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
Free Parking Is a Terrible Investment for Transit Agencies
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Does it make sense for cash-strapped transit agencies to spend millions of dollars on park-and-ride facilities and then give those parking spaces away for free? The Minnesota Valley Transit Authority, which operates in the Minneapolis suburbs, is going to spend $6.6 million to build a 330-car garage at its Apple Valley Transit Station. Matt Steele at Streets.mn ran the numbers, […]
Study: Sharrows Don’t Make Streets Safer for Cycling
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Sharrows are the dregs of bike infrastructure — the scraps cities hand out when they can’t muster the will to implement exclusive space for bicycling. They may help with wayfinding, but do sharrows improve the safety of cycling at all? New research presented at the Transportation Review Board Annual Meeting suggests they don’t. A study by University […]
Missouri Lawmaker Wants to Require Tall Fluorescent Flags for Cyclists
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In what is perhaps the most comical anti-bike legislation to come out of a statehouse in years (and that is really saying something) a Missouri lawmaker has proposed legislation that would require any cyclist riding on a “lettered county road” to use an orange, fluorescent flag that stands at least 15 feet off the ground. One […]
Social Engineering! Cities That Build More Parking Get More Traffic
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Build parking spaces and they will come — in cars. New research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board finds a direct, causal relationship between the amount of parking in cities and car commuting rates. University of Wisconsin researcher Chris McCahill and his team examined nine “medium-sized” cities — with relatively stable […]
Blaming Pedestrians While Absolving the Streets That Kill Them
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It didn’t take long for Louisville to notch its first pedestrian death of the year. Brian O’Neal, 46, was killed on the sixth day of 2016 while trying to cross Dixie Highway. The fact that Dixie Highway was the site of this fatality shouldn’t have surprised anyone who’s paying attention to pedestrian safety in Louisville. The city’s first pedestrian injury also happened on Dixie […]
New Evidence That Bus Rapid Transit Done Right Spurs Development
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More American cities are considering bus rapid transit, or BRT, as a cost-effective method to expand and improve transit. One of the knocks against BRT, as opposed to rail, is that it supposedly doesn’t affect development patterns. But a new study [PDF] by Arthur C. Nelson of the University of Arizona and released by Transportation for America finds that BRT lines can indeed […]
Portland Bike-Share Ready to Roll Thanks to $10 Million From Nike
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“Huge” is how Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland described the news yesterday that Nike will sponsor Portland’s upcoming bike-share system to the tune of $10 million. Bike-share has taken much longer than expected to get off the ground in Portland. With Nike’s sponsorship, the city will be moving forward with a bigger network than it’s been planning. The […]
New Philly Mayor: Politicos Can No Longer Park on the City Hall Sidewalk
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The Jim Kenney administration is off to a promising start in Philadelphia. One of the mayor’s first acts in office was to end the thoroughly obnoxious practice of letting government honchos park on the sidewalk “apron” around City Hall — a public space. There was a Tumblr dedicated to chronicling this highly visible abuse of government privilege. And ending the […]
A Letter-Grade System for Walkable Retail Buildings
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What makes a building walkable? Or rather, what kind of buildings make a city walkable? David Barboza at Network blog Straight Outta Suburbia has been giving the matter some thought. He lays out his letter grade system for retail buildings in a recent post: An “A” building has to comply with the following rules: The building is placed […]
What Happened When a Newspaper Became an Advocate for Bicyclists
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In too many cities, newspaper coverage of bicycling has stoked some of the darker aspects of human nature. Opinion pieces about bike lanes tend to cater to the reactionary opposition, goading the trolls of the comments section, where casual death threats are standard fare. But a newspaper in South Florida has taken a very different approach over […]
Philly Reduced Its Public Parking Supply and More Spaces Opened Up
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If you remove a bunch of parking from the center of a city, you’ll get carmageddon, financial ruin, and the complete unraveling of society as we know it — right? That’s what you tend to hear at public meetings when a proposal that would reduce parking comes up, but as this real-life example from Philadelphia shows, there’s really nothing […]
Will the New “Free Range Kids Law” Protect Parents Who Let Kids Walk?
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Last spring, Alexander and Danielle Meitiv became public faces of the “Free Range Kids” movement when their children were picked up by police in Silver Spring, Maryland, while walking home from a local park. The sight of a 10-year-old and a 6-year-old unsupervised prompted police to open a child neglect case against the couple. The investigation was dropped […]