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
Study: “Shared Space” Slows Drivers While Letting Traffic Move Efficiently
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The idea behind “shared space” street design is that less can be more. By ditching signage, traffic lights, and the grade separation between sidewalk and roadbed, the shared space approach calms traffic and heightens communication between drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. Instead of following traffic signals on auto-pilot or speeding up to beat the light, motorists have to pay attention […]
New Evidence That Protected Bike Lanes Get People Cycling More
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Cities making the most progress on protected bike lanes are seeing bicycling rates go up. But at the scale of a specific street with a new protected lane, it’s hard to know how much of the increase in bike counts is due to cyclists moving over from nearby streets, and how much is due to people biking the route for the […]
Obama’s Politically Impossible Transpo Plan Is Just What America Needs
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It may be “seven years too late,” as tactical urbanist Mike Lydon put it, but President Obama has released a transportation proposal that calls for big shifts in the country’s spending priorities. Obama’s proposal would generate $30 billion annually from a $10-per-barrel surcharge assessed on oil companies. More importantly, the revenue is linked to a substantial shift in what transportation projects get […]
Progress on Detroit’s Effort to Fix Its Badly Broken Transit System
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Detroit’s transit system has been in crisis now for years. Among the horror stories chronicled by riders: Buses that never come, two-hour commutes, jobs lost to unreliable service. But there’s hope in an effort to integrate the region’s disjointed urban and suburban transit systems into a unified regional network. David Sands at Network blog Mode Shift gives an update on what […]
Which Cities Are Adding Walkable Housing the Fastest?
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As more Americans look for walkable places to live, cities are struggling to deliver, and a lot of neighborhoods are becoming less affordable. A new analysis by Kasey Klimes of Copenhagen’s Gehl Studio illustrates how major metro areas have let their supply of walkable housing shrink over the years, contributing to today’s housing crunch. In this chart, Klimes shows how […]
A University Built Around the Car Sees the Light
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Fresno State University was, until very recently, your prototypical car commuting school. The school began as an isolated agricultural institution and is still connected to a large university farm. Its transportation services haven’t extended much beyond subsidized parking. But over time, writes James Sinclair at Streetsblog Network member Stop and Move, the area around Fresno State became more […]
Road Spending Threatens to Crowd Out BRT in Montgomery County
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Montgomery County, Maryland, has an ambitious forward-looking vision for a bus rapid transit system, calling for an 81-mile network that would offer a way to bypass gridlock in the growing D.C. suburbs. But that plan is now in jeopardy. It looks like county officials with the power of the purse are signaling they’d rather shell out […]
Where Does Bernie Sanders Stand on Transportation and Cities?
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With Bernie Sanders pulling off a virtual tie with Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses, it’s time to take a closer look at his transportation policy platform. Two months ago, Clinton released a transportation platform that echoes a lot of the Obama administration’s agenda without including any ideas that might really upset the highway-centric status quo. Does Sanders […]
St. Louis “Beat Congestion” and Now Commute Times Are Longer
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St. Louis is every highway planner’s dream. Consistently ranked among the least-congested cities in America, the region’s car commuters spend a smaller share of their trips to work sitting in traffic than all but two other cities. That means St. Louis car commuters aren’t encumbered much by other car commuters, just like in those car commercials. But […]
Transit Investments and the Failure of Randal O’Toole’s Short-Term Thinking
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The Los Angeles Times recently ran a big story to the effect that the region’s major investments in transit are not paying off, since ridership has recently declined. But there are a lot of problems with the paper’s analysis, which Streetsblog LA looked at last week. Jarrett Walker at Human Transit has also taken issue with how the LA Times published sweeping conclusions about long-term […]
Houston Mayor Calls for “Paradigm Shift” Away From Highway Widening
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Newly elected Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner gave a remarkable speech yesterday in Austin [PDF], calling on the state to change its transportation priorities and stop pouring billions into widening highways. Turner told the Texas Transportation Commission, the appointed board that leads Texas DOT, that the state needs a totally new transportation paradigm. The speech is phenomenal, and […]
Designing City Streets to Suit 47 MPH Drivers Is a Recipe for Failure
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Gravois Avenue is an important commercial street in St. Louis that also happens to be designated a state highway. It’s currently slated for a redesign, providing a huge opportunity to make the street work better for walking and biking. But unfortunately the highway-like mentality of state transportation planners persists. Alex Ihnen at NextSTL reports that Missouri DOT is using highway design […]