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
The Top 100 Neighborhoods for Bicycle Commuting Have a 21% Mode Share
| | 26 Comments
City rankings of bike-friendliness — while fabulous click-bait for their purveyors — obscure dramatic differences among neighborhoods. Los Angeles doesn’t appear on any cycling top 10 lists, but the area to the north and west of the University of Southern California has a 20 percent bicycle mode share. The city of Miami Beach is no bike […]
Arlington Offers Cash Bike-Share Memberships to the Unbanked
| | 3 Comments
Washington, DC, is 50 percent black, but only 3 percent of Capital Bikeshare members are. As in many cities, the DC bike-share system’s users are disproportionately white, educated, and employed. As advocates and city officials have tried to make this economical and healthy transportation option more widely accessible, they’ve persistently come across a major obstacle: […]
Transit and Equity Advocate Stephanie Pollack to Lead MassDOT
| | 52 Comments
Stephanie Pollack was one of the first transportation experts who made a serious impression on me. A few weeks after I started working at Streetsblog, at my first Rail~volution conference, she gave a presentation on the complex relationship between transit, gentrification, and car ownership. Her energy, intellectual rigor, and passion for social justice were apparent […]
Streetsie Awards: Results, Part Two
| | 13 Comments
You’re back! I hope the first day of the new year was everything you’d hoped. Here at Streetsblog, we’re wrapping up the 2014 Streetsie Awards. First, the Streetsie for Most Disappointing Decision goes to: Nashville. Advocates started out the year worrying that city officials were going to water down the plan for center-running bus lanes […]
Streetsie Awards: The Results, Part One
| | 126 Comments
Happy New Year, everybody! Before we start fresh with a bright new year in which we will undoubtedly avoid all the mistakes we made this year (and every year before that), let’s take a look back at some highs and lows of 2014. The votes have been counted, and it’s time to reveal the first […]
The Streetsies Have Landed: Cast Your Vote for the Best and Worst of 2014
| | 18 Comments
You’ve been waiting for it all year: your chance to sit in judgment of everyone who’s been making our transportation system what it is today, from the advocacy heroes to the DOT bureaucrats to the drunk drivers. And you’ll be glad to know that this year’s batch of Streetsie polls are almost completely devoid of […]
NHTSA Touts Decrease in Traffic Deaths, But 32,719 Ain’t No Vision Zero
| | 18 Comments
Twenty-four-year-old Taja Wilson was killed near the Louisiana bayou in August when a driver swerved on the shoulder where she was walking. Noshat Nahian, age 8, was killed in a Queens crosswalk on his way to school in December by a tractor-trailer driver with a suspended license. Manuel Steeber, 37, was in a wheelchair when he was […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Here I Am, Stuck in Seattle With You
| | 8 Comments
Stuck in Seattle or Stuck in Sherman Oaks. There are so many places to get stuck these days and so many clowns and jokers making it worse. First, poor Bertha, stuck 100 feet under Seattle. All the tunnel boring machine wanted to do was drill a 1.7-mile tunnel for a highway that won’t even access […]
DeFazio, Norton, and Larsen Take on Dangerous Street Design
| | No Comments
Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) is already proving that he’ll put some muscle into the fight for bike and pedestrian safety in his new post as ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. DeFazio and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), top Democrat on the Highways and Transit Subcommittee, have signed on to fellow T&I […]
Pima County Holds Better Sidewalks Hostage to Get a Road Expansion
| | 5 Comments
West of downtown Tucson, Arizona, the city runs up against the interstate first and then the mountains, cutting off development. But east of downtown, the city sprawls on for miles. The Sunshine Mile, a shopping and dining corridor centered on Broadway Boulevard, stretches two miles just east of downtown, between Euclid Avenue and Country Club […]
Congress Trims TIGER (But Doesn’t Hack It to Pieces) in 2015 Spending Bill
| | 3 Comments
The drama is over; the House and Senate have both passed the “cromnibus” spending bill [PDF] that funds government operations through the end of fiscal year 2015. And the Department of Transportation’s TIGER program survived. While small, TIGER has proven to be a significant source of funding for local transit and active transportation projects, enabling […]
Talking Headways: Level of Disservice
| | 4 Comments
In California, whether you’re building an office tower or a new transit line, you’re going to run up against the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The law determines how much environmental analysis you need to do for new projects. But sadly, in practice it’s better at propagating car-oriented development than improving the quality of the […]