Angie Schmitt

Mt. Prospect Avenue in Newark has New Jersey's first protected bike lane, as far as we know. But unfortunately it looks like the Garden State will soon be back to zero.

Earlier this year, following a slight uptick in U.S. traffic volumes, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a press release, "More people driving means our economy is picking up speed." He's not the only person to equate traffic with economic growth. Even former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg once said, "We like traffic, it means economic activity," before his administration embraced ideas like congestion pricing, bus lanes, and protected bikeways.

Here's a classic story of traffic engineering myopia. Officials at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet are threatening to remove 17 newly planted street trees in a Louisville suburb.

The highway lobby in Dallas keeps beating the same drum: They talk about projected population growth and predict that highways will become a massive logjam. So they argue Dallas should be building, building, building new highways for these future drivers at a furious pace.

If you're searching for reasons to feel positive about the future, the street transformations pictured below are a good start. Earlier this month we asked readers to send in their nominations for the best American street redesigns of 2014. These five are the finalists selected by Streetsblog staff. They include new car-free zones, substantial sidewalk expansions, superb bike infrastructure, awesome safety upgrades, and exclusive transit lanes.

In an extraordinarily sad irony, the engineer in charge of Columbus, Ohio's complete streets program has been gravely injured in a car crash. His 21-year-old intern was killed.

Barbur Boulevard in Portland is one of the city's most deadly streets, and advocates there have pushed for a road diet that would slow traffic and provide comfortable space for biking and walking. But the state DOT has refused to change the road, in large part due to objections from the local chamber of commerce.

What separates a great bikeway from one that makes you wonder why anyone even bothered?

About a generation ago, many American school districts started shuttering and abandoning walkable neighborhood schools and building replacements in sprawling, undeveloped locations where the land was cheap.

How much car traffic will a new building generate? Engineers and planners are constantly trying to divine the answer to this question in the belief that it will tell them the "right" number of parking spaces to build, or how to adjust streets to accommodate more cars.