An All-Too-Rare Idea to Improve Transit: Put People Who Ride Transit in Charge
It's hard to improve transit service if the people who oversee transit policy don't know what makes for good service. And yet, agency boards are often dominated by political hacks with little or no transit expertise -- many don't even know what it's like to ride the transit systems they oversee. Dallas is trying something different.
June 30, 2017
Macon, Georgia, Striped a Good Network of Temporary Bike Lanes and Cycling Soared
The experiment shows that if you build it, they will come -- even in smaller cities without a strong culture around active transportation.
June 29, 2017
A Recipe for Cutting Traffic: Build More Apartments, Fewer Single-Family Homes
In the Twin Cities, people living in multi-family housing - apartments, condos, or any kind of dwelling that shares walls with its neighbors - travel by car 25 percent less than people who live in single-family homes. And they get around by walking, biking, and transit much, much more.
June 27, 2017
You Can’t Have Family-Friendly Cities Without Kid-Friendly Streets
A lot of cities assume that all parents who can move to the suburbs will do so. But it doesn't have to be that way.
June 26, 2017
Dallas Confronts the Dilemma: Build Transit for the Burbs, or Build Transit People Will Use
The biggest potential for transit ridership is in walkable neighborhoods in the city, where more people and jobs are clustered closer together. But regional politics often lead agencies to build transit in suburban areas where ridership will be more sparse.
June 23, 2017
The Science Is Clear: More Highways Equals More Traffic. Why Are DOTs Still Ignoring It?
Numerous studies have documented the phenomenon known as induced demand in transportation: Basically, if you build highway lanes, more drivers will come. And yet, transportation agencies rarely account for this effect when planning road projects.
June 21, 2017
A Tribute to Branden Klayko, Who Loved Louisville and Wanted His City to Be Its Best
We want to take a moment to honor the life of Branden Klayko, an architect and Louisville native who founded the local blog Broken Sidewalk, which was part of the Streetsblog Network for years.
June 20, 2017
We Have the Tech to Stop Distracted Driving. But Do We Have the Will?
What is stopping us from implementing solutions to prevent distracted driving? We have the technology. The problem is, the smartphone industry doesn't want to use it.
April 21, 2017
The Human Toll of Normalizing Distracted Driving
Nowhere is the culture of permissiveness more apparent, or deadly, than in Texas, where about 3,500 people lose their lives in traffic every year. It is one of just four states that doesn't ban texting and driving.
April 20, 2017
Study: Drivers With Smart Phones Use Them Almost Every Time They Drive
Motorists with smart phones use their devices in 88 out of every 100 trips, according to data collected by Zendrive, a company that assesses driving behavior using the sensors in smart phones. Extrapolating to the entire population, Zendrive estimates there are about 600 million trips involving distracted driving in the U.S. each day.
April 18, 2017