Zipcar honolulu how to#

“Jack” Reilly, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (alma mater of Alexander Cassatt, who oversaw the tunnel construction as president of the Pennsylvania Railroad). “You can’t expect these things to last forever!” says John M. On the opposite side of Manhattan from the Second Avenue subway, the 110-year-old tunnels under the Hudson River-linking New York’s Penn Station to the south and west-need replacing. Maintenance is also costly, as the well-publicized troubles of the Washington Metro demonstrate: It built 117 miles of subway without securing sufficient funding to maintain them, an oversight for which current passengers are paying with disruptive line closures for emergency repairs. There’s a lot of travel markets that lend themselves to-let’s call it ‘collective mobility.’ We need to do something to provide a decent option for that.”īut fixed subway and rail infrastructure is prohibitively expensive for all except the largest jurisdictions. “I think the idea that today, the 21st century, with a change in the nature of the markets, a change in the cities, as much as we’d like them to go back to resembling 19th-century cities-that’s not going to happen. Zimmerman, a Cornell-trained civil engineer and World Bank consultant with 40 years in urban transportation planning. “I don’t think the light rail lines and the metros and fixed-route, fixed-schedule buses are dead, because there are still markets where they make sense,” says Samuel L. Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is currently putting in 176 kilometers of rail and 85 kilometers of bus rapid transit at a cost upwards of $23.5 billion, and by the end of this year New York should have opened the first, $4.4 billion segment of its long-planned Second Avenue subway, with three new stations on the Upper East Side. Spurring a shift away from private cars, some cities continue to invest in massive transportation engineering projects that rival those that reached their zenith in the 20th century. Traffic congestion wastes time, saps economic growth, and pollutes the air, with private cars and trucks accounting for a fifth of U.S.

More than half the world’s population lives in cities, up from 34 percent in 1960, and the number of urban dwellers will grow 1.4 percent or more annually between now and 2030, the United Nations estimates. The arrival of driverless vehicles a decade from now, coupled with a proliferation of traffic-monitoring sensors, promises still more change. From the spread of light rail and streetcar systems in Denver, Charlotte, N.C., San Diego, and Washington, to dedicated rapid bus lanes in Bogotá, Colombia, the hill-climbing Mexicable-Ecatepec cable car system in the state of México, and the schedule-bending Magic Bus being road-tested in Nairobi, Kenya, cities are trying a variety of ways to move their growing populations. Urban transportation is in the midst of an upheaval, caused by growing congestion, the cost of building and maintaining traditional mass-transit systems, world-wide concern about pollution from private vehicles, and Web-based communication that is rapidly altering urban life. More important, it would need frequent updating. And it would contain not only the transit diagram but a patchwork of options-public and private-that connect commuters, tourists, or business travelers to Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, car2go Smart coupes, bike sharing, taxis, and minivans. First of all, it would be a touch screen or downloadable app. A present-day sign would look and feel different. “This is how we’ve decided you’ll get from Point A to Point B,” they declare. So do New York, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia: They’re the big, bold signs put up decades ago by urban transit agencies that diagram subway, bus, and streetcar routes in red, silver, yellow, and fuchsia.

Zipcar honolulu how to#

High costs of transit infrastructure and accelerating technology have cities and visionaries rethinking how to take us from Point A to Point B.