Today is the 150th anniversary of the pounding of the gold spike that represented completion of the first transcontinental railroad.

The Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey revealed that, for the first time, the median income of transit commuters has risen above the median income of all American workers.

The apparent death of California high-speed rail has led to a spate of stories asking, “What went wrong?”

Nationwide transit ridership has declined steadily since 2014, with some of the largest urban areas, including Atlanta, Miami, and Los Angeles, losing more than 20 percent of their transit riders in the last few years.

The reality is that Europe’s trains are enjoyed by tourists, but they don’t work that much better for Europeans than the U.S. system works for Americans.

In 1985, Reason Foundation co-founder and then-president Robert Poole heard about a variable road pricing experiment in Hong Kong. In 1986, he learned that France and other European countries were offering private concessions to build toll roads. In 1987, he interviewed officials of Amtech, which had just invented electronic transponders that could be used for road tolling.

Nationwide transit ridership in May 2018 was 3.3 percent less than in the same month of 2017.

The American Public Transportation Association (APTA) has just published a paper on the economic cost of failing to modernize transit, referring to the roughly $100 billion maintenance backlog built up by U.S. transit agencies, mostly for rail transit.

Public transit cost federal, state and local taxpayers more than $50 billion in 2016 — nearly $5 in subsidies every time someone boarded a transit vehicle.

Thanks to new services such as Uber and Lyft, the nation’s transit industry is fading away, leading some people to declare an “emergency.”