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Ben Fried

@benfried

Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.

Recent Posts

Image: Bradlee9119 via Flickr
STREETSBLOG USA

Needed: A Federal Program to Boost Transit Service

By Steven Higashide and Ben Fried | Apr 23, 2021 | No Comments
Instead of cutting people off from opportunity, condemning households to struggle with high transportation costs, and overheating the planet, our transportation systems can advance economic fairness, racial equity, and climate action. To achieve that transformation we’ll need to run more transit service.
Source: Transit Center
STREETSBLOG USA

Op-Ed: Learning from Nashville’s Failed Transit Measure

By Ben Fried | Jan 28, 2020 | No Comments
As Austin, Cincinnati, and San Antonio tee up similar measures, here are some pitfalls to avoid.
IMG_0764
STREETSBLOG NYC

Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast

By Ben Fried | Jul 26, 2018 | No Comments
Contrary to the story Uber, Lyft, and their peers like to tell, ride-hailing services are not reducing traffic in American cities. Nor will they, even if they meet their goals for converting solo passenger trips to shared rides, according to new research from transportation analyst Bruce Schaller.
A mixing zone on Telegraph in Oakland.  Photo: Streetsblog/Rudick
STREETSBLOG NYC

New York City Councilman Challenges Safety of ‘Mixing Zones’ and Painted Solutions

By Ben Fried | Jul 19, 2018 | No Comments
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson wants DOT to provide better protection for pedestrians and cyclists in its redesign of 10th Avenue.
Photo: Courtesy of Motivate.
STREETSBLOG NYC

What Happens When a Company That Sells Car Trips Gets Into the Bike Trip Business?

By Ben Fried | Jul 9, 2018 | No Comments
Lyft has acquired the nation's largest bike-share company, setting up a situation where its bike trip sales will cannibalize its car trip sales.
greenway_cbs_still
STREETSBLOG NYC

Let’s Get Serious About Capping Car Speeds in Crowded Cities

By Ben Fried | Nov 2, 2017 | No Comments
Sound outlandish? The barriers are not as intimidating as they might seem.
Photo: NYC Mayor's Office
STREETSBLOG NYC

Yesterday’s Times Square Toll Was Terrible — But So Is a Typical Day of Traffic Violence

By Brad Aaron and Ben Fried | May 19, 2017 | No Comments
Given the high-profile location, the number of victims, and recent instances of people using vehicles to kill for ideology, it's understandable that yesterday's crash drew so much attention. But it's important to recognize that as terrible as the Times Square carnage was for a single incident, the same human toll occurs on a daily basis on NYC streets -- it's just dispersed across the city.
Russo remembers seeing a mother and daughter cycling on the Ninth Avenue protected bike lane soon after it debuted in 2007: "The idea that someone who's seven or eight years old would ride their own bicycle on an avenue in Manhattan -- it was an outlandish concept. The fact that someone had done that made me realize people were going to respond to this." Photo: NACTO
STREETSBLOG NYC

Q&A With Oakland DOT Head Ryan Russo on Protected Bike Lanes in NYC

By Ben Fried | May 9, 2017 | No Comments
Few people have been so closely involved in the transformation of the city's streets over such a long period of time as Ryan Russo. So between his last day at NYC DOT and his move to the West Coast, I caught up with him to get an insider's perspective on more than a dozen years of change to NYC streets.
Shared bikes in Shanghai. Photo: Mark Gorton
STREETSBLOG NYC

Bike-Share as a Speculative Venture

By Ben Fried | Apr 26, 2017 | No Comments
New York, you may have heard, is about to get invaded by a swarm of bike-share companies. Their product is often described as “dockless” bike-share: They rely on “smart locks,” not fixed stations, to secure the bicycles. But dockless systems have been operating in cities including Hoboken and Portland for some time now — it’s not […]

Welcome to the New and Improved Streetsblog

By Ben Fried | Dec 14, 2016 | No Comments
For the first time in nearly nine years, we’re debuting a sitewide redesign of Streetsblog. The last time we overhauled the site, few people were reading news on their phones, Twitter was just finding a mass audience, and no one thought of Facebook as the world’s most important media platform. Streetsblog was a single non-profit with reporters […]
Imagine all the Trump signs marking projects that get tax breaks from the infrastructure plan Steve Bannon is pushing for. Schumer photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls/Wikimedia Commons; Bannon photo: Don Irvine/Wikimedia Commons
STREETSBLOG USA

Steve Bannon Would Love to Team Up With Chuck Schumer on Infrastructure

By Angie Schmitt and Ben Fried | Nov 21, 2016 | No Comments
We mentioned it briefly last week, but Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s comments to the Hollywood Reporter about infrastructure are worth a closer look. It helps explain why Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are making a grave mistake when they line up to help Trump implement this plan. Bannon is the propagandist who entered the Trump campaign team after […]
pelosi_trump_schumer
STREETSBLOG USA

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi Are Falling for Infrastructure Propaganda

By Ben Fried and Angie Schmitt | Nov 17, 2016 | No Comments
We’re going to see a lot of stories about Donald Trump and infrastructure in the next few months, and this reporting will be heavily influenced by a message that has been honed and perfected by the American Society of Civil Engineers. It will be important to see through these arguments and view the Trump infrastructure plan with clear eyes. Already, leading Congressional Democrats […]
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