Ben Fried

The Miami Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) wants to build a highway extension in the southwest fringes of the city, near the edge of the Everglades, and to do that it needs to ingratiate itself with the public. At an open house to kick off the public-facing phase of the planning process, agency staff were well-prepared and friendly, reports Matthew Toro at Transit Miami. After all, he says, "all good salespeople are."

Hey, so it turns out the all-powerful @BicycleLobby didn't actually scale the Brooklyn Bridge and plant white American flags at the top. That was two all-powerful German artists.

In November, voters in 36 states will head to the polls to choose governors. Among the state leaders up for reelection is Wisconsin's Scott Walker, who faces a strong challenge from Democrat and former Trek Bicycle executive Mary Burke.

It looks like New York City is days away from announcing a deal in which REQX Ventures, an affiliate of the Related Companies and its Equinox unit, will buy out Alta Bicycle Share, the company that operates Citi Bike and Bay Area Bike Share. The implications are big -- not just for bike-share in New York, but for several other major American cities as well.

This is it! The final days and the final giveaway of our spring pledge drive. So far, 221 superheroes have donated to Streetsblog and Streetfilms. To reach our goal, we need 179 more readers to step up and give by Sunday at midnight.

After three stellar years with Streetsblog and Streetfilms, our development director Christa Orth is embarking on a new chapter with the fundraising consultancy Wingo. Christa masterminded the creation of a fundraising system essentially from scratch, and it’s safe to say Streetsblog and Streetfilms would not be in the position we are today without her. If you’ve ever attended one of our benefits or happy hours here in New York, you probably heard her ebullient laughter. We’re going to miss her and we wish her all the best.

We’ve all seen the graphs: Driving and car ownership have passed their peak in America, while transit ridership and biking are on the rise. On the ground, however, city buses still move at a crawl, bogged down in traffic. Most streets remain too dangerous for most people to feel comfortable biking on them. And the traffic death toll continues to put our cities to shame compared to our global peers.

As Smart Growth America showed us earlier today, the costs of sprawl are high. So it's a bitter irony that federal rules have made it more expensive to build compact, mixed-use development by tightly limiting the share of commercial space in projects that receive financing from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

I'm pleased to announce that our national news site has a new name: Streetsblog USA. Say it with pride.

Major media have a habit of blowing bike-share problems out of proportion. Witness the 2009 BBC story that cast theft and vandalism as an existential threat to Velib in Paris. Five years later, Velib is still going strong. The most recent entry in the genre is Christopher Matthews' misguided story on the Bixi bankruptcy in TIME. Headline: "Why America’s Grand Bike-Sharing Experiment Is Failing."