Angie Schmitt
Angie is a Cleveland-based writer with a background in planning and newspaper reporting. She has been writing about cities for Streetsblog for six years.
Recent Posts
Transit Opponents Fight Ballot Measures With the Language of Tech Futurism
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Today’s a huge day for transit on local ballots. Ballot measures in Detroit, Indianapolis, Raleigh, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places, could significantly expand transit access for millions of people. In many of these cities, transit opponents have seized on the same feeble argument: Investment in transit isn’t needed because soon Uber and Lyft and self-driving cars will […]
Milwaukee Is Claiming Its Excess Street Space for Bicycling
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Milwaukee has shrunk since the 1960s, when its population was about 19 percent bigger than today, leaving the city with a lot of excess road capacity. As a result, Milwaukee is a city where it’s relatively easy to replace general traffic lanes with bike lanes. Other cities in the Rust Belt — and anywhere suffering from population loss — could be doing the […]
How the Accommodations We Make for Cars Impose Huge Costs on Cities
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Wide highways, big parking lots, dangerous intersections designed for speed — there are a lot of downsides to all this car-centric infrastructure, including the way it saps the fiscal health of cities. Bill Lindeke at Network blog Streets.mn lists seven, from the erosion of the local tax base due to land consumed for highways to public health costs in the form of […]
How Can Cities Make the Most of an Infrastructure Spending Spree?
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Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have indicated that they intend to spend big on “infrastructure” if elected president. Whether this ends up making cities stronger or just fueling more wasteful sprawl, however, is an open question. Cities usually have a hard time accessing federal funds, since the current system funnels most of the money to states DOTs, […]
Will Seattle Blow Its Chance to Reclaim Its Waterfront?
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It’s bad enough that Washington DOT is building a huge underground highway by the Seattle waterfront at enormous expense and financial risk. Now the city is poised to ruin the one benefit of the highway tunnel — better pedestrian connections to the waterfront. Advocates have been warning against replacing the current elevated highway with a highway-like surface street. But […]
Transit Vote 2016: Raleigh’s Chance to Grow Smarter
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We continue our overview of what’s at stake in the big transit ballot initiatives this November with a look at Wake County, North Carolina. Previous installments in this series examined Indianapolis, Seattle, Detroit, and Atlanta. Ask Wake County Commissioner Sig Hutchinson how Raleigh’s transit system is currently functioning, and he doesn’t sugarcoat it. “I just really don’t think we’ve got […]
Pedestrian Shaming — an Annual Rite of Halloween
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We are out on the corner of North Ave and Peachtree W reminding Pedestrians to #SeeAndBeSeen#DriveAlertGapic.twitter.com/C5Q5fKHnCA — Georgia DOT (@GADeptofTrans) October 31, 2016 More pedestrians are killed on Halloween than any other day of the year — by far. The conclusion that transportation agencies all over the country draw from this is that people on foot must be further marginalized […]
Why American Trucks Are So Deadly for Pedestrians and Cyclists
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Large trucks are a leading killer of pedestrians and cyclists in urban areas. While London has recently decided to kick the most dangerous trucks out of the city, in the U.S., truck safety regulations are much further behind. Engineer Alex Epstein of the Volpe Center, a research arm of U.S. DOT, spent five years examining how truck design […]
Will D.C. Metro Fall Into a Transit Death Spiral?
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The situation unfolding for transit riders in Washington, DC, is scary. Few American cities rely on transit more than DC, but the system seems to be caught in a spiral of deteriorating service and declining ridership. With fewer people paying fares, WMATA has less revenue to pay for service, and the cycle continues. WMATA is now planning for […]
What If Climate Hawks Fought Dirty Highways Like They Fight Dirty Energy?
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This Nebraska farm was in the path of #kxl pipeline. And now it’s ready for 100% Clean Energy! pic.twitter.com/JU4FuVyPUB — Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) May 11, 2016 American climate activists’ single biggest achievement in recent years was the defeat of the Keystone XL pipeline. Nothing has unified and energized more people than the fight to keep dirty fossil […]
Transit Vote 2016: Atlanta May Finally Expand MARTA and Beef Up Bus Service
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We continue our overview of what’s at stake in the big transit ballot initiatives this November with a look at Atlanta. Previous installments in this series examined Indianapolis, Seattle, and Detroit. Back in the 1970s, both Atlanta and Washington, D.C., received federal grants to build rail networks. After finishing the first wave of Metro construction, D.C. continued to invest, […]
Will State DOTs Follow Through on Their Goals for Zero Traffic Deaths?
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State DOTs aren’t known for setting ambitious street safety goals. They’re usually more interested in moving traffic than saving lives. But it looks like that’s starting to change as states follow the lead of the federal government’s “Toward Zero Deaths” initiative, which itself was inspired by the spread of Vision Zero campaigns among cities. Even states like Ohio are saying […]