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With flights still down more than a third despite a $1.3 billion makeover unveiled last summer, San Jose's airport wants to send a new message to airline executives: Friend me. Officials at Mineta San Jose International want the City Council to approve spending $1 million over four years on two marketing firms to pitch airlines on adding more San Jose flights. Among the proposed strategies is harnessing social media sites such as Facebook....But Mayor Chuck Reed is skeptical of the approach...Reed, however, wants to ensure that the city doesn't waste time and money on "roundabout stuff." He says there are fewer than 100 people in the industry who decide where the planes go, and he wants San Jose on their radar in a big way.....San Jose is in a quandary with Mineta San Jose International Airport. As the city grew in the 1990s dot-com era to become the self-proclaimed Capital of Silicon Valley, its airport remained a retro-relic where passengers exited jets on rolling stairways like in those black-and-white photos of the Beatles on their first U.S. concert tour.

 At Volvo’s Innovations Toward Zero conference last week, Volvo Special Vehicles chief Lennart Stegland spoke of drivers’ preoccupation with the notion that “something might happen,” forcing them to drive 400 miles at a time. “But if you look at your normal life, you are pretty predictable,” he said....For 90 percent of drivers, Volvo’s Stegland says that just under 50 miles is a predictable range for dropping the kids off at school, grabbing a coffee, heading to work and stopping to get groceries on the way home. 

Analysts are pessimistic about the U.S. transportation system making progress. There isn’t enough money to maintain what the country has right now, much less to get to quality levels that are giving other nations a competitive advantage....Today U.S. infrastructure investments amount to 2.4% of the nation’s GDP, versus 5% in Europe and 9% in China, according to a data from the World Economic Forum...“Our existing transportation network is deteriorating. This is happening now. It is happening today,” said Martin Wachs, an urban and regional planning researcher with the Rand Corp. think tank..

Throughout the Bay Area, few outside of the transit industry and the 320 BART riders who were handed free $20 tickets Thursday seemed to have any idea Dump the Pump fever was filling the air....Hang around a bus person for a while, and you'll learn a bit about buses. And sure enough, the dozen or so reporters and community members who toured the SamTrans yard picked up these tidbits surrounding the 320 behemoths that cart 47,500 riders along the byways from San Francisco to Palo Alto every day...The American Public Transportation Association, the main agency promoting Dump the Pump nationally, says a two-person household can save about $10,000 a year by downsizing to one car.