ansoncfit

Take NJ Transit to Los Angeles

Amtrak locomotive and NJ Transit rolling stock in front of Gateway Plaza at LA Union Station

I spotted some NJ Transit rolling stock at Los Angeles’ Union Station last Friday.  I should have taken that instead of flying back to the East Coast.

New Jersey Transit in Los Angeles

Read Full Post | August 27 2009 | Swarthmore and Transportation |

TSA Failure: Terrorists with Pilots Licenses

The New York Times reported another TSA failure today.  A man on the FBI’s most wanted list has been able to keep his pilots license and try to sell his old plane online:

With such a straightforward match, David M. Schiffer, president of Safe Banking Systems, said it was “highly unlikely” that, despite assurances in June, the Transportation Security Administration was matching the publicly available F.B.I. list with the publicly available F.A.A. list.

Classic TSA – make me take off my flip flops and take all of my electronics out of their cases (a five minute ordeal for a geek like me), but let known terrorists keep their pilot licenses.

Read Full Post | August 18 2009 | Transportation |

Google Transit for LA Metro

The Los Angeles County MTA finally launched Google Transit, or at least a “data test” for it.  Too bad SEPTA beat them by a week.

Read Full Post | July 06 2009 | Transportation |

National Train Day

Acela

Today marks the 140th anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad.  In celebration, Amtrak hosted National Train Day at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.  I talked with some members of the National Association of Rail Passengers, picked up some new information on the Silverliner V, saw some great paintings of trains, heard a former Pullman Porter talk about his experiences, and saw Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood.  Probably the most exciting part was the rolling stock tour.  I got to walk through an Acela trainset as well as an old Santa Fe dining car.

[Show as slideshow]

Read Full Post | May 09 2009 | Swarthmore and Transportation |

On the Move featured on Bostonist.com

A website I maintain, bostononthemove.org, was featured by Bostonist today in a post about the MBTA’s debt.  I maintain this site for the Greater Boston Transportation Justice Coalition, of which ACE and TRU are members.

Read Full Post | March 31 2009 | Transportation |

Governor Patrick’s Transportation Plan

The Big Dig

[Another blog entry I wrote for ACE:]

Governor announces Transportation and Economic Security Plan

February 23, 2009

At a press conference on Friday, Governor Patrick announced a broad set of goals for transportation funding and reforms. Although the proposed six cents per gallon of new gas tax revenue dedicated to the MBTA may not be enough pay down the $2.7 million backlog of system maintenance and repair, the Governor’s plan is a step in the right direction.  [Read More]

Read Full Post | February 24 2009 | Transportation |

Transportation Planning Workshop

Planning a new street network for Marshall's Creek, PA

Two consulting firms, one focused on urban design and one focused on transportation engineering, made guest appearances in my Cities and Transportation Systems class at UPenn last week.  They each gave informative presentations on what careers in those two fields are like.  After the presentations, they gave us a scenario that the two firms had worked on together: developing new downtown for the bedroom community of Marshall’s Creek, PA.  It was fun to work with a team of City and Regional Planning students to formulate our own plan for the area; it feels like my goal of playing SimCity for a job is one step closer.

Read Full Post | February 15 2009 | Swarthmore and Transportation |

John Wayne Gets Virgin

John Wayne Airport

Virgin America will begin flights to and from John Wayne on April 30th, occupying the slots that Aloha Airlines opened up when they ceased operations last year.  I would have preferred an airline that flies to Philly; the Register reports that AirTran had a spot on the waiting list ahead of Virgin America, but was noncommital.  Oh well.  It will still be nice to be able to try Virgin America without driving to LAX.

Read Full Post | January 27 2009 | Transportation |

TSA Failure: Leaving Orange County

View down the Southern California coast

My departure out of of John Wayne in the predawn hours of Saturday made me even angrier at the TSA than I’m used to getting.  The couple in front of accidentally messed up their boarding passes, but the TSA personnel needlessly made a huge fiasco out of it at two different stages of the checkpoint.

An agent (I use agent instead of the TSA’s preferred Transportation Security Officer because these agents are not actually sworn peace officers) at the entrance to the screening area told the woman that she had to go back to the ticket counters to get  a boarding pass for her flight from Orange County to Atlanta.  She only had a boarding pass from Atlanta to Washington, D.C., while the man carried one for the Orange County to Atlanta leg.  I’m sure it happens everyday that people leave one or more of their set of boarding passes at the ticket counters.  In this case, it was a waste of time for the woman to have to go back and retrieve the additional boarding passes when it was abundantly clear that the couple were traveling on a legitimate itinerary.  It makes air travel no safer to waste peoples’ time in making them obtain duplicate information.

