Sharrows: the consolation prize of bike infrastructure. Dick van Veen, a Dutch bike engineer who is currently working in Ottawa, says cyclists often ask him about this symbolic gesture toward bike safety. He says in America, sharrows are often painted on an otherwise inhospitable road. The Dutch use them too, but they have a very different approach, he explains at Urban […]

The deaths of two pedestrians and a bicyclist in quick succession in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood have local street safety advocates demanding reforms and the mayor promising swift action. So naturally a crack reporter had to interject that, hey, pedestrians sometimes break traffic rules! A recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece by Ed Blazina adopts the perspective of a Port Authority bus driver who complains people […]

Traffic fatalities are on the rise up again, with an increase of 8.1 percent in the first half of 2015, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. As is their practice, NHTSA officials are attributing the problem to driver (or passenger) error — drunk driving, speeding, failure to wear seatbelts — but did promise “new initiatives to protect vulnerable road users such […]

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 […]