It has a nice ring to it: using oil and gas revenue to shift transportation off oil and gas dependence. President Obama announced a plan to do just that on Friday — but the details of his plan are disappointing if you want to see the conversation on clean transportation go beyond cars. The Energy Security […]

If you’ve been on a U.S. street anytime in the past few years, it comes as no surprise to hear that way too many Americans are yammering away on their cell phones — or worse, OMG’ing and LOL’ing with their friends on text and email — while driving. A new report from the CDC — […]

As driving continues to stagnate in America, transit ridership keeps rising. Last year saw the second highest annual ridership since 1957, despite the fact that the nation’s busiest transit systems had several days of blackout due to Superstorm Sandy. The numbers still haven’t topped 2008, when gas prices spiked above four dollars a gallon for the first […]

If bicyclists want to convince policymakers of the benefits of cycling, they need to stop talking about cycling. That was one major lesson of this year’s National Bike Summit, thanks to some strategic research done by a friendly consultant. So the Summit’s theme was “Bicycling Means Business” – and the economic impacts of a healthy […]

The House of Representatives voted to subtract $785 million from the transportation budget this week, trimming dollars from transit, New Starts and highway safety programs as part of a “continuing resolution” measure that will set spending levels through 2013. The vote, coming on the heels of last week’s mandatory budget cuts from the sequester, goes […]

Tuesday morning, Rep. Earl Blumenauer took his usual place behind the podium at the National Bike Summit. (He never misses a Bike Summit.) “I’m coming up this morning and smiling at someone going past me on the bike lane on Pennsylvania Avenue,” Blumenauer said. “Remember four years ago, I talked about risking my life on […]

When you talk to policy-makers, do you complain about how bicyclists lost out in the last transportation reauthorization and demand that cycling get its “fair share” of funding? Do you tell them that more and more people are riding bikes, and maybe they ought to try it too? If so, you’ve been doing it all […]

Why would a representative from AAA be the keynote speaker at the National Bike Summit? “It may seem surprising,” admitted Bike League President Andy Clarke.  And even AAA PR Director Yolanda Cade acknowledged that the 750 bicyclists in the room may be asking themselves, “‘Why is AAA here today?'” After all, she said, “We do have ‘Automobile’ […]

Everything you think you know about bicycling is wrong. At the National Women’s Bicycling Forum this morning, one message came through: the underrepresentation of women and people of color in cycling isn’t simply due to safety concerns and lack of protected infrastructure, as is often surmised. It’s more complicated than that. Megan Odett, who founded Kidical Mass […]

For years, the federal government has adopted roadway guidelines that fall far short of what’s needed — and what’s possible — to protect cyclists and pedestrians. By “playing it safe” and sticking with old-school engineering, U.S. DOT allowed streets to be unsafe for these vulnerable road users. But that could be changing. The bike-friendliest transportation […]

The consequences of the near-certain sequester for aviation have been well publicized by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s recent media blitz, but less well-known are the effects for surface transportation. LaHood broke that silence in a memo to department staff earlier this week and released yesterday by Politico, warning that even after taking measures like “instituting hiring freezes, cutting contracts, […]

Welcome to Sequestration Week. Congress has until Friday to strike a deal that would avoid a set of dreaded automatic budget cuts. The president is blaming the crisis on House Republicans, who are in turn laying blame on Senate Democrats. Unlike any number of previous budget crises, no one really thinks that Washington can pull […]