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
How Seattle Residents Won a Fix for the City’s Most Dangerous Street
| | No Comments
Sometimes calling your city council person or circulating a petition isn’t enough. Here’s an inspiring story about Seattle residents who got creative to highlight their fight for a safer street. Phyllis Porter and Gordon Padelford at Seattle Bike Blog explain Seattle’s Rainier Avenue was badly in need of intervention: With a crash every day on average, 7 businesses […]
“Pocket” Bike Lanes: A Small Step to Make Intersections Work Better?
| | No Comments
A bike lane that appears at an intersection to help guide bicyclists out of the way of turning drivers — in Washington, D.C., they call this a “pocket lane.” David Cranor writes at Greater Greater Washington that the District is looking to add them along streets that don’t otherwise have bike lanes, targeting intersections where they might help avoid conflicts. […]
Study: Even Drivers Prefer Protected Bike Lanes
| | No Comments
When it comes to allocating street space, it is often taken for granted that anything that benefits people on bikes harms people who drive. Such assumptions are contradicted by data showing that cycling infrastructure makes streets safer for all users, and don’t mesh with a new study on motorist preferences. In the latest issue of “Transportation Research,” […]
If People Can’t Afford to Live Near Work, They Probably Won’t Bike Commute
| | No Comments
How out of control are Bay Area housing prices? It costs so much to live in Palo Alto that Kate Vershov Downing — a lawyer who served on the Planning and Transportation Commission — announced this week that she and her husband — a software developer — are moving to Santa Cruz. She resigned her seat on the commission. Before her resignation, Downing had […]
If You Want to Fix Sorry Bus Stops, Don’t Forget to Tell the DOT
| | No Comments
Streetsblog just wrapped up our 2016 Sorriest Bus Stop in America competition, with a waiting area on a state highway in Silver Spring, Maryland, beating out 15 other terrible bus stops for the crown of shame. For our voters, asking people to cross a six-lane divided road with no signal was unforgivable. To make the pedestrian environment around bus stops better, state […]
That Time a Louisville Paper Fantasized About Bombing Its Own Downtown
| | No Comments
When urban renewal took a wrecking ball to American cities in the middle of the last century, some places looked like a war zone. In fact, that bombed-out effect is pretty much what the proponents of “slum clearance” and related policies had in mind. In an amazing relic from June 29, 1955, unearthed by Branden Klayko at Broken Sidewalk, the Louisville Courier-Journal yearned to wipe out the […]
This Tiny Roadside Refuge in Silver Spring Is Your Sorriest Bus Stop, America
| | No Comments
The people have spoken, and the winner of Streetsblog’s 2016 Sorriest Bus Stop in America tournament is this beauty on Colesville Road in Silver Spring, Maryland. In terms of pure danger, it’s hard to top this tiny refuge next to a state highway with no crossing to protect pedestrians from speeding traffic. The last match in the 16-entry tourney was a bit of […]
NTSB Finally Takes an Interest in Cycling Safety — Still Misses the Point
| | No Comments
The National Transportation Safety Board is best known for investigating train crashes and plane crashes to figure out what went wrong. It’s an approach designed to prevent catastrophic incidents that claim several lives at once. But the much bigger risk in America’s transportation system is more mundane — the daily stream of traffic crashes that kill one or two people […]
U.S. Transportation Now Belches Out More Carbon Than U.S. Electricity
| | No Comments
For the first time in almost four decades, the nation’s tailpipes now spew out more carbon emissions than the nation’s smokestacks. It’s an indication of how slowly the American transportation sector is rising to the challenge of preventing catastrophic climate change. Over the past 12 months, carbon emissions from cars and trucks have exceeded carbon emissions from electric power — the first time that’s happened […]
How the New Google Maps May Change the Way You See the City
| | No Comments
What can a Google Maps visual teach us about the cities we live in? Kyle Shelton at Network blog The Urban Edge has been exploring the latest update of Google Maps, which now highlights clusters of businesses, or “areas of interest,” in orange. Shelton says the highlighted zones can reveal unexpected pockets of commercial activity: The surprising diversity of the areas — in character, […]
It’s KC vs. Silver Spring in the Final Round of America’s Sorriest Bus Stop
| | No Comments
This is it, folks — the championship round of Streetsblog’s Sorriest Bus Stop tournament. Each of the 16 bus stops that competed this year — and the agencies who oversee them — deserved a thorough shaming. No transit rider should ever have to wait in the rain for a bus with no posted schedule, or walk in a ditch along […]
Chris Christie’s Transportation Record Is a Bigger Disaster Than Bridgegate
| | No Comments
What a fiasco. Six years after New Jersey Governor Chris Christie killed the ARC transit tunnel under the Hudson so he could avoid raising the gas tax, the jig is up. The state has run out of transportation funding anyway. NJ’s Transportation Trust Fund dried up a month ago, bringing a halt to basic infrastructure projects all over the […]