Blog

During the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic downturn, we’ve seen how much we depend on essential workers. We’ve also seen that these same workers are often the most at risk. As the meme goes, “we are all weathering the same storm, but we are not in the same boat.” With essential workers taking center stage, transit equity and health equity have entered the public’s field of vision in a new way.

George Floyd should be alive. His murder is just the latest instance of extreme injustice arising from the racism embedded in our society and institutions. We condemn the brutality of the actions of the officers in the Minneapolis Police Department. We fully support every effort to prosecute these officers and the mandate to replace systems and behaviors based in white supremacy with systems rooted in equity and honoring diversity.

At Rail~Volution we’ve been following closely the ways transit agencies have been impacted by COVID-19 and how they’re adapting to protect workers and assist riders, especially essential riders.

The Rail~Volution Board of Directors and National Steering Committee (NSC) were in Miami this month to set direction for the year ahead. The board meeting overlaps with the NSC’s first planning meeting for the annual Rail~Volution transit and community development conference, which will be in Miami, September 20-23.

Rail~Volution 2019 in Vancouver, BC, marked the 25th anniversary of the Rail~Volution transit and community development conference – 25 years and counting! During the conference, we sat down with two of the people involved from the get-go: Steve Dotterrer and GB Arrington. In 1995, Steve was head of transportation planning for the City of Portland and GB worked at TriMet, the transit agency in Portland.

The second plenary at Rail~Volution 2019 in Vancouver, BC, featured a strong panel of speakers, led by Frances Bula, an urban affairs contributor to The Globe and Mail with decades of experience covering development and transit expansion. “Vancouver has done a lot of good things” in terms of developing density along transit, she said. But, “what has come with transit has not necessarily been the best housing for low income communities.”

On this episode of the Rail~Volution podcast, we’re joined by Phil Washington, CEO of LA Metro, the transportation agency for one of the country’s largest, most populous counties. The agency’s scope is big. It serves as transportation planner and coordinator, designer, builder and operator.

In this (first!) episode of the Rail~Volution Podcast, we hear from Jonathan Sage Martinson, former director of the Central Corridor Funders Collaborative, about the community’s efforts to plan for a $1 billion infrastructure project running through some of the lowest income neighborhoods of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota. The project in focus, the Green Line light rail, opened in 2014. Also in the podcast: cultural corridors, including Little Mekong, Little Africa, and the Rondo neighborhood. And, the change in FTA rules that started in a Starbucks line at Rail~Volution.

The risk that transit and other infrastructure projects will result in displacement — pushing out rather than improving the lives of existing (and often historic) members of a community — has been a topic of increasing focus across the country. Transit agencies, local governments and community stakeholders increasingly recognize that they must proactively combat displacement as part of their work.

The Avondale Apartments, a LEED Gold-certified building with beautiful views, opened in Denver in 2014, one year after light rail trains began running on the new West Line connecting Denver, Lakewood, and Golden, Colorado. Well-connected to transit, this affordable housing development also is near schools and colleges and right next to a new Denver Public Library building.