Streetsblog Network
Will Toronto Get Cars Out of the Way of the King Street Streetcar?
Despite running through some of Toronto’s most densely populated areas, King Street is designed like a suburban road. Cars have dominion while the city’s streetcar has no dedicated right-of-way despite high ridership — so it sits in heavy traffic. But it looks that’s about to change. Toronto recently announced plans to overhaul King Street by 2017 with a pilot project to shift space from … Continued
January 19, 2016
Free Parking Is a Terrible Investment for Transit Agencies
Does it make sense for cash-strapped transit agencies to spend millions of dollars on park-and-ride facilities and then give those parking spaces away for free? The Minnesota Valley Transit Authority, which operates in the Minneapolis suburbs, is going to spend $6.6 million to build a 330-car garage at its Apple Valley Transit Station. Matt Steele at Streets.mn ran the numbers, … Continued
January 15, 2016
Missouri Lawmaker Wants to Require Tall Fluorescent Flags for Cyclists
In what is perhaps the most comical anti-bike legislation to come out of a statehouse in years (and that is really saying something) a Missouri lawmaker has proposed legislation that would require any cyclist riding on a “lettered county road” to use an orange, fluorescent flag that stands at least 15 feet off the ground. One … Continued
January 14, 2016
Social Engineering! Cities That Build More Parking Get More Traffic
Build parking spaces and they will come — in cars. New research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board finds a direct, causal relationship between the amount of parking in cities and car commuting rates. University of Wisconsin researcher Chris McCahill and his team examined nine “medium-sized” cities — with relatively stable … Continued
January 13, 2016
Blaming Pedestrians While Absolving the Streets That Kill Them
It didn’t take long for Louisville to notch its first pedestrian death of the year. Brian O’Neal, 46, was killed on the sixth day of 2016 while trying to cross Dixie Highway. The fact that Dixie Highway was the site of this fatality shouldn’t have surprised anyone who’s paying attention to pedestrian safety in Louisville. The city’s first pedestrian injury also happened on Dixie … Continued
January 13, 2016
Northeast Ohio to State DOT: Road Expansions Getting Out of Hand
If you could point to one aspect of American transportation policy that’s more disastrous than all the others, expanding highways and roads to the point of absurdity is probably it. In northeast Ohio, cities like Cleveland and Akron were hollowed out by highway building, but the state DOT still privileges road expansion instead of maintenance or investment in transit, … Continued
January 12, 2016
Straightening Out the Vestigial Kinks in Bus Routes
Just a few months after Houston reorganized its bus network to provide more frequent service where more people can use it — without increasing the operating budget — ridership is already on the upswing. A lot goes in to bus network analysis and how to put scarce resources to better use. But some inefficiencies clearly stand out on a … Continued
January 11, 2016
Portland Bike-Share Ready to Roll Thanks to $10 Million From Nike
“Huge” is how Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland described the news yesterday that Nike will sponsor Portland’s upcoming bike-share system to the tune of $10 million. Bike-share has taken much longer than expected to get off the ground in Portland. With Nike’s sponsorship, the city will be moving forward with a bigger network than it’s been planning. The … Continued
January 8, 2016
A Letter-Grade System for Walkable Retail Buildings
What makes a building walkable? Or rather, what kind of buildings make a city walkable? David Barboza at Network blog Straight Outta Suburbia has been giving the matter some thought. He lays out his letter grade system for retail buildings in a recent post: An “A” building has to comply with the following rules: The building is placed … Continued
January 7, 2016
Philly Reduced Its Public Parking Supply and More Spaces Opened Up
If you remove a bunch of parking from the center of a city, you’ll get carmageddon, financial ruin, and the complete unraveling of society as we know it — right? That’s what you tend to hear at public meetings when a proposal that would reduce parking comes up, but as this real-life example from Philadelphia shows, there’s really nothing … Continued
January 6, 2016