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
The 23-Lane Katy Freeway: A Monument to Texas Transportation Futility
| | No Comments
Fast-growing Texas cities have an enormous traffic problem — that much isn’t in dispute. But the response has been myopic: pouring more and more money into widening highways. Even the road engineers at the Texas Transportation Institute recently acknowledged there’s no way these cities can fund and build highway lanes fast enough to keep pace […]
Compelling Evidence That Wider Lanes Make City Streets More Dangerous
| | No Comments
The “forgiving highway” approach to traffic engineering holds that wider is safer when it comes to street design. After decades of adherence to these standards, American cities are now criss-crossed by streets with 12-foot wide lanes. As Walkable City author Jeff Speck argued in CityLab last year, this is actually terrible for public safety and the pedestrian environment. […]
A Plea for States Like Ohio to Wake Up to the “New Reality”
| | No Comments
Ohio’s cities have been declining, and traffic congestion isn’t the problem. The highway system, if anything, is overbuilt. But state authorities continue to prioritize highway building over every other form of transportation spending. Jason Segedy, the head of Akron’s regional council of governments, is sounding the alarm about it. At his blog, Notes from the Underground, Segedy […]
Federal Court: Wisconsin Uses Bogus Traffic Data to Justify Highways
| | No Comments
State departments of transportation all over the country use specious traffic projections to justify hugely expensive road widening projects. That’s how you end up with the graph on the right — showing how DOTs continued to forecast traffic growth year after year, even as driving stagnated. Wisconsin DOT is perhaps the most notorious manipulator of traffic […]
Atlanta Can’t Fix Its Traffic Problem Without Getting a Handle on Sprawl
| | No Comments
Complaining about traffic is practically a sport in Atlanta. Which makes sense, since traffic in the region is absolutely miserable. What’s interesting, says Darin Givens at ATL Urbanist, is how infrequently the people complaining about traffic mention the primary cause of that traffic — the region’s notorious sprawl. He says: You can’t expect good alternatives to […]
The State of American Infrastructure Spending in Four Charts
| | No Comments
If you’ve checked the news on the subject of American transportation infrastructure lately, you’ve probably heard that the sky is falling. It’s true that Congress can’t get its act together and pass a decent transportation bill, but the amount of money that’s being spent isn’t the problem so much as the fact that we’re spending it […]
Driver Smashes Through House, Hits Baby in Crib. Police: No Biggie!
| | No Comments
If you’re behind the wheel of a car, law enforcement will let you get away with just about anything — even smashing into a house and pulverizing a crib where an infant was sleeping. Guess what the police had to say after a driver in the Seattle suburbs did just that? Here’s the story from Tom […]
Boston Says So Long to the Casey Overpass, a 1950s Highway Relic
| | No Comments
This month, Boston is demolishing a monument to 1950s-era car infrastructure: The Casey Overpass, a short elevated road built in 1955 to whisk drivers over the Forest Hills MBTA station in Jamaica Plain without encountering any pesky things like intersections or pedestrians. The last car drove over the decrepit 1,600-foot-long structure just a few days ago, and construction […]
Will Milwaukee Fall for the Convention Center Shakedown?
| | No Comments
This is how it begins: Local leaders in Milwaukee commissioned a study examining whether the city’s convention center is up to snuff. Surprise, surprise, reports Bruce Murphy at Urban Milwaukee: Hunden Strategic Partners, a consulting firm that loves convention centers, says Milwaukee really ought to be pumping a bunch of public money into expanding its convention facilities and a […]
Can LA Make “Great Streets” If the Mayor Won’t Stand Up for Good Design?
| | No Comments
Los Angeles, with its expanding transit network, is supposed to be in the process of shedding its cocoon of car-centricity and emerging, in the words of a recent Fast Company headline, as America’s “next great walkable city.” The city’s streets, however, didn’t change a whole lot under former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. When Eric Garcetti was elected mayor in 2013, advocates thought […]
What Can We Learn From an Unbuilt Highway in St. Louis?
| | No Comments
Back in the 1960s, planners envisioned a series of expressways slicing through St. Louis. And almost all of the Bartholomew Plan, as it was known, was eventually built. Today St. Louis has among the most highway lanes per capita of any American city. These roads teed up a wave of urban flight and astounding population […]
From Minneapolis, Evidence That the Census Undercounts Walking and Biking
| | No Comments
The U.S. Census is the most widely cited source of data about how Americans get around. It’s updated regularly and it covers the whole country, but it comes up short in a number of ways. The Census only asks about commute trips, and commuting only accounts for about 16 percent of total household travel [PDF]. What […]