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What Would a National Vision Zero Movement Look Like?
Earlier this week, New York-based Transportation Alternatives released a statement of 10 principles that emerged from the Vision Zero symposium the group sponsored last Friday. It was the first-ever national gathering of thought leaders and advocates committed to spreading Vision Zero’s ethic of eliminating all traffic deaths through better design, enforcement, and education.
November 21, 2014
The Great Traffic Projection Swindle
This is the final piece in a three-part series about privately-financed roads. In the first two parts of this series, we looked at the Indiana Toll Road as an example of the growth in privately financed highways, and how financial firms can turn these assets into profits, even if the road itself is a big money loser. In this piece, we examine the shaky assumptions that toll road investments are based on, and how that is putting the public at risk.
November 20, 2014
Talking Headways Podcast: I’m Not a Scientist
Do you ever think about the ecology of the city you live in? Not just the parks and the smog. Scientists are starting to examine urban ecosystems more holistically: the trees and the concrete, natural gas lines and soil, water pipes and rivers. The natural and the synthetic feed off each other in surprising ways. We're not scientists, but we found it interesting.
November 20, 2014
How Macquarie Makes Money By Losing Money on Toll Roads
This is the second post in a three-part series about the Indiana Toll Road and privately financed highways. Read part one.
November 19, 2014
The Indiana Toll Road and the Dark Side of Privately Financed Highways
This is the first post in a three-part series on the Indiana Toll Road and the use of private finance to build and maintain highways.
November 18, 2014
The Parking Tax Benefit: A $7.3 Billion Subsidy for Traffic Congestion
The federal government spends billions of dollars a year on tax subsidies that make traffic congestion worse, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by TransitCenter and the Frontier Group. The culprit is the parking commuter tax benefit, which costs taxpayers $7.3 billion in foregone revenue each year, all while adding more than 800,000 cars to rush-hour traffic on the nation's roads each workday, the authors estimate.
November 18, 2014
Shared Space: The Case for a Little Healthy Chaos on City Streets
Dick van Veen is a Dutch architect and engineer at consultancy company Mobycon. This post originally appeared on the blog of The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.
November 17, 2014
Lesson From the States: Index Your Gas Tax to Something, Anything
Amid all the hand-wringing in Congress about transportation funding is one simple fact: The federal gas tax has been unchanged at 18.4 cents per gallon for 21 years. During that time, rising fuel efficiency and inflation have chipped away at how much the tax brings in and eroded the value of what remains.
November 13, 2014