Streetsblog USA

Only two spots remain in the Elite Eight of Streetsblog's Parking Madness bracket. Yesterday, the parking fields by GM headquarters along the Detroit waterfront prevailed over the parking crater around the BART station in Bay Area suburb Walnut Creek.

A group of heavy hitters in the road building and traffic safety establishment recently came out with a plan called "Toward Zero Deaths" [PDF], presented as an ambitious strategy to cut traffic fatalities in America. But don't get too excited by the branding -- the ideas inside don't present much of a challenge to practices that have made the U.S. a shameful laggard on traffic safety compared to other affluent nations.

The Parking Madness competition has never been fiercer. In yesterday's match-up, Parkersburg, West Virginia, edged Boston by a slim 12 votes, and before that, Amarillo beat out Nashville by just six votes. Your ballot counts.

The problem seems simple enough: The federal transportation program is going broke because Washington has allowed the gas tax to be eroded by inflation for more than 20 years.

Yesterday, in the closest match in Parking Madness history, Amarillo edged out Nashville by just six votes to advance to the round of eight.

This is a pretty revealing (read: depressing) exchange between a U.S. representative and the president of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, which represents state DOTs.

We're moving on to the fourth match of Parking Madness 2015, and the competition is getting intense. So far, parking craters in Tampa, Camden, and Newport News have advanced to the Elite Eight.

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast I’m joined by Joe Cortright of City Observatory to nerd out on employment data and discuss their most recent report, Surging City Center Job Growth. We learn how employment cores for many cities are growing and why this looks like a long-term shift.

So far in round one of this year's Parking Madness tourney, the parking crater in downtown Newport News, Virginia, knocked off the surface parking right by L.A.'s North Hollywood metro station, and the parking-scarred waterfront of Camden, New Jersey, beat out downtown Mobile and its carpet of parking lots.