Transit Tangents

Denver’s transit network has a problem that most riders can name instantly: transfers. When a normal trip demands two transfers and long waits, RTD stops feeling like a real option for everyday life and starts feeling like something you tolerate. From Union Station, we sit down with June Churchill, Denver City Council candidate for District 10, and James Flatham, co-founder of Greater Denver Trans...

Austin’s public transit is changing fast, and some of those changes are going to sting before they help. We break down the newest CapMetro updates across the Red Line, MetroRapid, and system-wide fare increases, with an eye toward what’s driving the decisions and what riders can realistically expect in 2026 through 2029. If you ride CapMetro, we want your take. Subscribe, share this with an Austin...

A 30-mile Kansas City monorail that runs from KCI to downtown, then stretches toward the Plaza and the Kansas City Zoo sounds like something out of a retro-future postcard. But once you look past the “wow” factor, the real questions show up fast: Where’s the map, what does it actually cost to build, and is this the best way to spend limited transit dollars in a city that already has momentum with...

Brightline finally filed for bankruptcy and the internet rushed to declare private rail dead. We slow it down and unpack what’s actually happening: why trains can keep running through a restructuring, how a tangled ownership setup changes the story, and what $5.5B in debt teaches us about building passenger rail with long timelines and interest ticking from day one. We also go straight at the wors...

SEPTA just put real numbers and real ideas on the table, and it changes the conversation about Philadelphia public transportation overnight. We’re joined by Jay Arzu, executive director of the Roosevelt Boulevard Subway movement, to translate the SEPTA Accelerate Plan into what it actually means for riders: faster trips, simple service, and a system that works for more people, more hours of the da...

Colorado’s Front Range is growing fast, and I-25 is already paying the price. When the only real north-south artery turns into bumper-to-bumper gridlock at 9 a.m., “just add lanes” stops sounding like a plan and starts sounding like a loop. That’s why we sit down with James Flattum, Director of Outreach for the Coloradans for COCO campaign, to talk about Colorado Connector and the November ballot...

A shiny new rail proposal just dropped for the Austin to San Antonio corridor and the details are going to spark arguments. The headline sounds great: “higher speed” passenger rail along SH 130 with top speeds around 125 mph and a trip time near an hour. But the route starts at Austin’s airport, ends near the Alamodome, and completely skips two of the biggest demand generators between the metros:...

A two-hour train ride from Chicago to St. Louis should sound normal. In the United States, it still sounds like science fiction, yet Illinois is quietly laying the groundwork for exactly that: a 220 mph high-speed rail corridor that could turn a 4 hour 45 minute Amtrak trip and a 5.5 hour drive into a fast, frequent rail connection between two major Midwest metros. We dig into why Illinois is a un...

From a U.S. perspective, a city about the size of Tucson shouldn’t be able to pull off a dream transit system, but Dresden does. We set out to explore all public transit available in Dresden, starting at Dresden Hauptbahnhof and hopping straight into a tram network that’s frequent, citywide, and refreshingly simple. No “signature station” theatrics, no mystery routes, just service that shows up of...

Canada has talked about high-speed rail for half a century, and we might finally be watching the moment it turns into steel in the ground. Alto, a new federally owned Crown company, is proposing a 1,000 km high-speed rail line from Toronto to Quebec City with fully grade-separated, electrified tracks and top speeds up to 300 km/h. That’s not “slightly faster rail” that’s the real global standard,...

Berlin is one of those cities where you can feel history in the street layout and then confirm it by looking at the transit map. We start at Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the modern central station that finally brings together rail lines that were once split by politics, operators, and the literal division of East and West. From there, we ride our way across the city to answer a simple question with big im...

$1.2 billion doesn’t just buy track and trains. It buys time back in your day, the kind you lose when your “commuter rail” only shows up every 30 to 60 minutes and a single delay wrecks every connection. We dig into the newly awarded federal Capital Investment Grant for Utah’s FrontRunner and why it’s one of the biggest pieces of positive news for public transit in the U.S. in a long while. We sta...

