The intercity bus sector in the United States (US) has experienced a dramatic recovery in recent years due to the expansion of new curbside operators—express operators linking major cities that do not use traditional stations. Curbside operators such as BoltBus, DC2NY Bus, and Megabus are infusing new life into this once-struggling sector, particularly in the Midwest and Northeast. This study explores two aspects of the changing role of the intercity bus. First, it evaluates the extent to which intercity bus service diminished after 1960 and its subsequent recovery starting in 2006. Drawing on newly collected data from 11,400 arrivals and departures from a representative sample of US cities between 1960 and 2010, it shows that US cities lost more than three quarters of their intercity bus services before the recovery began. Secondly, it shows how recent growth of curbside-bus operators is reducing fuel consumption by about 11 million gallons annually and reducing carbon emissions by an estimated 242 million pounds. This is the equivalent benefit of removing 23,114 vehicles from the road or having 66,041 people convert from conventional to hybrid cars. These findings suggest that the sector's recovery has significant and perhaps underappreciated environmental benefits. It also suggests that further expansion by the sector, nurtured by public policy, could be an effective strategy to promote more energy-efficient intercity travel.

This article describes a typology for formal governance structures of public transit in the United States to support inquiry into how organizational structures influence policy making processes, organizational capacity and policy outcomes. Scholarship of public transit has largely explored outcome-based research while paying less attention to how decisions are made. Despite some transport scholarship that shows how institutional characteristics influence financing, power arrangements and public discourse, there has been little recent analysis of governance within public transit systems beyond the regional role of Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). Using data from multiple sources, we assembled a database of governance structure of transit systems in the largest 40 cities in the United States. We show that the structure of transit decision making has substantial variance across and within cities, and is far from limited to MPOs. The variety of governance models and growth of local and sub-local models suggest that local context is critical for better understanding transit priorities and decision-making processes.

Zoning relief, the process of exempting individual properties from land-use regulations, is a widespread yet underexplored planning practice. A mixed-methods analysis of applications to the Board of Standards and Appeals in New York City between 1998 and 2017 examines three clusters of zoning relief. The results suggest a strong relationship between relief and neighborhood socio-political capital and underscore relief as a powerful form of ad hoc planning. Zoning relief practices in New York City deepen inequalities but also facilitate planning goals such as disaster recovery and allowing families to grow in place. Zoning relief has long-lasting consequences on urban development and deserves increased attention from planning scholars.

Recent efforts to promote land value capture as a solution to the fiscal crisis of local governments have gained traction, increasing the use of value capture tools across a variety of contexts. Th...

This paper provides a qualitative examination of the implementation of a value capture–funded streetcar investment in Kansas City, MO. Using semi-structured interviews, I show that the local benefits of value capture financing go beyond revenue-raising. Local officials used value capture to limit the public approval process to residents who supported enhanced transit and to redefine the metrics of a successful transport investment in terms of land development impacts. This strategic, and unexpected, use of value capture underwrites property-led economic development that uses infrastructure investments to signal public-sector priorities, in terms of both geography and populations.