Big transit/sustainable mobility stories of 2025
Obviously this isn't everything. But what sticks out to me.
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Congestion pricing in NYC. In January I wrote that the introduction of congestion pricing in NYC was already the biggest ground transportation story of the year ("The most momentous transportation story of 2025 has already occurred: imposition of NYC's congestion zone"). Basically the results are in ("New York's Congestion Pricing Is Working. Five Charts Show Hows," Bloomberg). It's working exactly the way it's supposed to.
As far as business effect goes, I worried about business relocation. That may or may not be an issue. But visitation to the core of Manhattan is up, and so are sales tax revenues, and reduction in storefront vacancies. Plus MTA has $500+ million to invest in transit.
We have to remember that the Trump Administration is still fighting the congestion zone in court ("New York’s Congestion Pricing Succeeds as Trump Fights to End It," Newsweek).
That Gov. Hochul cancelled it ("The Politics That Derailed Congestion Pricing in New York," New Yorker), then reversed course, in part because of sustained public opposition to her decision ("‘Slap in the face’: outrage after New York governor halts congestion pricing," Guardian). In the end, the price dropped from $15 to $9.
The second biggest story is ongoing financial crises for most transit systems, whose business models were crushed by covid and the shift to work from home. Many systems have half or fewer the number of riders pre-2020. And special federal funds for transit were increased under Biden, and not under Trump.
-- "San Diego transit at a crossroads? MTS boasts robust ridership recovery — but faces financial crisis," San Diego Union Tribune
Chicago area systems are getting a $1.5 billion payment from the state for the next few years ("Illinois enacts $1.5 billion plan to stabilize Transit and Avoid Service Reductions," Governing).
Philadelphia still needs a long term solution for SEPTA funding, as the Republican dominated State Legislature isn't particularly interested ("SEPTA got stopgap relief, but still needs a sustainable long-term solution," Philadelphia Inquirer, "Credit Shapiro for more SEPTA funds, but still need long-term fix," Philadelphia Tribune). Etc.
Trump Administration uses crime incidents to demean and defund transit. Using one-off terrible crimes to say transit is unsafe ("US threatens to withhold funds from Boston, Chicago transit agencies," Reuters, "Trump administration threatens to pull New York transit funds as it questions anti-crime efforts," AP, "Deadly stabbing on Charlotte train highlights America's transit safety challenges," ABC11), the Trump Administration used this event as an excuse to suggest defunding transit ("Trump Admin Issues New Threat After Charlotte Train Killing," Newsweek).
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said, “Safety needs to be the top priority of elected officials. Citizens don’t want federal dollars going to public transportation that local leaders refuse to keep safe!”
The fact is, transit is safer than driving ("We Need a Reality Check on Crime, Safety and Transit," "New York City’s Subway Is Actually Safer Than Your Car," Bloomberg).
As one of the implementers of broken windows policing in NYC said, "there are always going to be high profile one-off incidents, regardless of the overall program of crime suppression."
Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, University of Chicago Press.
The big thing is the availability of guns ("A fighting chance: A new book challenges conventional wisdom on gun violence and suggests new approaches to solving the problem." University of Chicago Magazine), such as in LA ("Person fatally shot on L.A. Metro bus in Exposition Park," LA Times), where a fight between young adults erupted in gun violence and death on a bus.DC has a problem on the Metrorail system. NYC has a problem with people who have extreme mental health issues. SEPTA a problem with gun violence.
Problems in Minneapolis ("Metro Transit boosts uniformed security presence on light-rail trains," "What a week’s worth of rider text messages reveals about Metro Transit’s problems," Minneapolis Star-Tribune) and Seattle ("How Seattle-area transit is pushing back against crime," ), etc.
I still haven't gotten around to opining about how the BART system in San Francisco is using urban design interventions to improve safety at transit stations ("Can BART bring a Civic Center-style revival to another dilapidated S.F. station?," SF Chronicle).
Fare evasion countermeasures. NYC, DC, and SF are installing much more difficult to evade emergency exit systems.
