Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.
Ben Fried
Recent Posts
America’s Biggest Bike-Share Operator Now Makes Its Own Bikes
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Motivate, the company that runs bike-share systems in several large American cities, is now manufacturing its own bikes. That might explain why the timetable for Citi Bike expansion has been getting a lot firmer. When the current Motivate management team took over last fall, they inherited two big problems. Most of their systems ran on flawed software that crippled reliability […]
Streetsblog Retains BlankSlate to Strengthen Our Bottom Line
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Earlier this year, I wrote about the imperative for Streetsblog to generate more revenue from our website. With so many unsold impressions, ads were a clear opportunity to put Streetsblog’s sizable reach to use strengthening our bottom line. Today I’m pleased to announce that we’ve retained BlankSlate to help us sell ads and make good on that […]
A New Type of Streetsblog in St. Louis, Ohio, Texas, and the Southeast? Yep.
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A little more than six years ago, we launched the Streetsblog Network as a way for people across the country writing about livable streets, sustainable transportation, and smart growth to band together and share ideas. There are many wonderful things about the Streetsblog Network, but I would put this is at the top of my […]
Seattle Car-Share Is Growing, But Is It Cutting Traffic?
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After launching a pilot program three years ago enabling the company car2go to use on-street parking spots for its car-share fleet, Seattle is pursuing an expansion that would allow new companies to enter the market and dramatically increase the availability of point-to-point car-share vehicles. Scott Bonjukian at The Urbanist has the details about the expansion […]
What People Think of a Citywide 25 MPH Speed Limit in Decatur
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Last year, New York City enacted a citywide 25 mph speed limit, a central plank in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Vision Zero street safety platform. Are other American cities going to follow suit? Outside Atlanta, Decatur, Georgia, has been mulling a reduction of its default speed limit for a few years. The results of a […]
Jay Walder on What’s Next for America’s Biggest Bike-Share Company
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Last fall, former MTA chief Jay Walder took over as CEO of Alta Bicycle Share, part of a restructuring that injected new resources and expertise into a company that had struggled to keep up with the demands of running bike-share systems in half a dozen major American cities. This morning, the company came out with […]
Jane Jacobs’ 1958 Warning About the Loss of Street Life Still Resonates
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The mistakes of the urban renewal era are supposed to be behind us. Super-blocks, blank walls, and the publicly subsidized demolition of varied buildings to make way for monolithic districts are relics of a bygone era. Right? Branden Klayko, who writes about Louisville at Broken Sidewalk, doesn’t think so. While development practices have changed in […]
New Name for Alta Bicycle Share: “Motivate”
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After new management took over in 2014, injecting capital and expertise that’s expected to turn around a sputtering operation, the company formerly known as Alta Bicycle Share has adopted a new name: Motivate. (A verb! Very active transportation-y.) Motivate operates bike-share systems in New York, DC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle, making it the […]
Changes at Streetsblog in 2015
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When Streetsblog launched in 2006, the site made an impact almost immediately. The daily scrutiny of NYC transportation agencies and elected officials created new opportunities for policy reform, leading to real change in the design and operation of our streets. It wasn’t long before advocates from out of town contacted Streetsblog about bringing this model […]
Wishing for "Truly Open Streets" in 2015
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It’s a new year, and around the Streetsblog Network people are posting their 2014 retrospectives and resolutions for the year ahead. Kristen Jeffers at The Black Urbanist shares these thoughts to kick off 2015: Remember this picture of me? I was playing on a B-cycle demonstration bike on the street that I helped paint, to […]
Keep Streetsblog Going Strong – Donate and Enter to Win a New PUBLIC Bike
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If you look at the state of American streets, the scale of our transportation dysfunction is epic. Nothing conveys the failure of the car-based system better than this: More than 30,000 people lose their lives in traffic annually — which means the U.S. could prevent about 20,000 premature deaths each year if we catch up […]
How Does the Threat of Police Violence Affect How You Use the Street?
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When the news came out yesterday that a Staten Island grand jury had failed to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold, like many people I found the outcome difficult to comprehend. With clear video evidence showing that Pantaleo broke NYPD protocol and a coroner’s report certifying that Garner’s death […]