Various

1. Interesting college student campaign to promote expanded bus service. (Via Burnabarian)

- Passups, a campaign for better public transportation from the Alma Mater Society, University of British Columbia

2. A more rigorous plan for high speed rail comes from the America 2050 project, although Transport Politic has some legitimate quibbles with their methodology, in "Establishing Objective, Realistic Assessment Tools for Planning an Effective High-Speed Rail Network."


3. Transport Politic has some legitimate concerns about maglev funding, in "DOT Expands Funding For Studies on U.S. Maglev Corridors."

4. I write a lot about the need to either co-locate public facilities or build mixed use public facilities, as well as to have broader more transformationally oriented planning processes designed to yield better public facilities.

Over the last 15 years or so, college unions have shown one way forward. Plus, many universities are now placing their college bookstores in "town" rather than bury them deep on campus, and in San Jose, California, the county library system's main branch and the main library of the San Jose State University were combined into a new expanded facility a few years back.

Towson, Maryland's Goucher College has just opened a new library, the Athenaeum, that has some college union/recreation center type aspects. See "The College Library in a Changing World".

According to "Is It a Library? A Student Center? The Athenaeum Opens at Goucher," in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the library has:

an art gallery, a restaurant, and open forum space that can seat at least 700 people... treadmills, exercise bikes, and rowing machines as well.

SEPTA General Manager Joseph Casey (right) was at the groundbreaking at the subway stop at Broad and Spring Garden Streets with assistant GM Francis Kelly (second from left) and construction company chief James J. Anderson. Clem Murray/Philadelphia Inquirer

5. In "Rehab of two North Broad subway stations begins," "Stimulus dollars sprucing up Francisville and Spring Garden stations," and "Ground broken for rebuilding of Croydon rail station," the Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the use of federal stimulus monies to rehabilitate transit stations in the Philadelphia region.

Although this statement from the last article:

"We pray this will not just redevelop a train station, but redevelop our neighborhood and community," a local priest, the Rev. Larry Crehan of St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church, said in his invocation before political and SEPTA officials plunged ceremonial shovels into ceremonial dirt.

is wishful thinking. Praying isn't enough. If you want revitalization, at least if you want it fast (in many DC neighborhoods, it has taken at least 20 years, because transit-related neighborhood revitalization plans weren't really created, and frankly, people didn't really know how to do it back then probably, but in any case, you need a plan...