USDOT: all in for roads but not road safety. Changing the funding criteria and basically eliminating transit infrastructure funding going forward ("T4America statement on USDOT proposal to eliminate federal transit funding"), same with sustainable mobility ("Trump Cancels Trail, Bike-Lane Grants Deemed ‘Hostile’ to Cars," Bloomberg) in favor of roads.
Lots of road safety projects were cancelled because they think safety and diversity of users meaning not just automobile operators, are "woke."
Bike share growth in Toronto.
Bike share use in NYC, Washington, DC, Toronto ("How Bike Share Toronto got big — and what it will take to keep rolling," Toronto Today, "How Bike Share went from death’s door to one of Toronto’s fastest-growing ways to travel," Toronto Star) and Boston ("Bluebikes’ popularity has skyrocketed. This map shows where they are used most and where they lag," Boston Globe) is exploding.DC's system launched in 2010, so it seems to me that it takes a long time to reach critical mass (see Diffusion of Innovation, ("Bikeshare Beat: Capital Bikeshare records over 6.1 million rides in 2024, fastest growing system in US," Greater Greater Washington and "Citi Bike, 10 Years Old and Part of New York’s Street Life," New York Times).
-- "Shared Mobility's Role in Sustainable Mobility: Past, Present, and Future," Annual Review in Environment and Resources
Sadly, in many places, systems are minimally used or have shuttered operations, including high profile cities like Minneapolis ("Nice Ride shuts down pioneering Minneapolis bike share program," Minnesota Public Radio).
It's important to figure out what separates successful places from the unsuccessful ones, to increase biking uptake.
One factor obviously is infrastructure along with urban form. Scale too.
Plus, E-bikes have made a big difference too. Although in response, cost per trip is higher. I was always critical about e-bikes in the flat core of a city ("(Still) tired of mis-understanding of the potential for e-bikes," 2015) but it's not for me to say how people "should be using" bikes.
And of course, whether or not there is public subsidy as part of an overall transportation planning program. Systems relying on sponsorship, like Minneapolis, fall apart when they can't replace sponsors.
-- Better Bike Share Partnership
Matt Elliott, a columnist for the Toronto Star warns us that as systems are successful, depending on the operator, they can focus more on extracting more revenue from riders, rather than improving the system ("Why dark clouds loom over Bike Share Toronto, despite its undeniable success," 2030 Bike Share Toronto Growth Strategy - Ride More, Connect More, Toronto Parking Authority, Presentation).
Here’s the problem. The TPA report, after justifiably bragging about its recent success, spends much of the rest of the document laying out ways to extract more money from the Bike Share riders who have contributed to that success. That includes “new revenue streams” like “loyalty programs, digital advertising networks, feature upsells, and advanced reservations.” It reads like a road map that could easily lead to what the tech writer Cory Doctorow has colourfully called “enshittification” — the process whereby online platforms and services decline over time as they change from focusing on what benefits users to what benefits their bottom line.
You know it when you see it. It usually starts when a service that previously offered a reasonable price and a good user experience begins constantly trying to sell you on their Premium Extra VIP Plus program while also showing unskippable ads for weight-loss drugs.
This decline can be an insidious process that starts with good intentions. For instance, Bike Share has had problems with dock and bike availability, especially at peak times of day. From the TPA’s perspective, allowing people to reserve a bike in advance for a small fee might seem like a good way to ease frustration. For users, however, a much better approach would be to add more bikes and docks in areas with high demand.
They argue that London is a cycling city now because of dockless bike share.).
If one secret is making the bikes really electric, the other seems to be making them really dockless. Previously, bike-hire schemes offered a patchy service: it was often hard to find a bike and it could take ages to find a designated parking space. Today, London’s operators have more bikes. But critically they have negotiated relaxed parking rules, including on residential streets, meaning their fleets fan out widely. Lime claims that 97% of Londoners in its service area live within a two-minute walk of one of their bikes. As with Uber, it thinks users open the app if they know convenience is only a few minutes away.
