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
Peter Norton: We Can Learn From the Movement to Enshrine Car Dependence
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Yesterday, we published part one of my interview with Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia and the author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. We talked about whether the push for infrastructure investment is always code for increasing car capacity, and how the Vision Zero campaign […]
Q&A With Peter Norton: History Is on the Side of Vision Zero
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Last week, a bunch of bigwigs gathered to talk infrastructure in one of Washington’s most historic and prestigious sites, the Hay-Adams Hotel across the street from the White House. I was offered an opportunity to interview former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and a host of other VIPs. But — […]
Conquering the Unbearable Whiteness of Bike Advocacy: An Equity How-To
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Many bicycle advocacy groups find themselves in a sticky position today: They’re increasingly aware that their membership doesn’t reflect the diversity of the broader population, but they’re not sure how to go about recruiting new members, or how to do it in a way that doesn’t amount to tokenism. The League of American Bicyclists has […]
Got Transit Troubles? The Problem Could Be the Chain of Command
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If you still have to juggle multiple farecards for the various transit systems in your area — or if urgent maintenance issues in the city core are going unattended while the suburbs get a shiny new station — the problem might run deeper than the incompetence everyone is grumbling about. The root of it all […]
Schlepping By Bicycle: The Next Big Thing in Women’s Bike Advocacy?
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Why don’t women bike as much as men? It’s a question that’s been getting a lot of press for the last three years or so since the explosion of Women Bike onto the national advocacy scene. Only about 24 percent of bikes on the street have women’s butts on them. What’s going on? The conventional […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Zero Deaths, Zero Cars, Zero Tundra Voles
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Special guest Damien Newton of Streetsblog LA joins Jeff and me on this episode to tell us all about the Los Angeles DOT’s new strategic plan, which includes a Vision Zero goal: zero traffic deaths by 2025, a vision all of our cities should get behind. He walks us through the oddities of LA politics and […]
So Your City Is Adding HOT Lanes. Will They Work for Transit?
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High-occupancy vehicle lanes can help incentivize carpooling (and let solo drivers sit in punishing congestion). But too often, transportation agencies spend millions of dollars to widen the road to make carpool lanes, instead of simply designating existing lanes. To recoup some of the expense, the agencies also let drivers pay to use the new “high-occupancy/toll […]
Livable Streets or Tall Buildings? Cities Can Have Both
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Kaid Benfield’s new blog post on density is getting a lot of buzz over at NRDC’s Switchboard blog. Benfield, a planner/lawyer/professor/writer who co-founded both LEED’s Neighborhood Development rating system and the Smart Growth America coalition, has some serious street cred when it comes to these matters. And on this one, he’s with Danish architect Jan Gehl, […]
Talking Headways Podcast: OMG Enough About Millennials Already
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Jeff is back from Rail~volution with all the highlights from the sessions he skipped because he was deep in conversation in the hallways. Isn’t that what conferences are for? We discuss what we do and don’t get out of these big meetings. We also get into CityLab‘s examination of the gap between public support for […]
Will Montgomery County Botch the Streets in a Model Suburban Retrofit?
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Four years ago, White Flint, a neighborhood of North Bethesda, Maryland, most known for its shopping mall, caught the attention of urbanists around the nation with a proposal to reimagine car-oriented suburban streets as a walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhood. Montgomery County adopted a plan for the town that would narrow its wide arterial roadways and […]
Complete Freeways? Florida Tries Bike Lanes on Highway Bridges
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A few years ago, a person living in a working-class neighborhood of Miami and commuting to the tourism district in Miami Beach could pretty much forget about walking or biking there. Her choices were either to pay for the bus or buy a car, but healthy, active transportation was impossible — or at least, illegal. […]
Talking Headways Short: The Real News About America’s Driving Habits
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Consider this a bonus track. A deleted scene at the end of your DVD. Extra footage. Or, consider it what it is: A short podcast episode Jeff and I recorded two and a half weeks ago that never got edited because I went to Pro-Walk Pro-Bike and he went to Rail~Volution and we recorded (and […]