Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Traffic

The Feds Quietly Acknowledge the Driving Boom Is Over

By Phineas Baxandall | Jan 7, 2015 | 13 Comments

The Federal Highway Administration has very quietly acknowledged that the driving boom is over. After many years of aggressively and inaccurately claiming that Americans would likely begin a new era of rapid driving growth, the agency’s more recent forecast finally recognizes that the protracted post-World War II era has given way to a different paradigm. […]

Talking Headways Podcast: Here I Am, Stuck in Seattle With You

By Tanya Snyder | Dec 19, 2014 | 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 […]

The Importance of Driving to the U.S. Economy Started Waning in the 70s

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 18, 2014 | 23 Comments

Earlier this year, following a slight uptick in U.S. traffic volumes, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a press release, “More people driving means our economy is picking up speed.” He’s not the only person to equate traffic with economic growth. Even former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once said, “We like traffic, it […]

Talking Headways: Level of Disservice

By Tanya Snyder | Dec 12, 2014 | 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 […]

It’s Happening: Washington State Revises Traffic Forecasts to Reflect Reality

By Angie Schmitt | Oct 21, 2014 | 8 Comments

The amount that the average American drives each year has been declining for nearly a decade, yet most transportation agencies are still making decisions based on the notion that a new era of ceaseless traffic growth is right around the corner. The Wisconsin Department of Transportation, for example, has overestimated traffic on its roads by […]

How to Reduce Traffic By 30 Percent: Strike Fear Into Motorists

By Tanya Snyder | Jan 31, 2014 | 11 Comments

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 […]

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