as fast as possible.

Macau LRT Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macau_Light_Rapid_Transit

Every bike in the bike lane should make drivers happy. That's a few seconds they might be saving on their drive. Every bit of research shows adding lanes doesn't seriously make commutes faster, but removing competing traffic surely does.

London has managed to stabilize the routes and scheduling around the new Elizabeth Line metro in the city. This means they're comfortable with the infrastructure and have the staff to man it properly and they're going from 16 trains an hour to 20 per hour during peak times! That's a train every 3 minutes!

The Elizabeth Line was built to serve east London which had a lack of serious rail services, despite lots of growth over 50 years. It's been wildly successful since it opened in May 2022. It's served over 600,000,000 total trips, with peak days of 800k people per day. The line basically caps out based on how many trains can physically run, so going to 20 per hour could get the line up to a million people per day. That's a huge achievement in the transit world.

Nice work, London!

Seattle has opened a subsection of their new Light Rail Line (Line 2). It doesn't connect to downtown yet (still working out engineering issues with the floating bridges), but they were smart enough to start running the section already complete.

Massive (by US standards) ridership has ensured. People needed the transit!

Seattle's geography is really tough for transit systems. The quantity of bottlenecks from riders and mountains is quite high. Trains are a necessity going forward to tie together the region.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34793815

Vietnam has build working towards some serious transit upgrades lately. The HSR line between the major cities, and starting to ban gas powered vehicles on a very accelerated time scale both show a nation wanting to modernize and build needed resources for their people.

France and Vietnam relations have come a long way since the 1960's... building relationships and resources is good work.

Huge fire trucks are a real problem for cities. Requiring roads to be huge so emergency vehicles can move through them is locking streets into being big for unnecessary reasons.

I lived in a tiny town for a few years. They wanted to build a road out to some spread out houses, but couldn't afford it. The reason? The fire department bought a new huge truck and demanded the road be wide enough for them to turn the truck around anywhere they liked.

The result was part of the city being cut off for decades as the city council fought the firefighters. All because anyone of 1800 people bought a hook and ladder truck capable of handling skyscraper fires. The tallest building in town is three stories and it still burned down, even with the oversized truck on hand.

I really liked the tone of their article. It's uplifting about how the bike roads are supporting commercial style activities along with being transit resources.

In Berlin I was fascinated by the sheer volume of material being delivered by bikes. Both individuals and companies use the bike roads to move goods. Some of the bikes could haul some serious tonnage, especially the cargo bikes with an enclosed box truck style back end.

Bike infrastructure is commercial infrastructure and it supports jobs all along the route.

Seattle continues to inch towards being a pedestrian city again. Now if they could just find a way to make a streetcar that's not stuck in traffic all day...