People keep telling us self-driving cars are going to make public transit irrelevant. So we pressure-test that claim using the stuff that actually decides whether a city works: speed between cities, traffic and reliability, passenger capacity, comfort, safety, and what happens when 20,000 people all need to get home at the same time. We also bring real-world perspective from riding the tech oursel...

New York dominates rail conversations in the country, yet the most realistic statewide upgrade might be hiding in plain sight. We’re talking about the Empire Corridor and a plan that could make intercity passenger rail in upstate New York faster, more frequent, and far more reliable without needing a full greenfield high-speed rail build. We start with what’s already running: Amtrak’s Empire Servi...

Passenger rail in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama doesn’t get the spotlight often, but the story behind Amtrak’s new Mardi Gras service proves how much demand has been waiting on the sidelines. We sit down with Knox Ross, chairman of the Southern Rail Commission, to unpack how a three-state compact built the coalition, the funding path, and the political momentum needed to bring New Orleans to...

New York City has the most famous subway in the United States, yet the bus is the workhorse that moves millions of people every single day. That’s why we sat down with Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn to unpack NYC’s newly announced Bus Action Plan and the specific, measurable goal at the center of it: make buses 20% faster without leaving rider comfort, safety, or accessibility behind. We g...

Brightline has been held up as proof that private passenger rail can work in the United States and right now it’s also a warning sign. We went to Florida to ride the Miami to Orlando train for ourselves, then pulled the thread on the business model behind the glossy stations and “high speed-ish” branding. What we found is a system with real momentum as well as a very real financial clock ticking i...

Miami traffic isn’t just annoying; it’s expensive, unsafe, and deeply political. We’re joined by Cathy Dos Santos from Transit Alliance Miami, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit advocating for a Miami built for people, not cars. We talk about what it really costs to own a car in Miami, why that burden lands hardest on service workers and families, and how better public transportation can unlock both freedom of...

Miami’s transit network can feel like a highlight reel one minute and a facepalm the next. We start downtown at Government Center, hop the MetroMover, and then ride Metrorail south on the Green Line, where the elevated guideway, solid headways, and impressively clean cars immediately raise the bar. From there we test a local favorite, the Coral Gables Trolley, a free, frequent route that looks lik...

Austin’s Project Connect is getting dragged in the headlines as “off the rails” and “one of the most expensive light rail projects in the country,” so we slow down and fact-check the story with the full timeline. We walk through what Austin voters actually approved in 2020 under Proposition A, why that plan was always based on early design assumptions, and what the new Austin Light Rail Phase One...

Orlando isn’t short on pavement, but it is short on fast, reliable public transportation and the cost shows up everywhere: rent, commute times, missed opportunities, and that feeling that the city is always one traffic jam away from chaos. From downtown Orlando, we sit down with Giancarlo and Enmanuel from Sunrise Movement Orlando to talk about the Star Plan, their push to make rapid transit a rea...

A 140 mph bus on California freeways sounds like a joke you would see in your news feed, until you realize Caltrans is seriously studying it. We dig into the “bullet bus” concept and what it would actually require to run intercity service at "aircraft-level speeds" on rubber tires, including dedicated freeway lanes, banked curves, ultra-durable pavement, and technology that likely leans...

What happens when you try to live in the real Orlando without a car? We spend a full day riding Lynx buses from the airport to downtown, up to Winter Park, back through the Florida Mall Superstop, and finally to Disney Springs, testing what public transit in Orlando actually feels like on the ground. We talk honestly about the big constraint hanging over everything: half-hour bus frequencies on ma...

A beach trip shouldn’t require a car, so we put St. Petersburg’s Sunrunner Bus Rapid Transit to the test the only way that counts: we rode it, timed it, transferred on it, and paid attention to the small details that make people trust a transit line. Starting in downtown Tampa, we take the 100 bus to St. Pete and talk about how regional connections, routing, and frequency shape whether public tran...

Spirit Airlines didn’t just sell cheap tickets, it reshaped how Americans think about flying. Now it’s shut down, and we’re asking the uncomfortable question: if the biggest ultra-low-cost carrier disappears, do all of us end up paying more even if we never flew Spirit once? We unpack what Spirit’s May 2, 2026, closure signals for airfare prices, route competition, and the future of budget travel...