It’s been nearly ten months since we first started building the Streetsblog Network — a group of bloggers around the country and around the world who write about livable streets, transportation policy, sustainable development and related topics. To find these folks, we asked our friends for tips and then went out hunting on the Internet. […]

In the last couple of weeks, the issue of cellphone use and texting while driving has finally been shoved into the national consciousness, thanks to an excellent series of articles by Matt Richtel in The New York Times. Even the United States Senate has been moved to sit up and take notice. Of course our […]

When non-transportation-geeks ask me why transportation policy is a topic worthy of more attention on the national stage, I often start by talking about the public health implications. Not only are tens of thousands of Americans killed and injured in car crashes every year, not only are countless thousands of others killed and sickened by […]

It’s the height of summer, the stretch of endless lazy days when — at least in the American dreamworld — kids hunt for adventure in packs through the shimmering heat. A time when they make their own fun. A time of bicycles and improvised games and ice cream, of luxuriant boredom and the discovery it […]

The other day, a woman on foot was killed by a someone driving a car in New Jersey. Sadly, that isn’t terribly unusual. What made this death more "newsworthy" — elevating it briefly to the CNN headline stack yesterday — was the fact that Alexis Cohen, the woman who was left on the side of […]

Can a bike-sharing program transform a city? To mark the second anniversary of the Vélib system in Paris, Streetsblog Network member World Streets has a post arguing that it can, if it’s done on a sufficient scale: One of the complaints currently being voiced in the UK press about the new public bike start-up in […]

It’s Friday. It’s summer. Let’s face it, you shouldn’t be looking at a computer right now. But since you are — maybe you’re at work or something crazy like that — we’ll give you some fun stuff from the Streetsblog Network today. Fun, with a little undertone of serious. First, via Transit Miami, we present […]

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we’re headed to Louisville, Kentucky, where Broken Sidewalk highlights grassroots efforts to prevent a massive expansion of the I-64 highway on the Ohio River waterfront. A local advocacy group called 8664.org (as in, "let’s 86 the 64") is opposing the Ohio River Bridges Project, which would cost $4.1 billion and […]

New York isn’t the only city that’s experimenting with closing roads to improve traffic and create better conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. Today, from Streetsblog Network member Human Transit, we hear of a bridge in Vancouver where a lane of car traffic has been given over to cyclists: Happy cyclists coming off the Burrard Bridge […]

In today’s New York Times article about how the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration withheld research data on the risks of cellphone use while driving, one little nugget in particular caught my attention: [Dr. Jeffrey Runge, then the head of the highway safety agency,] said [the chief of staff for Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta] asked […]

What’s really slowing these cars down? Probably not bikes. Photo by richardmasoner via Flickr. What is it about bicycles that drives some motorists so crazy? Anyone who’s ever ridden a bike more than a handful of times in this country has experienced it. The honking, the rude remarks, the vehicles speeding past with drivers shouting “get out of […]

They seem to be coming out at an ever-increasing pace: rankings of cities and nations based on how livable they are, or how bicycle friendly, or how green and happy, put together by various advocacy groups, think tanks and magazines. The media loves to pick these up, and let’s face it, they’re fun. But as […]