Tanya Snyder

Law professor Frank H. Buckley seems to want to be the next Dororthy Rabinowitz. That is, he wants to gain notoriety by clinging to old and unsafe street designs while, simultaneously, shoring up the Wall Street Journal's reputation as a bastion of change-averse curmudgeons. Done and done.

Behold, Streetsblog's brand-new podcast! In what we aim to turn into a recurring feature, Reconnecting America's Jeff Wood and I recently chatted about the week's news in livable streets, urbanism, and sustainable transportation. The topics are drawn from Jeff's excellent daily compendium of transportation and planning links, The Direct Transfer, and from stories we're tracking at Streetsblog Capitol Hill. It's a treat for me to get back to producing audio -- I was a radio reporter before joining Streetsblog.

There’s nothing worse than buying bags and bags of Halloween candy and then no one comes trick-or-treating at your door. (Hmm, scratch that -- there are definitely worse things.) But anyway. You know your neighborhood leaves something to be desired if you don’t have little ghosts and princesses banging on your door tonight.

“This is a money and power grab.”

Why raise desperately needed transportation funds for a broke region when you could let people drive for free? In Georgia, the state has made up its mind: The DOT will pay $4.5 million to tear down tolls on GA 400 -- and forfeit the $21 million a year the tolls brought in.

When researchers look at the reasons behind the downward trend in driving rates in the U.S., they look at several demographics: young people who prefer urban living and are getting into biking, or baby boomers who have picked a more vibrant place to spend their retirement.

Soon after the government shutdown ended, we heard murmurs that the TIGER grant program for innovative transportation projects had been a casualty of the negotiations.

There is a pernicious myth among some states that they give more to Washington in the form of gas taxes than they get back in the form of federal transportation funding. A recent rash of federal bailouts -- $35 billion between September 2008 and March 2010 -- ensured a windfall for every state in the union. And yet many still believe that federal bureaucrats are skimming off the top of their payments to give their hard-earned highway money to the liberal subway-riders in New York or something. It's a dangerous lie with serious repercussions.

Reading this sentence in a mainstream publication just validated everything I feel about the kind of parent I want to be: "It doesn’t mean millennials put parenthood second, but their definition of what makes a good parent is Mom and Dad being happy, and exposing their child to all the things that they have enjoyed."