• President Obama has committed millions more towards beefing up screening equipment at airports, including full-body scanners, “swabs,” and random searches. (ABCNews)
• If you are on an empty train in New York City, don’t stretch out to make yourself a little more comfy. Police are looking to hand out “seat hogging” citations. (NY Times)
• The Oregon town of Klamath Falls has become the model of geothermal success, so much so that the Department of Energy is taking note. (Yahoo!)
• An appeal is made to transit advocates to change their tactics: Provincialism needs to end and be replaced with a broader vision of transportation needs. (The Stamford Advocate)
• An excellent photogallery of what Copenhagen’s bike-sharing program might look like in the future. (Inhabitat)
• Houston mayor Annise Parker is emerging as a public transit superstar. Her actions are the driving force between the Houston light rail project. (Houston Chronicle)
• Local Venetian Renatto Brunetta wants to give the city of Venice “a shock” by installing — get this — a sub-lagoon railway. (Economist)
• A collection of comments from Silicon Valley expressing the for and against views of high speed rail. The area around San Jose is now the main front of California’s HSR war. (San Jose Mercury News)
• Construction has begun on an HSR route linking China’s Chongqing municipality and Chengdu, the Sichuan province capital. The line will let riders cover 191 miles in about an hour. (China Daily via TTPolitic)
• Here’s a fascinating look at the seismic threats to Turkey: A whopping 95% of the population lives in an active earthquake zone. (Euronews)


• Just how is the U.S. “No-Fly” list (which has nearly doubled in size since Christmas) created? The AP investigates. (


• Stay classy San Diego: A group of “big thinkers” in the city are saying it should become part of a mega-region stretching from Southern California to Las Vegas. (
• With the Olympics over, eyes now turn to the Herculean construction tasks needed to turn the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi Russia into a success. (
• Jakarta is sinking: By 2025, the sea level could rise high enough to hit the Presidential Palace in the city center (pictured). So what’s the solution? Time for a new capital city: “If we have a good plan … we can build a city from scratch, like Brasilia in Brazil,” says an expert. (AFP via
A Eurostar train in London.
• This morning, the
Senator Harry Reid stumping for AFGE.
• Is the Obama administration mis-allocating all this money spent on high speed rail? One expert certainly thinks so. (
• South Carolina’s Governor is preparing to file a lawsuit in an attempt to force President Obama to open a disposal facility for radioactive waste in Nevada, the plans for which were just canned. (
• Gallup-Healthways’ Well-Being Index, which ranks metro areas according to poll responses about physical and emotional health, work environment, and life evaluation, packs a few surprises. Florida has three cities in the bottom ten! (




