It’s Washington vs. Burlington in the Parking Madness 2016 Tip Off!
Welcome to Parking Madness, Streetsblog's annual Sweet 16 tournament of parking craters. What's a parking crater? Simply put, it's a depression in the cityscape, a void where car storage has usurped land that should be devoted to buildings.
March 17, 2016
Architect of Houston Bus Overhaul: “Why Haven’t More Agencies Done This?”
Last time we checked in on Houston's bus network redesign, ridership was on the rise just a few months after METRO, the local transit agency, rearranged its routes. The new pattern optimized existing resources, providing more people with access to more frequent bus service without costing more to operate.
March 17, 2016
D.C. Metro Shutdown Should Be a Wakeup Call: Spend Smart on Transit
Today's emergency 24-hour shutdown of the D.C. Metro system is a transit embarrassment of epic proportions. The shutdown follows an electrical fire in a subway tunnel Monday, and will allow for system-wide safety inspections. Metro has been under federal control following a smoke inhalation death caused by a similar problem last year.
March 16, 2016
Imagining a New Future for Empty Garages
If shared fleets of self-driving cars really do hit the streets in the next decade, some big changes are on the horizon. One of the biggest is that individual car ownership will become much less common.
March 15, 2016
Gun Lobby’s New Target: The Bus
Letting people carry firearms on transit vehicles is a new priority for the gun lobby in several states where legislation to expand concealed carry rules to buses and trains is gaining momentum.
March 14, 2016
BeltLine Visionary: It’s Time to Radically Reconceive Urban Infrastructure
Ryan Gravel was just a graduate student at Georgia State University when he came up with the idea for the Atlanta BeltLine -- a ring of parks, trails, and transit that would encircle the city, repurposing derelict space around abandoned train tracks.
March 11, 2016
How to Get Airport Transit Right
The big rail line to the airport is an awfully seductive transit project to many political decision makers. So cities keep heaping resources on flashy airport transit even though the ridership is seldom worth the expense. Toronto, for instance, recently rolled out a new airport line that costs a bundle to ride and is drawing a disappointing number of passengers.
March 11, 2016
It’s True: The Typical Car Is Parked 95 Percent of the Time
Cars are a very inefficient transportation technology for too many reasons to count. They take up huge amounts of space but get driven around mostly empty -- the average private car in the U.S. carries only 1.6 people. A lot of the time, people drive distances that are short enough to easily walk or bike -- 28 percent of car trips are a mile or less, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.
March 10, 2016
Pedestrian Deaths Make Up a Rising Share of U.S. Traffic Fatalities
Pedestrian deaths rose 10 percent in the first half of 2015 compared to the same period the year before, according to preliminary data released by the Governors Highway Safety Association. If that increase held up over all 12 months of 2015, it would be among the worst single-year changes since the GHSA started collecting data in 1975.
March 9, 2016
All the Best Places in Cleveland Are Illegal Under Its Current Zoning
Cleveland's first zoning code was written in 1929, and since then it's been amended in ways that have eroded the walkability of the city. City leaders acknowledge that building compact, mixed-use neighborhoods has basically become illegal under the current zoning code.
March 9, 2016