The pandemic has halted progress for public transit systems nationwide, but Amtrak’s Director of Government Affairs for the Midwest discusses why the region was struggling with passenger rail long before COVID-19 and how we might move forward.

Read Part I, "Public Health, Transit and Investment," here. COVID-19 has decimated public transportation in cities nationwide; the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority (TARTA) was already struggling when COVID-19...

From airlines to subways, mass transit is particularly ill-suited to the social distancing practices that help stem COVID-19’s spread, so it doesn’t come as a shock that the transportation sector has struggled to navigate the pandemic. And for transit systems nationwide, it’s a bitter pill to swallow: where public transportation was most successful, it now seems most threatening—and threatened.

Click below to begin. The early 20th century was a transformative period for Toledo, the Great Lakes region and the US. In the final decades of the 19th century, Toledo...