|
The Capital District Transportation Authority (CDTA) Board Chairman, David M. Stackrow has been elected as Vice-Chair of the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) Board of Directors. APTA is the national trade association for bus, rail, paratransit and other organizations that move people throughout North America. The association also includes companies that build and supply the necessary components to help member organizations operate safely and efficiently. In total, there are more than 1500 members of APTA.
“It’s an honor to take on this role, and represent CDTA, the Capital Region and New York State at the national level,” said David M. Stackrow, CDTA Board Chairman “We have done great things at CDTA to improve and advance mobility in our region. I’m excited to continue my role as CDTA Board Chairman, and to take on this new responsibility that will allow me a voice for public transportation systems and the work we are doing across this country.”
New York City’s subway system handles about 5.7 million riders every weekday, more than 10 times the combined daily ridership of all other public transportation systems in the rest of New York state.
Even though their ridership is nowhere near the Big Apple’s, upstate New York’s largest public transit face many of the same challenges their big-city counterparts at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority deal with on a regular basis, including aging infrastructure and increased demand for service.
But the upstaters face an added hurdle: getting more state funding at a time when the downstate transit woes get all the attention.
“It’s always a big challenge for us to get on the playing field with the MTA being so big,” said Thomas George, director of public transit for the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, which operates two airports, bus service and a commuter rail line for the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area.
 Last week, NYPTA President Bill Carpenter, CEO of RTS testified at the Joint Hearing of the Senate Standing Committee on Finance & Assembly Standing Committee on Ways and Means concerning the SFY 2018-19 Executive Budget Proposal Relating to Transportation in Albany.
He called for legislators to reimagine transit - to provide the system and services necessary to respond to changing travel needs and support the economy. NYPTA recommends development of a three-year plan to increase state investment in transit service for upstate and downstate non-MTA transit, with adequate funding levels to transform service and accelerate improvements.
President Donald Trump's massive infrastructure package just hit a major roadblock.
Prominent Republican lawmakers are already coming out against raising the federal gas tax to pay for the president's promised $1 trillion investment in infrastructure. Speaking on Saturday night at a private donor retreat hosted by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn opposed the idea.
Reinventing Urban Transportation and Mobility (RITMO) aims to revolutionize public transit through an online app that turns transportation into an on-demand service. The app, which serves travelers on the University of Michigan’s North Campus, first launched this month on January 16. While no timeline is set in place yet, the developers hope to eventually expand the service to the University as a whole.
RITMO, partnering with the Ford School of Public Policy, will allow students, faculty and staff to use on-demand shuttle transportation linked with the University bus system. Riders only need to book one ticket to their destination and wait up to five minutes for their shuttle to arrive.
Lyft today announced it’s expanding its Concierge program – the service that allows organizations to schedule rides for other people – to more business customers. First announced in 2016, the service was originally designed to help patients get to medical appointments, particularly in areas where they may not have a car of their own, like New York, where more than half of households are car-free.
The 2016 partnership between Lyft and the National MedTrans Network aimed to change that by offering seniors in NYC a way to get rides to their non-emergency medical appointments by way of the then new third-party web application, Concierge. Lyft’s partners use Concierge to request rides on behalf of those who don’t have smartphones or, otherwise, aren’t able to book rides for themselves for other reasons.
|
