Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Recent Posts
Google Shows That When Transit Agencies Free Their Data, Riders Win
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Earlier this week, in a forum about intelligent cities and the ways data can improve urban planning, Carolyn Young of Portland’s TriMet let it slip that Portland was one of the first cities to share its real-time transit tracking data on Google Maps. (Google announced the news two days later.) For transit agencies, letting Google […]
GM CEO: “We Ought to Just Slap a Dollar Tax on a Gallon of Gas”
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Well, it’s unanimous – everyone agrees the country needs a significant hike in the gas tax. Everyone outside of Congress, that is. Last week, General Motors CEO Dan Akerson told The Detroit News that a higher gas tax would help solidify the market for more fuel-efficient cars. Akerson told The Detroit News that, rather than […]
Cul-de-Sacs Are Killing Us: Public Safety Lessons From Suburbia
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People choose suburban neighborhoods over urban ones for myriad reasons: because they can afford it, because the schools are good, because it’s a quiet street, or crimes rates are low, or everyone walks around with baby strollers and golden retrievers, or their family is nearby. But countless other consequences stream from their decision of where […]
Highwayman Inhofe Still Wants to Rob Bike/Ped Funding From Transpo Bill
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Last week, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) briefed reporters on the points of consensus reached by the four leaders of the Environment and Public Works Committee with regard to the transportation bill. In answer to a question by Streetsblog, she said that guaranteed federal funding for bike and pedestrian programs would be in the bill. She […]
Lawmakers Introduce Reality-Based Plan to Achieve “Freedom From Oil”
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Members of Congress of all stripes are trying to show that they’re concerned and responsive to the financial strain caused by high gas prices. Some are recommending more oil drilling. Some want to end subsidies to oil companies. Today, members of the Congressional Livable Communities Task Force suggested that providing more diverse transportation options to […]
Study: Building Roads to Cure Congestion Is an Exercise in Futility
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We hear it all the time: The road lobby insists that the only way to reduce mind-numbing traffic congestion on the roads they built is to build new roads. Federal funding gives huge blank checks to state DOTs, which tend to prioritize road building over transit, bridge maintenance or anything else. But mounting evidence suggests […]
Complete Streets Bill Introduced in Senate
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Earlier this week, 12 senators, led by Tom Harkin (D-IA), introduced the Complete Streets Act of 2011 (S.1056), a companion to the House bill we reported on a few weeks back. The purpose of the bills is to push states and metropolitan planning organizations to fully consider incorporating pedestrian and bicycle safety measures when roads […]
Boxer: Transpo Funding Will Rise in Senate Bill, Bike/Ped Will Be Preserved
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Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, just addressed reporters about the progress of the transportation bill. Rather than holding funding at SAFETEA-LU levels, as we previously reported and as the EPW statement indicated, the committee is planning a $339.2 billion bill – current spending plus inflation, plus an expanded TIFIA […]
Senate Transportation Bill, MAP-21, Freezes Spending at Current Levels
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The Environment and Public Works Committee just released an outline of some core principles of its transportation reauthorization bill. In a statement, the top Republicans and Democrats of both the full committee and the Transportation Subcommittee – Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA), James Inhofe (R-OK), Max Baucus (D-MT) and David Vitter (R-LA) – said: It is […]
T4America: Just Like Plane Crashes, Pedestrian Deaths Are a National Issue
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Over the last decade, nearly 48,000 people were killed in the simple act of walking. Many of them were on streets built only to accommodate fast-moving cars, without safe places for people to walk or cross the street. Transportation for America’s new report, “Dangerous by Design,” includes rankings of states and metro areas, but you […]
Dangerous By Design: How the U.S. Builds Roads That Kill Pedestrians
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If you had to cross this road on your walk to work, wouldn’t you rather drive? Millions of Americans live in communities without safe places to walk. And so they either don’t walk, adding to traffic congestion with every trip, or they do walk, risking joining the ranks of the 47,700 pedestrians killed and 688,000 […]
Scenes From National Bike to Work Day
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Fifty years ago the League of American Bicyclists organized the first Bike to Work Day. Today, more than 500 events were held across the country to encourage people to “bike the drive,” as they say. More than 41 million Americans have participated in National Bike to Work Week at least once, according to a 2002 […]