Month: May 2020

Fresno COGS asking for feedback on 2020 Fresno County Regional Trails Plan

The Fresno Council of Governments and Fresno County are developing the 2020 Fresno County Regional Trails Plan, which will create recommendations for the ongoing development of new trail connections that create a safe, comfortable, and connected network for walking/hiking, off-road biking and horseback riding.

Note: Don’t confuse this with the Trail Network Expansion Feasibility Plan, which is a CITY of Fresno plan. This new plan is for the entire county and will focus on unpaved recreational trails and paved shared-use paths in Fresno County, including county areas within Fresno.

There’s two ways for you to comment, a survey and a map. They both can be found on this page. You do the simple survey first, and then get shown a map of existing trails. You can then click on segments and make comments. For example, you can tell them that the Van Ness trail is not very useful. Once you’re done commenting on existing trails, you can draw your own preferred future trails. Click to read more!

Alaska Airlines adding flights to LAX from Fresno

Just a quick post to share some news from Fresno2Minneapolis on Twitter. Starting in September, Alaska Airlines will begin service twice a day between Fresno and Los Angeles! The flight will be on an Embraer RJ-175, operated by Skywest.

If all goes as planned, they would join American Airlines and United on this route. Note that due to COVID-19, those flights are currently not operating. However, if they come back as before, there would be 10 daily flights between the two cities.

The flight schedule, (assuming no more Coronavirus changes) from Fresno to LAX would be as follows:

6:00 AA
6:20 UA
7:30 Alaska
8:01 UA
11:55 AA
13:55 UA
14:00 Alaska
16:10 AA
17:57 UA
19:15 AA Click to read more!

COVID-19 Impacts to Fresno Area Transportation as of May 17, 2020

I can’t believe it’s been over a month since my last roundup of how COVID-19 (coronavirus) has affected transportation providers in Fresno and the surrounding areas. Time is really moving in strange ways these days. At this point, it’s clear we’ve reached the bottom in terms of service cuts, short of an airline declaring bankruptcy (cough, AA, cough). How quickly service is restored is an open question. Some transit agencies have already said they don’t expect to return to full service until the end of the year. Agencies that rely heavily on rush-hour commuters are going to be the most affected, as some jobs (such as Twitter) may remain remote forever. It will be interesting to see if those agencies restore more off-peak service than peak-service, which would create a flatter utilization of their fleet, and that may end up being a good thing in the long run. Click to read more!

On the passing of former Fresno Bee reporter George Hostetter

Last Thursday, the news came that former Fresno Bee reporter George Hostetter died of prostate cancer at age 70.

Fresno Bee

If you read this blog, you’re most likely familiar with his work, particularly his “city beat” reporting of downtown Fresno news. For years, when Mr. Hostetter needed to go to City Hall, he would get there by taking a long walk around downtown from the Bee offices on E street. It doesn’t matter what the weather was, he would walk, making notes about any development (or lack of development) along the way. He would also talk to all sorts of people to get their perspective. Click to read more!