Angie Schmitt

When a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shot and killed Philando Castile earlier this month, the encounter began with a traffic stop. The stop fit a pattern: Castile had been pulled over many times before -- 46 times in 13 years -- but few of those citations were for dangerous driving. More prevalent were stops for minor issues like vehicle defects or misplaced license plates -- the type of justifications that police are more likely to use when stopping black and Latino drivers throughout the country.

Earlier this week tech entrepreneur Elon Musk released his updated "master plan" for Tesla, including some thoughts on how autonomous mini-buses will supplant today's transit and "take people all the way to their destination." Like every Musk pronouncement, this one got a lot of buzz -- but it also drew some healthy skepticism.

In the past few years, Congressional Republicans tried and failed to turn the federal transportation program into a highways-only affair. Still, the GOP isn't giving up on eliminating federal funds for transit, walking, and biking.

Tuesday was a very exciting day in Portland, as the city celebrated the launch of its long-awaited bike-share system, Biketown. The network makes 1,000 bikes available in an eight-square mile area of the city.

You can usually count on Vox for accurate, research-based explainers of public policy issues. That's why the new Vox video on red light cameras is so monumentally disappointing.

The lousy state of American bus stops is a serious problem. Transit riders say bad waiting environments are one of their top concerns, according to a recent survey and report by TransitCenter [PDF]. That's why Streetsblog is highlighting some of the sorriest bus stops in the nation this month.

Commuting accounts for only about 15 percent of trips in the United States. But when planners make transportation infrastructure decisions, they often base them on commuting patterns, not other types of trips.

The images are excruciating -- Philando Castile, bleeding to death as his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter look on. A cafeteria supervisor in the St. Paul School District, Castile was pulled over by officer Jeronimo Yanez in the neighboring town of Falcon Heights for having a broken taillight. Yanez fatally shot Castile after he informed the officer that he was carrying a licensed firearm then reached for his driver's license and registration, according to Castile's partner, Diamond Reynolds.

Every year Census data comes out revealing which cities are growing fastest. But what the numbers don't tell us is what kind of growth is occurring and where.

When she was a kid growing up in Minneapolis, biking was as natural to Alice Avidor as breathing the air. But as time went on, biking went from feeling carefree and empowering to something more like a hostile negotiation.