Streetsblog USA

The new year is right around the corner and it's time to take stock of the year that's passed. In 2015, we saw some painful setbacks and some important strides in the national movement for better walking, biking, and transit.

Louisville is in the middle of a three-year, federally-funded safety initiative to reduce the city's high rate of pedestrian fatalities. Per capita, four times the number of people are killed walking in Louisville than in Washington, DC.

Talk about a reductive view of safety. After a couple of unusual incidents where bicyclists collided with pedestrians in Savannah's 30-acre Forsyth Park, the city is now considering outlawing cycling in the park.

Yesterday, Washington DC officials released the city's Vision Zero plan [PDF], which aims to eliminate traffic fatalities within the District by 2024. It came with a good deal of analysis highlighting where the most dangerous places in the city are.

When Congress passed a long-term transportation bill for the first time in more than a decade earlier this month, People for Bikes called it "a great day for bikes," and Momentum Magazine called it a "win for bikes." But is it?

"Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars," Donald Shoup wrote in his celebrated investigation of parking economics, The High Cost of Free Parking. The above video, from the city of Ottawa, does a good job explaining exactly why that is and the problems it causes.

On Saturday, the COP21 summit in Paris culminated with a precedent-setting climate change agreement. Nearly 200 nations are on board, but their commitments don't go far enough to head off catastrophic global warming.

A new report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office [PDF] examines why people walking or biking account for a rising share of traffic deaths in the United States. While the conclusions aren't exactly earth-shattering, one culprit the GAO identified is street design practices that seek primarily to move cars.

When engineers make decisions about streets, they tend to emphasize the "peak hour" -- the morning and evening rush when traffic is at its most intense. For the most part, city streets are still designed to move motor vehicles during this relatively short period of time, to the detriment of people outside of cars -- i.e. the people who live in the neighborhood.