Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Studies & Reports

Highway Boondoggles: Widening I-70 in Denver

By Jeff Inglis and John Olivieri | Jan 25, 2016 | No Comments

In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the original came out in 2014), U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group teamed up to profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. Streetsblog will be serializing the case studies in the report. Today, we look at the widening of I-70 in Denver, a project with a […]

Highway Boondoggles: Widening I-95 Across Connecticut

By Jeff Inglis and John Olivieri | Jan 19, 2016 | 21 Comments

Last year Congress passed a multi-year transportation bill. Like previous bills, it gives tens of billions of dollars to states every year to spend with almost no strings attached. How much of this federal funding will state DOTs devote to expensive, traffic-inducing highway projects that further entrench car dependence and sprawl? In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the […]

Study: Sharrows Don’t Make Streets Safer for Cycling

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 14, 2016 | 145 Comments

Sharrows are the dregs of bike infrastructure — the scraps cities hand out when they can’t muster the will to implement exclusive space for bicycling. They may help with wayfinding, but do sharrows improve the safety of cycling at all? New research presented at the Transportation Review Board Annual Meeting suggests they don’t. A study by University […]

Social Engineering! Cities That Build More Parking Get More Traffic

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 13, 2016 | 19 Comments

Build parking spaces and they will come — in cars. New research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board finds a direct, causal relationship between the amount of parking in cities and car commuting rates. University of Wisconsin researcher Chris McCahill and his team examined nine “medium-sized” cities — with relatively stable […]

New Evidence That Bus Rapid Transit Done Right Spurs Development

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 12, 2016 | 41 Comments

More American cities are considering bus rapid transit, or BRT, as a cost-effective method to expand and improve transit. One of the knocks against BRT, as opposed to rail, is that it supposedly doesn’t affect development patterns. But a new study [PDF] by Arthur C. Nelson of the University of Arizona and released by Transportation for America finds that BRT lines can indeed […]

Real Estate Giant: Suburban Office Parks Increasingly Obsolete

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 10, 2015 | 23 Comments

What tenants want in an office building is changing, and the old model of the isolated suburban office park is going the way of the fax machine. That’s according to a new report from Newmark, Grubb, Knight and Frank [PDF], one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world. The old-school office park does “not offer the […]

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