Streetsblog USA

What makes a city great? According to Jeff Speck, the secret sauce is, quite simply, walking. If your city is a good place to walk -- that is, walking is safe, comfortable, interesting, and useful -- everything else will fall into place.

Matt Yglesias made an excellent point about NIMBYs over at Slate yesterday. Writing about opposition to multifamily residential construction in the tony neighborhood near Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis, Yglesias wondered how much value residents really place on keeping the area a "single-family residential community."

Oahu, Hawaii should be the ideal place to walk for transportation, but it has the nation’s highest pedestrian fatality rate for senior citizens – more than twice the next-highest state. So the state enacted a Complete Streets policy in 2009, seeking to “reasonably accommodate” everyone -- “pedestrians, bicyclists, transit users, motorists, and persons of all ages and abilities” -- on public roadways.

Walk Score came out with its bikeability rankings in the spring, but they were only at the citywide level. If you wanted to plug in your address and come up with a custom rating for your own address, like you can with Walk Score, the system wasn't quite ready. That all changes today. Using an algorithm that takes into account factors including bike infrastructure, topography, and the number of cyclists on the streets, Walk Score has released "Bike Scores" for addresses in 25 American cities and 11 Canadian cities.

In June, the House of Representatives voted to ban U.S. DOT from even studying the viability of switching from the gas tax to a vehicle-miles-traveled (VMT) fee. But the tide may be turning: The sponsor of the amendment, Rep. Chip Cravaack, has been ousted from Congress, the amendment itself is on the skids, and a new bill would actually require the government to study the VMT option.

Earlier this month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed a new rule requiring automakers to install event data recorders, known as EDRs or black boxes, in all light passenger vehicles. While the rule would expand the number of vehicles equipped to record critical information in the moments preceding a crash, that alone won't aid investigations of traffic deaths or strengthen cases against reckless drivers. For black boxes to help get to the bottom of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, changes to local crash investigation procedures and to EDR technology itself need to happen as well.

Ford has spent the last few years fretting about how to reach out to Gen Y. The car company made news earlier this year when it re-designed its 2015 Mustang to appeal to buyers born between 1980 and 1999. (Apparently Gen Y just screams "shark-nosed grille and round headlights" to Ford.)

As you might expect, given the billions America spends on highways, measuring the activity of motorists is practically an industry unto itself.

Which transportation projects are the smartest investments, and which are the most ridiculous boondoggles? The Sierra Club has put together a solid list in a new report titled "Smart Choices, Less Traffic: The 50 Best and Worst Transportation Projects in the United States."