Orphan Road

And thus, the market for car sharing grows..

What interested me most was this nugget:

Susan Shaheen, transportation research director with the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said U-Haul has begun a pilot car-sharing program and that Hertz and Enterprise are looking at options.

"With the entrance of U-Haul and more daily-rental approaches by the rental-car companies, there's always an opportunity for those organizations to more aggressively enter this space," said Shaheen.

Because you know what's even more awesome than dealing with U-Haul's horrible rental experience once every couple of years? Dealing with it every day. Boy I can't wait to wait in line for 3 hours to rent a car and then have it break down on me half the time. Man, if I was Zipcar, I'd be quaking in my boots right now!

And no, it doesn't run windows, and it' not cheap, either:

"This is not cheap what they're doing," said Kevin Desmond, general manager at King County Metro Transit. "Microsoft employees enjoy good benefits that many employers would give their right arm to be able to provide."

Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, acknowledged it is expensive but declined to say how much the company is spending.

The pilot program will include 14 buses, including seven large coaches with bike storage, and electrical outlets at each seat, in addition to Wi-Fi. Seven midsize coaches will be used for neighborhood pickups. There will be multiple runs in the morning and afternoon, Smith said.

Running one bus for one hour costs the Metro system about $110, which includes the driver, mechanic and fuel, Desmond said. At that rate, it would cost $9,240 per day to run 14 buses for six hours, or $2.4 million per year, not including weekends, the cost of new buses or Wi-Fi service.

Flexcar users are understandably peeved that their "rentals" are now subject to the same 18.7% tax rate as other rental cars. Alan Durning does a good job of explaining why these taxes exist:

Many Cascadian cities, with state authorization, put special sales taxes on rental cars. The rationale, as best I can understand, is that rental car taxes are mostly paid by nonresidents: business travelers with expense accounts and vacationers who don’t vote locally.

Flexcar, however, has created a whole constituency of in-state car renters, and suddenly the legislators are caught with their pants down (apologies to Larry Craig), taxing their constituents at a rate that will approach 20% once the RTID/ST2 taxes pass this November.

Hot on the heels of the proposed London PRT system, a Mesa, AZ businessman is floating a proposal to bring a 25-mile transit pod network to downtown Mesa:

Bullet-shaped two-passenger vehicles would be suspended from overhead tracks. Instead of riding on wheels or bearings, they would be elevated and propelled by magnetic levitation at speeds up to 100 mph in city, and 150 mph between cities.

About every quarter-mile, there would be a station. Passengers would climb to the boarding platform, pay for their rides, punch in their destinations and jump into waiting cars.

A computer would guide the cars as they merge into the high-speed upper rail and then slow to a stop at the destinations.

Eventually, SkyTran advocates say, a city could be covered with a grid of lines, making it all but unnecessary to use cars for local trips.

And you thought the Seattle Monorail was a pie-in-the-sky idea?

USA Today explores the idea:

Fourteen states, six counties, 10 regional governments and 52 cities have complete streets policies, according to the National Complete Streets Coalition. In Illinois, a complete streets bill awaits the governor's signature. In California, a bill passed one house.

Massachusetts and at least 11 cities — including Seattle, Honolulu, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Madison, Wis., and Jackson, Miss. — have approved complete streets policies since last year, the coalition says.

Some states, such as Oregon and Florida, have had the equivalent of complete streets policies for years, but the "overarching concept jelled just in the last few years," coalition coordinator Barbara McCann says.

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, plans to sponsor a federal complete streets bill, spokeswoman Jennifer Mullen says.

It's interesting that it seems to be gaining support higher up than the local level. This is good, I guess, because streets tend to overlap jurisdictions. Even in Seattle, though, bike lanes can get nixed if there's even a hint of local opposition.

Personal Rapid Transit is coming to London's Heathrow Airport:

Tomorrow's public transit could look very different from today's if Martin Lowson's $20 million project at Heathrow Airport in London is a hit. Starting in 2008, Lowson's company, Advanced Transport Systems, will be whisking passengers between Heathrow's new Terminal 5 and a parking lot a mile away in tiny driverless vehicles that run on an elevated concrete track.

Unlike buses or trains, Lowson's 'pods' are private -- about the size of a taxi, fitting as many as four adults -- and arrive on demand, within five minutes after passengers press a call button.

People laughed -- perhaps rightly -- when Steve Jobs boasted that the Segway scooter would "erect entire cities" around the Segway scooter. But, on the other hand, it's obviously true that the design of our cities is more or less circumscribed by the transportation options available to us. A city designed around PRT would look very different than the one in which we currently live.

(Photo via)

SeaTrans does yeoman's work breaking down the recent Census study on commuting patterns in different cities and debunking the "3% myth." Turns out transit use in our Metro area is far higher than the wags would have you believe.

Also see this Strange Bedfellows post showing how Seattle ranks in the top 10 for percentage of commuters who bike, telecommute, and walk.

A friend of mine who commutes on her bicycle was recently hit by a car. Thankfully, she was okay. Conversation over drinks motivated Friend of Orphan Road (and sometime B&P contributor) Eugene to dig up this great article in the PI about bicycle safety in Seattle. Every year in Seattle, around 200 bicyclists are struck by cars.

In high school, I used to commute 20 miles a day on my bike -- a 5 mile ride to and from football practice, twice a day (uphill! into the wind! in the snow!).

Which got me to thinking, why don't I ride my bike now? I mean, my old mountain bike is a charming living room ornament and all, but in theory I might actually be using it for its intended purpose.

And the answer is: I'm terrified. My commute takes me straight downhill on Denny, where there's no bike lane, and even if there was there are enough SUVs, semis, and distracted drivers to make me shiver even when I'm on foot.

I'd love to have bicycling as a commuting option, but unless and until the city closes off whole streets to motorized traffic (not bloody likely), I'll stick with the bus and my feet.