This is run by operators separate from the TfL operated bike share system. But parking and storage can be a big mess.
... But any Torontonian will tell you that just because the line is there on the map doesn’t mean it will get you where you need to be in any kind of hurry. Toronto has the distinction of running the slowest streetcar system in the world.
This is because the city and the TTC don’t consider it any kind of priority to make rapid transit rapid. They design these lines and choose how to operate them to ensure they are slow. On purpose. If that wasn’t clear before, it has become so in the debates at the TTC board and city council that have followed Torontonians’ astonished rage at the sloth-like performance of our new $3.5 billion LRT line.
Authorities decided to put 18 stops on an 11-kilometre route. They decided the vehicles should travel below 25 km/h (less than half the speed of the traffic beside them) through intersections and when approaching stations, assuring they will never get up to a decent speed. They decided the vehicles should stop endlessly at red lights and also be forced to wait for single-occupant vehicles make left turns or U-turns. They decided, quietly, that instead of the promised 33 minutes for a trip across the line, 48 minutes was a reasonable stretch goal — something to aim for after the slower “soft launch.”
Note that this is an issue for bus systems in most places as well. Cars get the priority. That should change. Transit vehicles move far more people.
But the thing is that it is above ground in most places. Montreal's subway is 100% underground, so it can operate during terrible snowstorms. Not the REM.
DC dumping the streetcar ("DC makes yet another bad decision about streetcars: will replace the one line with a so called "fancy" bus | The Vision Thing," "Budget cut means D.C. Streetcar will shut down in March," Washington Post).
This is the endgame for a poor planning process from "start" (not the initial planning) to finish. I joke that DC and Seattle started streetcar planning in 2003. Seattle got the first line in 2007. DC in 2014.
Also, the city received an unsolicited offer from the private sector to run and grow the system (that's how it's done in Portland, Oregon, home in the US to the first modern streetcar). But they blew it off.
As DC plans to build a new stadium for the NFL football team, the current streetcar alignment is adjacent, and could have been leveraged to provide service within the campus as a complement to bus and subway service, and link to more subway stations as another mobility alternative.
Relatedly, Minnesota's pathetic Northstar commuter railroad is closing--by not extending it to St. Cloud it wasn't particularly useful ("Minnesota's Northstar Commuter Rail to Be Replaced by Expanded Bus Service Network," Hoodline), cities in the Dallas Area Rapid Transit system are trying to opt out--an anti-transit State Government doesn't have DART's back ("So You Want to Leave DART?," D Magazine), and plenty of communities, like Illinois, refuse transit extension to their communities ("Huntley backs out of planned Metra station for new passenger train service between Rockford and Chicago," Lake County Scanner).
Electric bicycles. E-bikes, unlike electric cars, do actually shift environmental metrics by reducing car trips ("For some parents, minivans are out and e-bikes are in," Boston Globe, "The best bike gets you out of your car," Bicycling, "How electric bikes reduce car use," Transportation Research: Part D), whereas EVs replace gasoline car trips, still creating traffic congestion and maintaining automobile dominance in the transportation planning paradigm. But the lack of standards for equipment, safety, weight etc. create problems.
Safety/We need national standards. Many communities are beginning to regulate electric bikes more closely in the face of deaths and accidents ("Molly’s Last Ride Twelve-year-old Molly Steinsapir crashed onto the pavement from a Rad Power e-bike and never woke up. With a poorly regulated e-bike industry, who is responsible when a child dies?," Bicycling).
And complaints of reckless riding by pedestrians and motor vehicles operators. Many in the micromobility world criticize this regulatory action, saying that accidents and deaths are still worse when it comes to motor vehicles. Sure.
