Visit the Are We There Yet? home Some places just don’t have the density of jobs and residents and intensity of activity that justifies an investment in rail transit. Many of these communities are investing in bus and shuttle service as well as in programs that make it easier and more pleasant to carpool, walk and bike to jobs in an urban or suburban downtown, and to get healthier while doing it. Des Moines, for example, which has a population 400,000, has been investing nearly $2 million a year to make the downtown more walkable and create a network of bike lanes and trails. Google — which offers job perks that are the envy of Silicon Valley, including chef-prepared food at all hours — is trying to make commutes as painless as possible by ferrying its pampered workers on shuttles that run on biodiesel, with leather seats, wi-fi, and even room for dogs. The Google shuttle carries a quarter of the company’s…

The Federal Transit Administration will hold three public webinars to discuss the New Starts final rule published on Jan. 9 in the Federal Register and the accompanying proposed policy guidance, available on the website here. Comments on the proposed guidance are due March 11.

Reconnecting America today released an updated interactive map showing all of the fixed-guideway transit projects in the United States.  You can read more about the project in this Reconnecting America News report or you can go directly to the map here.

The November 2012 "Orange Line Opportunity Corridor Report" report from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) in Boston has been added to the Resource Center best practices database.

The Winnipeg Transit-Oriented Development Handbook and Typology Guide have been added to the Resource Center's best practices database.

Visit the Are We There Yet? home The Denver Broncos and a resurgent Payton Manning take on a Chargers team Monday night. These division rivals have no love lost and will seek to keep each other further away from the post season with a win today. In the realm of complete communities, unlike on the gridiron, San Diego and Denver compete in different divisions. San Diego competes with the heavyweights, with just over 3 million residents, while Denver falls in the middle division, where regions between 3 million and 500,000 population compete. That in part may explain why Denver brings home straight “A’s” in Living, Moving, Working, and Thriving, while San Diego has three “Cs” and a “B.” Denver’s competition isn’t generally as fierce as San Diego faces in the top tier. In many cases, San Diego does a better job on individual metrics than Denver. San Diego has a higher share of households who live near…

In 2003, the Transport Research Board held its 9th National Light Rail Transit Conference in Portland. Among the papers pressented then was discussion of how light rail system designers can plan at the start for innovative operational practices to expedite train movements. The article, "Designing New Light Rail: Taking Engineering Beyond Vanilla," has been added to the Research Center's best practices database.

"Going the Distance Together: A Citizen’s Guide to Context Sensitive Solutions for Better Transportation," originally released in September 2011, has been added to the Resource Center best practices database. The report, a National Cooperative Highway Research Program document, explains how to become a full collaborator in all aspects of transportation planning, from national, state, and local policy to operations and maintenance. The guidebook provides context-sensitive solutions (CSS), a consensus-building process.