13 transit projects expected to open in the US this year

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Dive Temporary:

• Greater than 160 miles of new rail, bus and other fixed-guideway transit lines opened within the U.S. in 2025, and about 94 miles extra are projected to be accomplished this 12 months, in accordance with knowledge from The Transport Politic. 
• Cities are selecting inexpensive and extra versatile bus fast transit and related arterial fast transit over mild rail tasks, mentioned Yonah Freemark, a researcher on the City Institute and creator of The Transport Politic. BRT traces usually run on devoted site visitors lanes, whereas arterial fast transit methods use present site visitors lanes, typically with bus sign precedence.
• “Over the previous decade, plenty of cities have been reorienting their funding approaches,” Freemark mentioned in an interview. “Gentle rail is simply very costly for these cities, they usually’re not discovering the mechanism to scale back that.”

Dive Perception:

In whole, about 150 miles of recent fixed-guideway transit traces are anticipated to open this 12 months throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, in comparison with over 240 miles in 2016. 

These are a few of the main tasks anticipated to open within the U.S. in 2026:

• Atlanta will launch a 3.1-mile BRT line from downtown Atlanta to the Atlanta BeltLine.
• Baton Rouge, Louisiana, plans to finish a 9.3-mile arterial fast transit line to attach the north and south sides of the town to its downtown.
• Kansas Metropolis will lengthen its streetcar line 0.7 miles to Berkeley Riverfront Park, whereas Orange County, California, expects to open its 4-mile streetcar line connecting the cities of Santa Ana and Backyard Grove.
• Seattle’s 7.5-mile mild rail extension will join two present mild rail traces throughout Lake Washington.  

Canadian cities Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto are constructing mild rail tasks. “Canada is performing somewhat bit extra like the remainder of the world,” Freemark mentioned. “Their main cities are constructing plenty of rail traces and are doing so on a reasonably fast tempo, and that’s not true within the U.S.”