Want to talk to your kids? Stick them in the car. That’s the word-for-word headline atop a recent post on Driving, a Canadian web site that also believes lowering speed limits in cities — you know, those places where kids and parents walk — is “an exercise in futility,” because drivers. Both columns were penned by the […]

Tooling around on Google, Dan Malouff at Greater Greater Washington stumbled on the above image from suburban Copenhagen. What’s right with this picture? Note the (a) bike parking lot at the Friheden Street transit station, just across the (b) sidewalk from the (c) bike lane. Writes Malouff: One of the most important uses for bicycles […]

Five years after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie spiked the ARC transit tunnel to redirect money to roads, politicians are finally discussing how to go about upgrading rail capacity between Jersey and Midtown Manhattan, currently limited to a pair of century-old tunnels under the Hudson River. But just about every announcement related to the proposed Gateway Project comes with a […]

Today the Streetsblog Network is mourning Deb Hubsmith, who died this week at age 45. Deb founded the Safe Routes to School National Partnership, a nationwide program that is saving the lives of children endangered by reckless drivers. If you’ve advocated for or cared about safer streets in the last 10 to 15 years, chances […]

What if the United States treated traffic violence like the public health issue it is? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that would entail building bike infrastructure and slowing down drivers. Last week the CDC released a report on the long-term mortality rate among U.S. cyclists. The study covers 38 years of U.S. DOT data […]

Does Atlanta want to be a sustainable, transit-oriented city? The answer has a lot to do with how it addresses parking. Following up on “Atlanta’s Parking Addiction,” a recent column in the alt-weekly Creative Loafing, Darin at ATL Urbanist points out that much of the city’s new downtown streetcar route is lined with vehicle storage, rather than housing […]

If you have a well-worn copy of Ralph Nader’s seminal “Unsafe at Any Speed” on your bookshelf — and who doesn’t? — you know that in the mid 20th century U.S. auto companies were hostile to the idea of designing safer cars. Introducing basic features like padded dashboards and collapsible steering columns, the thinking went, would […]

On Sunday residents of Portland got a preview of Tilikum Crossing, a.k.a. the “Bridge of the People,” described by Michael Andersen of BikePortland as “the first bridge in the United States to carry buses, bikes, trains, streetcars and people walking but no private cars.” Tilikum Crossing is the first bridge constructed over the Willamette River in […]

No one was hurt when a Metro train derailed in downtown DC yesterday, but the incident wreaked havoc on the morning commute — for transit users and motorists. David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington said the derailment and ensuing Metro service interruption “surely contributed” to gridlock throughout the downtown area, as people who would normally […]

In the early 20th century “chauffeur” was synonymous with “motorist,” and by 1906 Life Magazine had had enough of them. Doug Gordon at Brooklyn Spoke dug up a column titled “Get After the Chauffeurs,” in which Life reported on a two-vehicle crash in Central Park that killed several people, including the driver who caused the collision. “That one got […]