Sarah Goodyear

If you're a person who is accustomed to getting around the place you live without a car, you've probably spent at least some time trying to sell your auto-dependent friends on the concept. Maybe you've even gone so far as to map out a route for them so that they wouldn't get frustrated. And sometimes you've succeeded in getting another person onto a bike, bus, train or trolley to make a trip across town. It's a good feeling, right?

Yesterday's New York Times blog item about why New York women are underrepresented among the city's bike commuters didn't sit well with the authors of Streetsblog Network member Let's Go Ride a Bike. Trisha, one of the blog's authors and a bike commuter herself in Nashville, sees the piece as part of a trend (epitomized by a recent Treehugger post called "6 Reasons the World Needs More Girls on Bikes"). Too often, she says, people looking at female cyclists take a cosmetic approach to a complex subject: 

We hear the arguments again and again from DOTs: they need to widen highways and expand interchanges to improve safety on the nation's roads.

Excited about the prospect of high speed rail in America? Lots of people have been. But as Yonah Freemark reports on The Transport Politic, yesterday the General Accountability Office threw a bit of a wet blanket on the growing enthusiasm. The GAO is saying the Obama administration has so far failed to provide clear goals and a comprehensive plan for a high speed rail system:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Mobilizing the Region is talking about highway removal. Specifically, the proposed teardown or reinvention of the 40-year-old Aetna Viaduct in Hartford, CT, which has already outlived its projected lifespan. Now the Hartford Courant has become a proponent of the idea that getting rid of the road could transform Connecticut's capital city:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we've got a post from The WashCycle about speeding, new red light cameras and a reduction in fatalities in Montgomery County, VA. Police there report that "a 2008 study of 11 camera locations found a 25 percent reduction in crashes on the roads where the speed cameras were located." Deaths have gone to 9 from 19 over a the same period last year. While the WashCycle cautions against reading too much into a relatively small amount of data, they also say the cameras have likely been effective. They also report on some novel citizen objections to the technology:

The other day, we looked at a supermarket in a densely populated part of New Haven that is unwelcoming to pedestrians. Today, courtesy of member blog The City Fix, we're taking another look at urban supermarket planning, specifically the issue of how to get quality food markets built in underserved neighborhoods (so-called food deserts) -- where people often walk or take transit to the store. They write about how cities like New York and Washington, DC, can encourage supermarket construction by relaxing onerous zoning requirements for parking spaces:

With all the kerfuffle in Washington right now over the federal transportation law and the crisis in the Highway Trust Fund, it seems like an appropriate time to be reminded of the role that federal dollars play in funding bicycle infrastructure.

Today, from Design New Haven, a tale of two shopping plazas. 

Much of the talk on the Streetsblog Network in the past few days, perhaps prompted by the recently concluded Congress for the New Urbanism conference, is about transit-oriented development. The real estate crisis, it seems, may finally be pushing the issue into the mainstream.