Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Car Dependence

Tesla’s Parking Problem Says a Lot About Elon Musk’s Brand of Tech Saviorism

By Angie Schmitt | Apr 14, 2017 | No Comments

It's fitting that the Palo Alto headquarters for Elon Musk's flagship company, Tesla, has an epic logistical problem caused by the spatial inefficiency of its core product.

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America’s Traffic Death Toll Is a National Disgrace

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 17, 2017 | No Comments

More than 40,000 Americans were killed in traffic last year, according to new estimates from the National Safety Council, the worst toll in a decade. The U.S. transportation system claims far more lives each year than peer countries. If America achieved the same fatality rate as the UK, more than 30,000 lives would be saved each year.

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Car Dependence and the Troubling Rise of Subprime Auto Loans

By Angie Schmitt | Jun 10, 2016 | No Comments

There have been warning signs about the growth in subprime auto loans for years now. But the issue got some very high-profile attention last week when JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon raised concerns that there may be a bubble in the auto lending market. Since the economic recovery began, lending institutions have actually loosened standards for car loans. The auto […]

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More Driving, More People Dying on America’s Streets

By Angie Schmitt | Feb 9, 2016 | No Comments

On Friday, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released new data [PDF] showing that traffic deaths are up. Up quite a bit. During the first nine months of 2015, 26,000 Americans were killed in traffic collisions — a 9.3 percent increase over the same period in 2014. According to Autoblog, that would work out to the highest one-year percentage […]

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The Feds Want to Reform the Cult of “Level of Service”

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 28, 2016 | No Comments

“What you measure is what you get,” the saying goes. That’s certainly true for transportation policy. And for a very long time one metric has reigned supreme on American streets: “Level of Service,” a system that assigns letter grades based on motorist delay. Roughly speaking, a street with free-flowing traffic gets an A while one where […]

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Carseats and the Limitations of American Safety Culture

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 18, 2015 | No Comments

One lesson they really hammer home, when you’re a new parent, is the importance of carseats. Hospitals won’t let you take a newborn home from the hospital unless you can show you have a carseat. And they warn you of this fact in Lamaze class and in all the parenting books and on all the […]

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