Noah Kazis
Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox.
Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.
Recent Posts
From London to D.C., Bike-Sharing Is Safer Than Riding Your Own Bike
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People riding shared public bicycles appear to be involved in fewer traffic crashes and receive fewer injuries than people riding their personal bicycles. In cities from Paris and London to Washington, D.C. and Mexico City, something about riding a shared bicycle appears to make cycling safer. Paris’s Vélib’ is perhaps the most iconic bike-sharing system […]
EPA: Energy Efficiency Is About Location, Location, Location
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Where we live has an enormous impact on energy use, according to new research commissioned by the EPA. The report, “Location Efficiency and Housing Type — Boiling It Down to BTUs” finds that Americans use far less energy if they live in an apartment building in a transit-oriented neighborhood than if they live in a […]
House Transpo Committee Promises Bipartisanship, To Tackle Aviation First
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Meet the new House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The committee’s meeting this morning, the first of the 112th Congress, included twenty new Republican faces, 19 of whom are freshman representatives. The mostly administrative agenda didn’t offer many chances for the committee members to talk policy, but even some of the freshmen’s short introductions proved potentially […]
European Parking Policies Leave New York Behind
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Flashback to Europe, sixty years ago. Only still emerging from the ruin of total war, the continent was in the midst of a nearly unprecedented reconstruction. Over the next decade, however, industry finally was able to turn toward consumer products, from stockings to refrigerators and, of course, the automobile. Italians owned only 342,000 cars in […]
Industry Leaders Don’t Want to Miss Out on NYC Bike-Share
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Interest in New York City’s bike-sharing plans seems to be running high in the industry, if today’s “pre-proposal conference” is any indication. A packed room that included many of the major players in the bike-sharing industry gathered at NYC DOT headquarters to get the scoop on what New York, potentially the nation’s largest bike-sharing market, […]
Theft and Vandalism Just Not a Problem For American Bike-Sharing
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Even as bike-sharing spreads across the United States, it remains dogged by one persistent doubt. Critics, and even some boosters, fear that the bikes will be routinely stolen and vandalized. It’s time to stop worrying about crime, however. In America’s new bike-sharing systems, there have been essentially no such problems. Fears that public bikes will […]
Report: Letting Transit Tax Benefit Expire Will Throw Riders From the Train
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For many transit riders, there’s another fare hike coming down the track, one that many may not even be aware of. A provision of the stimulus bill that offered a larger tax break for some transit riders is set to expire at the end of the year. A new report by TransitCenter [PDF], a non-profit […]
Real-Time Bike-Share Maps Show America’s Got Some Catching Up to Do
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A fantastic new visualization of 16 bike-share systems around the world lets you see how people are using public bikes from London to Melbourne. You can watch animated graphics, for example, of bikes getting picked up in one part of town and dropped off in another during rush hour. The site, created by Oliver O’Brien, […]
U.S. DOT Unveils Full List of TIGER II Winners
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The complete list of TIGER II grants has been released by U.S. DOT today, after members of Congress revealed many winners last week. In keeping with the department’s livability goals, the list is filled with transit projects (especially streetcar lines), efforts to bolster the country’s non-trucking freight network, and fix-it-first projects aimed at deteriorating roads […]
Report: Want to Ease Commuter Pain? Highways and Sprawl Won’t Help
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Imagine two drivers leaving downtown to head home. Each of them sits in traffic for the first ten miles of the commute but at that point, their paths diverge. The first one has reached home. The second has another twenty miles to drive, though luckily for her, the roads are clear and congestion doesn’t slow […]
APTA Report Prescribes Public Transport to Improve Public Health
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Transit use is correlated with decreases in the number of traffic crashes. Image: "Evaluating Public Transportation Health Benefits" A new report written by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute’s Todd Litman for the American Public Transit Association [PDF], the trade organization for the nation’s transit agencies, reminds us that one of the most valuable benefits of […]
Walk Score Goes Multimodal With the Addition of Transit Score
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Like much of Manhattan, Streetsblog HQ nets a "Rider’s Paradise" rating from Transit Score. One of the simplest and best tools for promoting walkable development has branched out into the full range of car-free transportation. Walk Score, the website which measures how many neighborhood amenities are within walking distance of a given location, has added […]