Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Recent Posts
Why Is It Still So Hard to Find Out How States Are Spending Transpo Money?
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You would be lucky to get half as much information about a $5 million transportation project in your state as you can get from a toothpaste tube about how to brush. That sad comparison comes from a new report by Advocacy Advance (a project of the League of American Bicyclists and the Alliance for Biking […]
Indiana Transit Bill Moves Forward With Only Some of Its Worst Provisions
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Opponents had a field day inserting “poison pills” into the bill to allow transit expansion in the Indianapolis area. But so far, they haven’t been able to slow down the bill’s progress. It passed the Indiana House Transportation Committee yesterday, 11-1. The bill would allow Marion County — where Indianapolis sits — and six surrounding […]
Talking Headways Podcast: How Does This Podcast Make You Feel?
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This week, Jeff Wood and I get indignant about Miami-Dade County’s misuse of transit funds for roads, and we speculate about why — with the current success of pedestrian projects like Times Square — old-style pedestrian malls are still going belly-up. And then we peek behind the curtain at an exciting new frontier for urban […]
Join Us for a Media Training and Party to Kick Off the Bike Summit
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Every year, hundreds of cycling advocates gather in Washington, DC for the National Bike Summit. It’s always a high point of my year: meeting advocates, learning new things, grooving on momentum and good energy. This year, Streetsblog and Streetfilms are kicking off the Bike Summit with a couple of exciting activities we hope you’ll join […]
New Partnership Brings Together “Strange Bedfellows” For Active Transpo
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The gospel of active transportation has spread. Thanks to a number of concurrent crises, from obesity to climate change to the “silver tsunami,” it’s become clear to more and more people that the simple act of walking and biking can have a major impact on averting some of the biggest problems America faces. So over […]
Miami-Dade Squanders Transit Tax on Roads, Thanks to Florida DOT
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Only one of every five federal transportation dollars are set aside specifically for transit. So it’s infuriating when a local government plunders the small pool of transit funds and spends it on roads. Particularly when that place has some of the country’s most notoriously car-dominated and dangerous streets. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Miami-Dade County, Florida. […]
Talking Headways Podcast With Special Guest Jan Gehl
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Danish architect and urban planner Jan Gehl, who led Copenhagen’s turn away from car-domination toward streets and public spaces for people, is on a U.S. tour. I got to sit down with him this week in Washington. Where traffic engineers count cars, Gehl and his colleagues count people. So instead of telling city officials to […]
T&I Chair Bill Shuster Complicates Matters With Push for VMT Fee
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All options may be on the table for funding transportation, but Bill Shuster has chosen his. Rep. Shuster, head of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, hasn’t been willing to commit to any one proposal for funding transportation until now. And his choice may make things complicated. At a Bloomberg Government event yesterday, Shuster came […]
Tom Vanderbilt in NYT: Jaywalking Tickets Don’t Make Streets Safer
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Enforcement of jaywalking doesn’t improve pedestrian safety. So what will? Tom Vanderbilt, best-selling author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, gave a succinct answer in a New York Times op-ed this weekend. Our cities will be safer to walk in when we have “better walking infrastructure, slower car speeds and more pedestrians.” […]
How to Reduce Traffic By 30 Percent: Strike Fear Into Motorists
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Organizers of major sporting events, from this weekend’s “Mass Transit Super Bowl” to the Sochi Olympics a week from now, may benefit from a lesson learned during the 2012 London Olympics: a tactic transportation planners secretly call “the Big Scare.” They don’t like to talk about it in public. But Graham Currie, a professor of public […]
New Bill Would Make Bike/Ped Projects Eligible for TIFIA Loans
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The day after President Obama’s State of the Union plea to improve economic opportunity for struggling Americans, New Jersey Democrat Albio Sires introduced a bill that he says will help meet that goal. His bill [PDF] would build on the TIFIA loan program, which is so beloved by Congress its funding was expanded by a […]
Will Obama’s SOTU Pledge to Flex Executive Power Extend to Transpo?
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Maybe it doesn’t matter what President Obama says in his State of the Union. According to a Washington Post analysis, his batting average for last year’s SOTU proposals was a .208. In 2013, the president pleaded for tax reform, an American Jobs Act, $50 billion for a Fix-It-First infrastructure repair binge, a “Partnership to Rebuild […]