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
What If Traffic Engineers Were Held to Safety Standards Like Carmakers?
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It’s been a rough few days for auto makers. News broke last week that Volkswagen will be fined because the carmaker manipulated the data from its diesel vehicles to make emissions look lower, deceiving U.S. environmental regulators. And on Thursday, General Motors reached a $900 million settlement with the Justice Department for covering up a defect in its ignition switches that claimed the lives of at […]
Is Houston Serious About Becoming a Multi-Modal City?
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There’s been a fair amount of fanfare recently about the news that Houston is likely to surpass Chicago sometime soon as America’s third largest city. You can debate whether the comparison is very useful, due to variations in land area. But there’s no denying that Texas is growing fast. The Lone Star State is attracting two-and-a-half times more new […]
A Misguided Fix for Traffic Congestion in Silicon Valley
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According to a recent study of transit riders in Denver covered by CityLab, people who work within a 15-minute walk of a rail station are more likely to commute by train than people who live close to transit but don’t work by a station. Network blog Peninsula Transportation Alternatives says the study underscores how a proposal aimed at reining in traffic in Palo […]
Wisconsin Spends on Billion Dollar Interchanges While Potholes Swallow Roads
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An excellent recent Politico article “Overpasses — A Love Story” — took a close look at the policies of Republican Presidential hopeful Scott Walker and his big, big spending on highway infrastructure in Wisconsin. It’s a pretty sick dynamic. Highway interchanges in the state are becoming increasingly astronomical in size and in cost. And all that spending on road expansion […]
Park(ing) Day Scenes From Coast to Coast
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Today is a very fun day in cities around the U.S., when advocates for better public spaces unleash their imaginations on the dreary places where we normally store cars. Park(ing) Day is “an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks,” according to its organizers. Below we are showcasing […]
Cleveland Traffic Engineer Puts Buffer on the Wrong Side of the Bike Lane
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Cleveland is finally installing buffered bike lanes along some major streets, but with the buffer between the bike lane and the curb, not between the bike lane and traffic. At first, many people thought this design was a mistake. But it has now been painted on two streets at the behest of Cleveland’s traffic engineer, Andy Cross. Local blog GreenCityBlueLake reports that […]
Bike Commute Rate in Portland Reaches a New High
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New Census data out this week shows that the bike commute rate in Portland is higher than ever, exceeding the 7 percent threshold for the first time. Meanwhile, in the tier below Portland, about half a dozen large and mid-sized cities are neck and neck, Tom Fucoloro at Seattle Bike Blog reports: Seattle (3.7 percent) is now in a […]
North Carolina Lawmakers Try to Sabotage Durham-Orange Light Rail
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State lawmakers in North Carolina launched a sneak attack this week on plans for light rail between Durham and Orange County — and nobody’s sure exactly who’s behind it or why they did it. Leaders in Durham and Orange are counting on the state to deliver about 10 percent of the funding for the $1.5 billion, […]
Toronto Leaders Say They Hate Congestion — So Will They Support New Tolls?
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Toronto fumbled on creating a more walkable, connected city when city leaders chose not to tear down the Gardiner East elevated waterfront highway. Mayor John Tory said it was important to rebuild the Gardiner “to keep congestion under control,” even though experience suggests traffic would have returned to its former levels as drivers adjusted to the […]
What Cities Are Learning About Making Bike-Share More Equitable
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So far, the customer base of American bike-share systems has skewed toward affluent white men. But cities have been working to make the systems more useful and accessible to a broader spectrum of people, and in a new report, the National Association of City Transportation Officials has compiled some of the lessons learned. Here are a […]
Ferguson Commission Report Calls for Better Transit
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The police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, touched off a protest movement that gripped the country and elevated the profile of racism and police violence as a national issue. It also raised questions about a host of factors that have shaped Ferguson and communities like it: the suburbanization of poverty, inequality, and residential segregation. This week […]
House Dems: We Won’t Support a Transpo Bill That Cuts Bike/Ped Funding
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House Democrats won’t stand for any cuts to federal funding for walking and biking infrastructure. That was the gist of a letter signed by every Democratic member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week. Groups aligned with the Koch brothers and their organization Americans for Prosperity have pushed to eliminate all federal funds for walking, biking, and […]