Recent Streetsblog USA posts about Streetsblog.net

Anyone who does a fair amount of walking to get around will encounter gaps in the pedestrian network sooner or later. Sometimes they might just be minor annoyances, but they can also put people in very dangerous positions. Clark Parker at Streets.mn stumbled into a pedestrian gap when he tried to send a letter on a Saturday afternoon. The only post office open […]

Transportation planners in Austin are in the beginning stages of a pattern just about every community in the U.S. is familiar with. The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (CTRMA) says traffic on a local highway — South MoPac — is going to grow a lot. And if Austin doesn’t spend $400 million building new managed lanes, they […]

Last week, the Austin City Council voted to allow “granny flats” — small accessory dwellings — in some areas zoned for single-family housing, and to reduce parking requirements along transit corridors. These types of reforms make housing more affordable and make neighborhoods more walkable and transit-friendly. Dan Keshet at Austin on Your Feet said the vote highlights new political […]

As the House and the Senate get to work on hashing out a multi-year transportation bill in conference committee, Congress is also putting together its annual spending package for transportation. The annual bill decides the fate of several discretionary programs, and earlier this year it looked like US DOT’s TIGER grants, which tend to fund multi-modal projects at […]

How often do state DOTs lie with numbers to justify building highways? There’s so much funny math buried inside air quality formulas or traffic projections, a better question might be: Do these agencies ever tell the truth? Here’s a case where a dishonest case for highways was flushed out into the open. David Bragdon, former chief of Portland’s regional planning organization, recently accused state DOT […]

Transitions where streets suddenly change are a tricky part of bike lane design. Here’s how street designers in Pittsburgh handled the transition where a two-way bike lane ends at a T-intersection — with a “merge lane” for cyclists turning right across motor vehicle traffic. Bike PGH is enthusiastic about the new design: Have you had a chance to […]