Cities & Planning

After two years at the drawing board, Sound Transit designers devised downtown Seattle stops as deep as 145 feet, virtually unreachable by stairs. Such a plan is exorbitantly expensive but politically easier than fighting for cheaper, shallow routes.

Long-discussed concerns about environmental costs and overall supplies of critical inputs to renewables are finally starting to materialize.

An essay about Spokane, the New West, and its place within it.

A detailed essay about Spokane's regional market influence, lost economic potential, and splintered political interests.

With so much talk of a gondola to connect SFU Burnaby with the SkyTrain system, Seattle is now considering one as well. The promise of an aerial gondola would connect the waterfront, Seattle Center…

The leading source for independent news and analysis about transport in London and beyond. Award-winning coverage of transport infrastructure and politics alongside stories about the history of the Capital's transport networks.

The leading source for independent news and analysis about transport in London and beyond. Award-winning coverage of transport infrastructure and politics alongside stories about the history of the Capital's transport networks.

Beavers, nature's engineers, seem able to dam any stream, building structures with logs and mud that can flood large areas, thus restoring ecosystems and mitigating the effects of climate change.

Seattle has plenty of hills and waterways which makes a subway system attractive in comparison to road-based solutions. But even a subway needs to worry about steep hills and water unless you’re wi…

The Traffic Lab team is launching a new Q&A column to answer readers’ questions about the region’s thorny transportation issues.

As crosstown traffic becomes intolerable, a few Seattle thinkers are suggesting a gondola as the best way out of the mess. One possible route would go from the light-rail station being built on Capitol Hill to Olympic Sculpture Park, serving...

This is a comparison of capacity, carbon footprint, technology, availability, and construction impact between Link light rail and SkyLink urban gondola for West Seattle.

The North American Steel Interstate Coalition supports higher speed passenger and freight rail development, including putting trucks on trains in truck ferries.

In the 1980s, it was the granting of 48 state authorities by the ICC that opened the trucking and airline industry to competition. This could work for rail—not just local reciprocal switching, but national reciprocal trackage rights might enable competition over shared lines. Let’s reimagine rail.

On December 26, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential order that effectively seized the railroads for the U.S. government. Several factors, both governmental and economic, had conspired over the previous decade to result in an inefficient system suffering from labor unrest, poor scheduling, car shortages, and outright inability of the railroads to respond to wartime requirements. On or before December 28, the Treasury Department took possession of the railroads, and their operat

Jakarta is a coastal city run through with rivers, yet paradoxically: the city is sinking in no small part due to a lack of water as well. As residents pull water to drink from underground aquifers, the city settles — in some places dropping inches each year. At its current rate of descent, most of

In dry places, photovoltaic shade can even reduce water use.

When we last looked at Nuro, the developers of an autonomous electric delivery vehicle, they were on their second-generation R2. To refresh your memory, it was essentially a diminutive car designed to carry goods, not people, and Dominos successfully used them to deliver pizzas in a pilot program in Texas.

A group of Berlin residents has put forward a proposal to turn all of central Berlin (an area larger than Manhattan) into a car-

We need to visualize the kinds of urban environments we want to live in

New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced plans for a 14-mile Interborough Express on train tracks that already exist. Other U.S. states should take note.

The citizen-driven plan that the city is considering now would create the largest car-free area in a city anywhere in the world.