The man continued through the lines to the metal detector.  Upon passing through, the agent inspecting boarding passes said “This isn’t your name, is it?  Danielle?”  It turned out that he had been carrying his wife’s boarding pass for the first segment of their trip.   The fact that he had been allowed to proceed to the metal detector of course triggered a security breach.  One of the agents announced “Seven-November-One, wait no, Seven-November-Two !”, which presumably was a top-secret Homeland Security code for “one of our agents screwed up and read ‘Daniel’ instead of ‘Danielle’ on a boarding pass, and now it’s time for us to hold all these other passengers up and fire the agent at the front of the line.”  Whatever purpose the top-secret code had was eliminated as the agent sitting at the X-Ray, whom I will call Agent Crassa, fully explained the details and consequences of the security breach.  Two of the three TSA agents working the X-Ray machine I was at then had to escort the man back out of security.  Various passengers commented on how asinine it was for him to be escorted out of security, but we were reprimanded and informed that “It was for our own safety.” It makes air travel no safer to use needless “codes” or to require multiple agents to their stations and escort someone who is clearly not a threat back to the end of the line.

While I was waiting in line for the metal detector, one of the agents announced that they would be scanning all electronics, so we would need to remove all of our electronics from carry-on baggage to pass it through…

Read Full Post | January 19 2009 | Transportation |

Heathrow Expansion

Lufthansa 747-400 on approach to LAX

Despite their environmental harms, I tend to think airports are a pretty good idea.  The Great Park is okay, but building a small airport at the former MCAS El Toro for general aviation traffic would have been preferable and would have reduced the number of runway incursions at John Wayne.  Administrators at John Wayne tend to  blame the small planes but ignore the larger structural problem of combining heavy commercial and general aviation traffic at a tiny airport.  Instead of building a bunch of soccer fields and a giant balloon, it would have made sense to move general aviation traffic to El Toro, safely out of the way of the commercial flights at John Wayne.  Small recreational aircraft and charter planes wouldn’t have to deal with the constant “Caution wake turbulence” advisories from John Wayne Tower, and they would be able to clear the foothills that El Toro airport opponents claimed would doom any takeoffs.  The larger planes at John Wayne would have been safer without all the runway incursions.

While I tend to argue in favor of additional runway capacity, I do have to appreciate some of the tactics being used against Heathrow’s proposed third runway.  One of the more creative ones:

Greenpeace has quietly bought a field close to the site of the third runway, right in the middle of what would be the expanded airport.

The plan is to parcel it up into tiny squares, and sell them online to people across the world.

“The airport will have to buy the land back from Eskimos and people living on remote islands,” said one Greenpeace activist.  [BBC]

Awesome.

Read Full Post | January 13 2009 | Environment and Transportation |

Media Trolley Getaway Attempt

Route 101 Trolley at 69th St

Earlier this week, two suspects robbed a bank in Media and tried to escape on public transportation.  They boarded Route 101, the trolley I often take from the Springfield Mall near Swarthmore to either Media or 69th Street.  From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Yesterday, after the Sovereign Bank branch at Providence Road and Baltimore Pike in Media was robbed, the two suspects were spotted climbing on board the Route 101 trolley…

News of the robbery went out on the police radio and officers were stationed at every stop along the trolley route, said SEPTA spokeswoman Jerri Williams.

Read Full Post | December 23 2008 | Swarthmore and Transportation |

Obama Letdown

The Santa Ana Freeway – Will LaHood work for mass transit alternatives or expansion and induced demand?

I was well aware that President-elect Obama wouldn’t be able to live up to the high expectations that many people, including myself, had of him.  This week, however, has been a particularly rough one.  Monday’s announcement of his “Green Team” was lacking a Transportation Secretary.  As Streetsblog reports,

“Obama still hasn’t made the transportation – land use – climate connection,” Petra Todorovich, director of Regional Plan Association’s America 2050 program said. “It’s clear he’s thinking about these things in separate categories.”

When he did fill the spot, public transportation and livable streets advocates were not particularly pleased.  Most sources report LaHood to be pretty cozy with the highway lobby.  It’s disappointing to have such a valuable spot in the cabinet go to a politician who is not very progressive.  Again, from the Streetsblog report:

“This sends the message that the transportation secretary is a throw-away political appointment who doesn’t matter,’ said a city transportation official who, like others, asked to remain anonymous to preserve their relationship with the U.S. DOT. “This is the slot for the token Republican. It’s the bottom of the barrel. A bone you can throw.”

And to top it all off, it comes out that Rick Warren will be given the honor of giving the inauguration’s invocation.  I apologize on behalf of Orange County, but at least the conversations behind the decision have been made public.

Read Full Post | December 20 2008 | Transportation |