Streetsblog USA

If you could point to one aspect of American transportation policy that's more disastrous than all the others, expanding highways and roads to the point of absurdity is probably it.

This calendar is published by the Texas Department of Transportation as part of its traffic safety efforts. It shows how many fatal collisions and traffic deaths happened every day of the year. On average, someone is killed every two and a half hours on Texas streets, and someone is injured every two minutes, according to TxDOT [PDF].

"Huge" is how Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland described the news yesterday that Nike will sponsor Portland's upcoming bike-share system to the tune of $10 million.

What makes a building walkable? Or rather, what kind of buildings make a city walkable?

In too many cities, newspaper coverage of bicycling has stoked some of the darker aspects of human nature. Opinion pieces about bike lanes tend to cater to the reactionary opposition, goading the trolls of the comments section, where casual death threats are standard fare.

Last spring, Alexander and Danielle Meitiv became public faces of the "Free Range Kids" movement when their children were picked up by police in Silver Spring, Maryland, while walking home from a local park.

If you remove a bunch of parking from the center of a city, you'll get carmageddon, financial ruin, and the complete unraveling of society as we know it -- right? That's what you tend to hear at public meetings when a proposal that would reduce parking comes up, but as this real-life example from Philadelphia shows, there's really nothing to fear.

Here's a great visualization of how much land parking spaces consume in our cities, via Shane Phillips at Network blog Better Institutions.

Need a reason to feel hopeful for 2016? Check out this video from the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, showing off the city's new curb-protected bike lane.