Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Streetsblog.net

When Congress passed a long-term transportation bill for the first time in more than a decade earlier this month, People for Bikes called it “a great day for bikes,” and Momentum Magazine called it a “win for bikes.” But is it? The bill reserves $820 million for biking and walking infrastructure annually in its first two years, […]

Back when Seattle and the state of Washington made the (regrettable) decision to replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct with an underground highway, the consolation was that the elevated highway running between downtown and the waterfront would come down and make way for a nice surface street with dedicated transit lanes. Proponents of the deep bore tunnel even gave their plan […]

On Saturday, the COP21 summit in Paris culminated with a precedent-setting climate change agreement. Nearly 200 nations are on board, but their commitments don’t go far enough to head off catastrophic global warming. It wasn’t just heads of state meeting last week in Paris. If a two-degree celsius rise in global temperatures and the devastating fallout […]

When engineers make decisions about streets, they tend to emphasize the “peak hour” — the morning and evening rush when traffic is at its most intense. For the most part, city streets are still designed to move motor vehicles during this relatively short period of time, to the detriment of people outside of cars — i.e. the people who live in […]

Washington, DC, is the latest city to consider changing its traffic laws to require cyclists to yield at stop signs and red lights but not come to a complete stop unless necessary. Similar proposals have recently surfaced in New York and San Francisco. The proposed rule is commonly known as the Idaho Stop, after the one state that’s […]

Alex Ihnen at NextSTL uncovered this video from a 1965 television program about traffic and commuting in the St. Louis region. Noting the growing number of businesses in the suburbs with “free parking,” the narrator asks, “Who needs to go downtown at all?” This leads to a vision of the future that turned out to be eerily […]