Angie Schmitt
Recent Posts
Get Real — Colorful Crosswalks Aren’t Endangering Pedestrians
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Volunteers in the Tower Grove neighborhood of St. Louis painting a crosswalk. The city says this creates unsafe conditions. Photo: RallySTL.org
In the summer of 2014, residents of Tower Grove in St. Louis painted crosswalks with patterns like a fleur-de-lis to add some neighborhood character. Now city officials say the crosswalks should fade away, citing safety concerns.
The order comes from new bike [...]
5 Things States Can Do to Bring Transportation Policy Out of the Stone Age
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A growing number of states are taking steps to ensure projects are selected on merit rather than politics. Image: Transportation for America
On its page commemorating the 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower signing the Federal Aid Highway Act, the Federal Highway Administration offers a “Then and Now” chart showing how much America has changed since 1956. It’s a little corny, [...]
Social Engineering! Cities That Build More Parking Get More Traffic
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Cities like Hartford that added a lot of parking over the last few decades saw driving rates increase more than in cities where parking volumes stayed flatter. Graph: McCahill/TRB
Build parking spaces and they will come — in cars. New research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board finds a direct, causal [...]
2-Minute Video: Why Parking Minimums Are the Worst
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“Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars,” Donald Shoup wrote in his celebrated investigation of parking economics, The High Cost of Free Parking. The above video, from the city of Ottawa, does a good job explaining exactly why that is and the problems it causes.
Ottawa commissioned the animation to explain why its 1960s-era parking regulations [...]
Two Very Different Ways Bike-Share Benefits Transit
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Bike-share’s effect on how people use transit depends on the context. Image: Access Magazine
A new survey [PDF] by researchers at UC Berkeley and published in Access Magazine sheds light on how bike-share systems interact with transit.
Researchers Susan Shaheen and Elliot Martin surveyed more than 10,000 bike-share riders in Montreal, Toronto, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Washington, DC. Like previous surveys have shown, Shaheen and [...]
The Best and Worst of the New 5-Year Transportation Bill
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The trucking industry was a big winner in the transportation bill negotiations. Photo: Wikipedia
Smart people are wading through the 1,300-page transportation bill that came out of conference committee earlier this week, and we’re starting to get a clearer sense of how it will change federal transportation policy for the next five years.
The House voted to pass the [...]
5-Year, $300 Billion “FAST Act” Will Extend Transpo Policy Status Quo to 2020
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They’ve done it. Representatives from the House and Senate have emerged from conference committee with a five-year transportation bill, which is expected to be quickly approved and become first “long-term” bill in more than a decade.
Streetsblog was unable to confirm that Congress will be using this as the cover for its new transportation bill.
The discouragingly-named “FAST Act” [...]
Advice for State DOTs Looking for More Money: Spend Smarter
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The Oregon Department of Transportation is in a tough spot after it tried to justify highway expansion projects by saying they would cut greenhouse gas emissions. ODOT’s bogus claims helped sink a $350 million transportation funding package in the state legislature, and even some of the state’s Republican lawmakers are calling for agency director Matt Garrett’s head. What’s a beleaguered [...]
Tell FHWA You Want Safer Designs for City Streets
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Earlier this fall, the Federal Highway Administration proposed a major policy change: Instead of requiring roads that receive federal funding to be designed like highways, the agency would change its standards to allow greater flexibility. The implications for urban streets were huge — with less red tape, cities would have a much easier time implementing safer designs for walking [...]
Study: Sprawling Areas Require 3 Times as Much Pavement Per Person
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How much pavement area is required to service the population of an area is pretty closely related to population density, a Smart Growth America study found.
One of the big downsides to sprawl is the public cost of maintaining infrastructure that is extended over wide areas. A new study of New Jersey by Smart Growth America [PDF] attempts [...]
Just How Bad Is the Final House Transportation Bill?
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Nobody was expecting the GOP-controlled House of Representatives to put together a transportation bill that did much for streets and transit in American cities.
The House passed a six-year transportation bill this morning. Yay? Image: Transportation Dems
And they were right — there’s nothing to get excited about in the bill. But neither is it the total disaster for walking, biking, and transit [...]
AAA: Distracted Driving Now Standard in New Cars, Thanks to In-Dash Devices
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Distracted driving isn’t just about texting — it’s the mental effort of multi-tasking that makes people less alert and more dangerous behind the wheel. As hands-free devices like in-dash, voice-activated computer systems proliferate in new-model cars, they create additional risks. Using these devices can cause lingering distractions for up to 27 seconds after the task is completed, according to [...]