True. But working to reduce needless deaths wrt road safety (e.g., Vision Zero) should be the priority. E bikes don't get a pass ("14 year old riding an ebike on the sidewalk AT 25MPH, hits woman, she gets traumatic brain injury," Minneapolis Star-Tribune, "Santee poised to ban e-bikes for children under 12 City will work with schools, community to educate them about the tougher regulations," San Diego Union-Tribune, "Toronto is looking at licences for e-bikes. Here’s why that may be better for delivery riders — and pedestrians," Toronto Star, "It’s getting hard to ignore e-bikes’ dangers: If drivers of cars are responsible for their crashes, drivers of e-bikes are responsible for theirs," Boston Globe).
Plus, because of the weight of an e-bike (too much for me right now), brakes need frequent adjustment.
So should standardization of rules across the US. Many types of electric "bikes" are more akin to motorcycles, capable of speeds much higher than a typical "analog" bicycle, say the super riders can do 20mph. Duffers like me, more like 12 mph. There are even electric "bikes" that go faster than 28mph. Those aren't bikes, they are mopeds/motorcycles.
A few years ago a technology leading e bike company, Van Moof, went out of business, stranding users. Although it was acquired and restarted by a firm specializing in sports equipment.
Rad Power Bikes, a company which has set up stores around the country, but is based in Seattle, just declared bankruptcy ("Seattle e-bike pioneer files bankruptcy, owes millions," Seattle Times). And I'd been looking at that company for a bike, because I like the design.
Gondolas in Paris: the Transit City paradigm. Paris, which continues to expand its system of train, subway, and tram (light rail) transit ("Map of the Grand Paris Express, Europe’s Larctgest Transit Expansion Project," The Urbanist), has added gondolas to the mix ("Europe’s longest urban cable car is unveiled over dazzling capital city," Metro UK, "In the Île-de-France region, a cable car to reduce urban inequalities," Le Monde).
The new line, the first of its kind in the French capital, has been designed to connect the city’s isolated outskirts, poorly served by trains and buses, to the Métro network. At 4.5 kilometres long, the route links Métro Line 8 in Créteil to Villa Nova in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, and passes through Limeil-Brevannes and Valenton on the way.
The cable car system — which features 105 gondolas with 10 seats each — is expected to carry around 11,000 passengers per day above Parisian streets. While the new cable car is the longest in Europe, it still lags behind the longest in the world, which connects the Bolivian cities of La Paz and El Alto over 20 miles.
Although to be fair, projected ridership is equivalent to a medium usage bus line. OTOH, offering much faster trips and greater access and connectedness on "social urbanism" grounds.
The Le Monde article makes clear it took a long time, about 20 years, from idea to fruition. But it was also implemented. It's an example of the idea that to be a "Transit City" you have to keep investing in and where practical and needed, building new infrastructure.
Meanwhile proposals in DC for connection between the Rosslyn Metrorail station and Georgetown, Staten Island to New Jersey ("Bayonne mayor gives aerial gondola plan a thumbs up," Staten Island Advance) and Los Angeles ("Metro votes to approve Dodger Stadium gondola project despite protests," Los Angeles Times) languish.
Transit expansions. Are still happening, with projects that predate the Trump Administration. One notable is Seattle ("New light rail stations open with South King County party," Seattle Times). Each expansion generates a lot of new ridership, much more than say the Silver Line did for Metrorail in Suburban Virginia.
Last year’s extension to Lynnwood opened up the northern suburbs; this year’s stretch into Redmond welded together the tech-heavy Eastside; and now the jump to Federal Way is anticipated to be a boon for workers and students in South King County.
Up to 23,000 riders a day are expected to board or exit a train at the three new stations, boosting ridership along that 1 Line spine from the current 110,000 daily average. The Eastside’s 2 Line carries about 10,000 passengers a day, but its popularity is expected to grow once it connects with the 1 Line next year.
It's an example of how I say that transit infrastructure, done right, can have the speediest return on public investment, so it should be seen as an economic development measure.
Vision Zero/Road Safety. For another entry, this is too long as it is.
Labels: bicycle and pedestrian planning, congestion pricing, electric bicycles, gondolas/aerial trams, micromobility, transit
posted by Richard Layman @ 4:30 AM&Permanent Link
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