Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.
Ben Fried
Recent Posts
Wishing for “Truly Open Streets” in 2015
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It’s a new year, and around the Streetsblog Network people are posting their 2014 retrospectives and resolutions for the year ahead. Kristen Jeffers at The Black Urbanist shares these thoughts to kick off 2015: Remember this picture of me? I was playing on a B-cycle demonstration bike on the street that I helped paint, to […]
Keep Streetsblog Going Strong – Donate and Enter to Win a New PUBLIC Bike
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If you look at the state of American streets, the scale of our transportation dysfunction is epic. Nothing conveys the failure of the car-based system better than this: More than 30,000 people lose their lives in traffic annually — which means the U.S. could prevent about 20,000 premature deaths each year if we catch up […]
How Does the Threat of Police Violence Affect How You Use the Street?
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When the news came out yesterday that a Staten Island grand jury had failed to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold, like many people I found the outcome difficult to comprehend. With clear video evidence showing that Pantaleo broke NYPD protocol and a coroner’s report certifying that Garner’s death […]
The Link Between Northeast Ohio’s Flooding and Its Sprawl
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After a string of major flooding events, residents of Northeast Ohio are looking for someone to blame, reports Tim Kovach. Are local governments at fault for the property damage from these floods? Or should residents, as a great poet once said, blame it on the rain? Neither question really gets to the heart of the […]
Miami Highway Builders Try to Sell a New Sprawl Project to the Public
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The Miami Dade Expressway Authority (MDX) wants to build a highway extension in the southwest fringes of the city, near the edge of the Everglades, and to do that it needs to ingratiate itself with the public. At an open house to kick off the public-facing phase of the planning process, agency staff were well-prepared […]
Midwest Rail Advocates Take the Fight to Scott Walker
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In November, voters in 36 states will head to the polls to choose governors. Among the state leaders up for reelection is Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who faces a strong challenge from Democrat and former Trek Bicycle executive Mary Burke. Walker is one of three Republican governors who rejected high-speed rail funds from the Obama administration […]
The Citi Bike Deal Is Great News For Other Cities, Too
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Andrew Tangel at the Wall Street Journal had an encouraging update this week on the Citi Bike buyout plan first reported by Dana Rubinstein in Capital New York. It looks like the city is days away from announcing a deal in which REQX Ventures, an affiliate of the Related Companies and its Equinox unit, will […]
Time Is Running Out to Become a Streetsblog Superhero — Give Today
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This is it! The final days and the final giveaway of our spring pledge drive. So far, 221 superheroes have donated to Streetsblog and Streetfilms. To reach our goal, we need 179 more readers to step up and give by Sunday at midnight. If you’ve been been holding out until the end of the pledge […]
Be a Streetsblog Superhero and Give to Our Spring Pledge Drive
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We’ve all seen the graphs: Driving and car ownership have passed their peak in America, while transit ridership and biking are on the rise. On the ground, however, city buses still move at a crawl, bogged down in traffic. Most streets remain too dangerous for most people to feel comfortable biking on them. And the […]
HUD Expected to Loosen Restrictions on Mixed-Use Financing Soon
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As Smart Growth America showed us earlier today, the costs of sprawl are high. So it’s a bitter irony that federal rules have made it more expensive to build compact, mixed-use development by tightly limiting the share of commercial space in projects that receive financing from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Fortunately, those […]
Should Streets Be Designed for Easy Double-Parking or Safe Bicycling?
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After removing a downtown Providence highway segment, Rhode Island officials are figuring out how to redevelop 20 acres of prime city land. One outcome that local advocates are pushing for is a redesign of South Main Street with a two-way protected bike lane, reports James Kennedy at Transport Providence. In this proposal, most of the […]
Parking Politics Take a Bite Out of Downtown Raleigh
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Donald Shoup, the godfather of parking policy, likes to point out that city planners make decisions about parking based on the politics of avoiding on-street parking squabbles, instead of broad public policy concerns like the affordability of housing, the viability of transit, or the health of downtown. Today on the Streetsblog Network, Leo Suarez at […]