Sarah Goodyear

The other day, we wrote a post in hopes of starting a conversation about the way certain groups of people who ride bicycles -- notably, immigrants who ride to work and for work -- tend to get overlooked by bicycle advocacy groups and planners. The post (which grew out of an item by Streetsblog Network member Honking in Traffic) got a lot of responses, including a few from people who thought we were stating the obvious or being patronizing. (On Twitter, @feedmeshow put it this way: "Wealthy white person notices that some ride of necessity, as opp. lifestyle choice." Ouch.)

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we've got a post from M-Bike.org, who weighs in on a new crosswalk treatment in a Michigan town:

Today from Streetsblog Network member Honking in Traffic, an important reality check about a mostly overlooked segment of the bicycling population -- people who ride bikes out of economic necessity and not necessarily by choice. These aren't the oft-lauded "bike commuters" who ride for a sense of freedom and with at least some intention to "be green." These are people who could never be accused of smugness, many of them immigrants with low incomes.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we're featuring a post from Alex Steffen at Worldchanging that takes on the ever-burgeoning fetish for "green" technologies. Everywhere you look these days, there's talk of "going green." But Steffen, who's been paying attention to these issues for 20 years, says the ecofads are hopelessly inadequate.

A few weeks back, we told you about the dire situation for transit in Lorain County, Ohio, part of Greater Cleveland that's been hit hard by the recession. At that time, county officials were threatening to cut all bus service after voters rejected a sales tax increase that would have gone in part to fund transit operations. A redeployment of unused stimulus funds managed to rescue a skeleton of the former service, but the remaining cutbacks are still painful -- as was noted by President Obama in his visit to Lorain County last week.

When does going backward mean progress? When you're talking about bicycle use in the city of Beijing.

The importance of core urban areas to a region's economy is the subject of a post today from the always thoughtful Aaron Renn, who blogs at The Urbanophile. Renn examines data that suggest job growth (or decline) in a metro region's core counties is a good indicator for the overall health of those regions. Renn argues that it's important to keep a close eye on what's happening in the urban core in order to forestall the kind of catastrophic decline we've seen in places like Detroit and Cleveland.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic looks at the new Brookings Institution report on suburban poverty levels and the connection to future transportation planning in those regions. Freemark, who recently wrote about how the city of Paris is extending its transit infrastructure to its traditionally lower-income suburbs, points out that the challenges to transit in American suburbs are greater. The infrastructure of American suburbs, as well as the governmental planning mechanisms, present significant challenges to reducing automobile dependence -- a dependence that weighs especially heavily on people with low incomes. Freemark writes:

"There's nowhere to park." That's what a lot of drivers think, even when there is parking available very nearby — say, on the upper level of a parking garage. This disjunct between perception and reality, which can lead to municipalities overbuilding parking facilities that end up standing empty, is the topic of an intriguing post today from Tom Vanderbilt, on How We Drive.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, a fascinating look at the top 50 "low-car cities" in the United States -- that is, cities in which a high proportion of households do not own a car at all. Human Transit's Jarrett Walker digs into a list (from Wikipedia) of the US cities with populations over 100,000 with the highest percentage of zero-car households.