Transportation Daily News August 11

Transit and infrastructure:

 

Fuel costs changing the way school buses run in districts -- Fremont may double its bus fees, to $700 a kid. In Gilroy, elementary students must now live a mile away from school before they can board a school bus. And transportation directors everywhere are working the phones to find the best price on diesel fuel. SJ Mercury 8/11/08

 

*Suit filed over state high-speed rail project -- A coalition of transportation and planning groups and two Peninsula cities filed suit Friday, seeking to invalidate the environmental study - and the choice of the Pacheco Pass alignment - for the state's high-speed rail project. The suit, filed in Sacramento County Superior Court, contends that the California High Speed Rail Authority intentionally slanted a legally required study on the impact of building the fast rail line to steer the authority's board into selecting a route through the Pacheco Pass in Santa Clara County over one through the Altamont Pass in Alameda County. SF Chronicle 8/9/08

 

*Santa Clara voters to consider BART extension -- Santa Clara County voters will be asked in November to raise the sales tax to help fund the long-envisioned plan to extend BART to the Silicon Valley. The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority governing board voted Thursday to place a measure on the Nov. 4 ballot to raise the sales tax in the county by one-eighth of a cent. The tax is now 8.25 percent.  SF Chronicle 8/9/08

 

BART has commuters all a-Twitter -- Since Aug. 1, Bay Area Rapid Transit riders have been providing dispatches from the trenches to BART officials and other passengers through twitter.com. The free microblogging and social-networking site, developed by San Francisco start-up Obvious and launched two years ago, allows users to exchange real-time updates of what they’re doing with their friends — so long as the descriptions are under 140 characters. Examiner 8/11/08

 

Coast Guard:

 

*Mexico smugglers ply sea route to California -- Mexican smugglers are cramming illegal immigrants and drugs into boats and ferrying them to California by sea to try to beat the tightened security on the U.S. land border, authorities say. U.S. Coast Guard and police officers have nabbed 24 vessels packed with contraband in Pacific coastal waters off southern California since October 1 2007, more than twice the number stopped during the same period of the previous year. Reuters 8/11/08

 

Air travel:

 

*Sacramento Airport flight reductions could hurt local businesses -- The reduction in flights at Sacramento International Airport is more than an inconvenience to vacationers. It could be harming the area's business climate. While tourists lament the loss of nonstop flights to locales like Maui and Puerto Vallarta, business leaders are anxious about the cancellation of Sacramento's only nonstop service to bread-and-butter destinations such as Charlotte, N.C., one of America's banking centers. Sacramento's diminishing air service, they say, could make it harder to do business here and recruit corporations. Sacramento Bee 8/9/08