Headline News

Around the world, cycle-hire operators are rolling out bicycles that were tucked away for the cold and rainy months. Hundreds of new bikes and docking stations will join existing fleets, while many more cities, from Kailua to Tel Aviv to the Big Apple are joining the bike-sharing wave for the first time....In Chinese cities, where once the bike was king, the recent rise of bike sharing fits into the country’s larger trend of growing demand for mobility, said Susan Shaheen of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California Berkeley. In fact, the Public Bicycle System in one of China’s wealthiest cities, Hangzhou, has surpassed Paris’ Velib as the world’s largest bike-share program, with 60,600 low-cost, low-tech bikes and more than 2,400 stations spaced out about every 200 meters, Shaheen said.

Daily traffic in L.A. may be worst in the nation, but you ain't seen nothing yet. Suddenly, just a month-and-a-half before the largest closure of the 405 since it became the Westside's clogged lifeline -- carrying about 281,000 cars per day -- L.A. transportation officials have decided to come out and warn the universe of this impending doom. Not in time, unfortunately, to save thousands of pre-booked vacations from ruin. 

 Thanks to some crafty budgeting work, Caltrain looks set to receive $5 million in federal funds — enough to completely plug an operating deficit that once stood at $30 million....The money being directed from the MTC is coming from the federal government, and was originally intended to pay for Caltrain’s rail-replacement program. However, by redefining the federal funds — normally only eligible for long-term capital projects — for preventative maintenance uses, the MTC can technically allocate the $5 million for Caltrain’s operating budget, thus securing the final portion of the agency’s once-daunting $30 million shortfall.

In April, Gov. Jerry Brown made headlines by signing into law an ambitious mandate that requires California to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources like sunlight and wind by 2020....But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land. Even a cursory look at these costs exposes the deep contradictions in the renewable energy movement....While there’s plenty of land in the Mojave, projects as big as Ivanpah raise environmental concerns. In April, the federal Bureau of Land Management ordered a halt to construction on part of the facility out of concern for the desert tortoise, which is protected under the Endangered Species Act.