Memphis is making waves today with the announcement that the city will install 15 miles of protected bike lanes. Led by Mayor A.C. Wharton, a few years ago Memphis embarked on an ambitious campaign to add 55 miles of bike infrastructure. Then the city inspired envy when last year it was one of six selected by the [...]
Despite the ruinous housing crisis just a few years ago, the federal government still keeps the suburban sprawl machine humming. About 85 percent of federal subsidies for housing flow to single family homes, according to a recent report from Smart Growth America, though only about 65 percent of Americans are homeowners and the majority of [...]
On the face of things, it’s hard to understand why would anyone oppose bicycling. It’s cheap, it’s healthy, it’s good for the environment. Somehow, though, cycling has become politicized, and it’s the party of personal responsibility, austerity, and small government that tends to carry the anti-bicycling banner. That’s odd, writes Bill Lindeke at Network blog [...]
On the face of things, it’s hard to understand why would anyone oppose bicycling. It’s cheap, it’s healthy, it’s good for the environment. Somehow, though, cycling has become politicized, and it’s the party of personal responsibility, austerity, and small government that tends to carry the anti-bicycling banner. That’s odd, writes Bill Lindeke at Network blog [...]
Investigators are still poring over Friday’s train derailment and collision in Connecticut. Early reports point to damaged track as the cause of the crash that injured 70 people. Meanwhile, Amtrak has said that the route connecting New York and Boston will be closed for several days while the investigation continues, and Metro-North says commuter rail service [...]
It’s bike to work day, America! Hope you had a lovely commute today. This will probably come as no surprise, but if you biked to work this morning and you live in a city that’s making an effort to improve conditions for cycling, odds are you had a lot more company on the streets than [...]
If it seems like we’ve been singling out Governor Scott Walker and Wisconsin DOT a lot lately, that’s because WisDOT is such an excellent example of what a highly dysfunctional state transportation agency looks like. The latest foolishness: a billion-dollar proposal to double-deck part of a Milwaukee freeway. Milwaukee is a city that lost 0.4 percent of [...]
In the movement to create a multi-modal transportation system, states tend to be the toughest nut to crack. More aligned with rural interests, many state leaders seem to get a perverse thrill out of scuttling their major cities’ transit plans. But there is some progress as well, even in political environments that might seem especially hostile [...]
There’s a line of reasoning advanced by the media, angry motorists and, sometimes, cyclists, that goes something like: Since some cyclists don’t follow the rules, cyclists don’t deserve respect. A version of this axiom was repeated yesterday by Sarah Goodyear at Atlantic Cities, in an article titled “Cyclists Aren’t ‘Special,’ and They Shouldn’t Play by Their [...]
We reported last week that Republican state legislators in Wisconsin were doing their damnedest to kill the Milwaukee streetcar — though a civil rights ruling from the 1990s specifically bars them from doing so. Why are state lawmakers so intent on smothering a project decades in the making? The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is wondering as [...]
So many times, “pedestrian stings” by law enforcement agencies end up just handing out a lot of tickets for jaywalking. But police in Montgomery County, Maryland, recently did pedestrian safety enforcement the right way: rather than target the victims of traffic violence, they targeted the only party capable of inflicting injury and death — drivers. [...]
Building a streetcar in a Midwestern city without rail transit is political bloodsport. As Cincinnati can testify, something about the threat of adding rail transit to a city that doesn’t have it really agitates some elements of the Midwestern right wing establishment. In Wisconsin, Republican state lawmakers already did their best to kill the Milwaukee [...]
For decades, cyclists bickered amongst themselves about the efficacy and safety of bike infrastructure. With the proliferation of protected bike lanes in recent years, however, everyone can see that predictions about bike lanes making streets more dangerous for cycling simply didn’t come to pass. Network blogger Elly Blue at Taking the Lane says the debate [...]
Alon Levy at Pedestrian Observations ran a thought-provoking post today about the level of democratic involvement that goes into major American transportation projects. The problem in the United States, he writes, is that most big transportation spending decisions are made by a handful of powerful interests who believe that keeping the public in the dark is to their [...]
As New York readers know, bike-share stations are hitting the streets after the program encountered a few snags last year. When members start taking the first rides on Citi Bike later this month, it will be the nation’s largest bike-share system, launching with 6,000 bikes. Right now the sight of those new bike stations is [...]
