Ray LaHood is over in Spain, snooping around their high speed train system for ideas. Today he took a jaunt on the AVE from Madrid to Zaragosa and then hung around in a railway control center with the transport minister for a while. Tomorrow he’s meeting with prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the guy who’s has really been the force behind Spain’s recent investment. Maybe Zapatero will whisper some secret clue in his ear about how to get things in the US moving on the, um, right track.
The NY Times has seized the news peg of this visit and posted a story highlighting the successes of the Spanish rail program. Even for those of us who have already read several dozen stories about the successes of Spanish rail, it’s still worth reading. A few choice passages:
“Spaniards have rediscovered the train,” said Iñaki Barrón de Angoiti, director of high-speed rail at the International Union of Railways in Paris. “The AVE has changed the way people live, the way they do business. Spaniards don’t move around a lot, but the AVE is even changing that.” [...]
Here in Lleida, a town of 125,000 in northeastern Spain surrounded by plains that produce half of the country’s apples and pears, the inauguration of a high-speed route to Madrid in 2003 cut the journey to the capital to two hours from five and a half, and the extension of the line to Barcelona last year halved that trip to one hour.
Ángel Ros, the Socialist mayor of Lleida, said the AVE had transformed the town. The number of tourist visitors has increased by about 15 percent, he said. Demand for business conventions has risen 20 percent each year, and the city is building a 50 million euro ($70.5 million) convention center. The 13th-century town hall is in the midst of a 100 million euro public works project to transform the area around the railway station with gardens, bridges, a shopping center and parking lot.
America’s most famous street is now closed to cars right at the spot where it enters America’s most famous urban plaza. That’s right, Broadway in Times Square now belongs to pedestrians. To see how New York City’s newest public space was shaping up in the midst of its first official rush hour, I took a stroll along the thoroughfare at 7:30 this morning.
It probably isn’t much of a surprise to learn that New York is about twice as big as LA and three times as big as Chicago. Less mundane though, is the fact that it would contravene some mysterious but very strong law of collective behavior if it were any other way. So while there’s no “logical” reason to think that a country like ours couldn’t have two or more big cities approximately tied for the title of the largest, that kind of thing apparently just doesn’t happen.
New Laws For Safer Streets? Hawaii Gets It Right, Missouri Gets It Wrong
Thursday, May 28th, 2009In the last few weeks, two states considered “complete streets” laws that would have benefited residents with safer, more livable neighborhoods, and roads designed to include sidewalks and bike lanes and improve traffic flow. In one case, Hawaii, a broad coalition of citizens was able to celebrate the swift passage of a complete streets law that will improve quality of life throughout the state. In Missouri, though, it was different story, as the measure was killed at the last minute. What made the difference in these two outcomes?
In both cases, advocates did good work in support of the bills. In Hawaii, the One Voice for Livable Islands put a media spotlight on the state’s poor pedestrian safety record, while AARP’s efforts helped put the face of everyone’s grandmother at the center of the issue. Meanwhile, the Missouri Bicycle Federation helped organize testimony in favor of complete streets from a wide range of interests, from the state PTA to the Public Transit Association. The bill sailed through committee.
But according to Missouri Bicycle Federation Executive Director Brent Hugh, one opponent undid all that work: the State DOT.
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