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 [...]
“Hi… excuse me… can you help me find this address?“An oft-used phrase for visitors in a foreign city. A few months ago I met up with Andy Cutler from Providence, RI, who was in Denmark to explore opportunities for Providence and Copenhagen to hook up on a creative and business level. He did a cool [...]
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 [...]
The newfound popularity of bicycling and the rapid expansion of bicycle lanes doesn’t excite everyone—at least not right away. “Bike lanes are coming to my neighborhood, and now I will no longer be able to afford living there,” is a common reaction in low-income Portland neighborhoods says Olivia Quiroz, Educator for the Multnomah County Health [...]
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 [...]
Today we learned that U of T researcher Jessica Dennis found helmet laws do nothing to reduce rates of hospitalization for head injury. We can add this to the other studies that have successfully questioned the usefulness of helmet legislation. There has been a lot of confusion between statistics that show that helmets reduce head [...]
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 [...]
Thanks to everyone who’s given to Streetsblog and Streetfilms so far in our spring pledge drive — we’re nearly a quarter of the way to our fundraising goal of $40,000. I can’t emphasize enough how crucial it is for readers to chip in and help us reach our targets. Your contributions keep us going so [...]
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’ve been focusing on the Troost corridor for quite a while now, and one of the biggest stopping points for us in exploring the area and imagining “what could be” has always come back to a critical set of questions: Who would actually invest in development in the area? Can one project act as the [...]
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 [...]
Hubway had a good year last year, with half a million trips before shutting down for the winter. They reopened the service April 2, and as of May 7th had already logged 85,000 trips. If they keep up this pace the system should hit 1 million plus trips this year. See the email they sent [...]
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. [...]
Travis Allan and Cherise Burda over at the Pembina Insitute, a Toronto-based energy think tank, have an interesting post up on the prospects of using real estate development charges as a funding mechanism for transit. Development charges are fees developers pay to municipalities meant to offset the capital costs of extending or improving services like [...]
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 [...]
