Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Recent Posts
You Won’t Soon Forget These Photos of Ghost Bikes. That’s Exactly the Point.
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You’ve seen them, locked to signposts on the side of the road. Maybe you’ve helped install one. Maybe you’ve cried at the sight of them. Ghost bikes memorialize people who have been killed while riding bikes. The bikes don’t usually stay up for more than a few weeks or months before the city removes them […]
Surgeon General’s Warning: Unwalkable Places Are Hazardous to Your Health
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Physical activity is essential to people’s health, but dangerous streets and spread-out, sprawling communities prevent Americans from getting enough of it, says the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy. Murthy issued a call to action this morning to highlight how walking — and building walkable places — can benefit a nation where chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis […]
Shoes Off, Laptops Out, All Aboard!
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Rail travel has many advantages over flying, like the view out the window, or arriving at a downtown location. Perhaps most importantly: You don’t have to get to the train station an hour early to go through security checkpoints like you do in airports. But last month’s attack on a Paris-bound train has amplified calls to beef up rail […]
The Appalling Rollback of Truck Safety Provisions in the DRIVE Act
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A battle is brewing over the Senate transportation bill’s approach to truck safety. Though large trucks are involved crashes that kill nearly 4,000 people a year — a number that has grown by 17 percent over the past five years — the DRIVE Act actually rolls back what few protections exist. The bill would allow longer […]
Highway Safety Group Tells Pedestrians to Be Safe on Roads Built to Kill Them
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The Governors’ Highway Safety Association wants you to know it’s working really hard on pedestrian and bicycle safety. The coalition of state road safety agencies just put out another report in a series of well-intentioned but a off-base attempts to draw attention to the issue. In Everyone Walks: Understanding and Addressing Pedestrian Safety, GHSA notes that pedestrian […]
Indianapolis Brings Street Life Downtown With a Flurry of Quick Changes
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Indianapolis is building public support for a major street redesign the same way DIYers and tactical urbanists do: by testing out temporary changes. Monument Circle, where the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument stands tall at 285 feet, is a downtown traffic circle and city park with a lot of potential, but with three lanes of traffic whirling […]
Louisiana Raids Its Maintenance Fund to Pay for Road Expansions
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This year, Louisiana will raid $21.6 million from its road maintenance fund to pay for road projects, including some expansions, that have been on the books since 1989. The state will have to keep stealing from the fund for the next 27 years to pay for them. Voters approved a package of 16 road and bridge […]
The Key Human Factors That Can Lead Any City to Transform Its Streets
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How did Portland get to be a national model for sustainable transportation and walkable development? Yes, Mayor Neil Goldschmidt stopped the Mount Hood Freeway from being built in 1974 and began negotiations that eventually led to the implementation of the urban growth boundary. But Goldschmidt didn’t do it alone. Grassroots activists from a group called […]
Transit Union Slams DRIVE Act
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Yesterday, the Senate passed both a three-month transportation extension and a six-year reauthorization bill (albeit with three years of funding), which the Senate hopes to workshop with the House in the fall. The bill’s name itself — the DRIVE Act — raised the hackles of transit advocates. Looking deeper, it seems those advocates have more […]
With New Rule, Feds Forget Their Own Best Ideas on Street Design
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Antiquated, car-oriented road design guidance is losing its vise grip on our cities. Other manuals are challenging the dominance of the “design bible” issued by AASHTO, the coalition of state DOTs. But the federal government might be missing an important opportunity to enshrine street safety for all modes. Over the past few years, the Federal Highway Administration […]
Congress Set to Pass Yet Another Short-Term Transpo Funding Patch
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The 35th transportation extension in the last six years is about to pass. The House had passed a five-month extension, the Senate insisted on moving forward with its six-year bill, then the House proposed a three-month extension, and somehow that sounded great to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. To win McConnell’s support for the short-term […]
Major MARTA Expansion Could Transform the Atlanta Region
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Transit planners in the Atlanta area are getting serious about the largest expansion in MARTA’s history. MARTA officials have proposed new, high-capacity service into North Fulton County and east into DeKalb County that could link important job centers by rail for the first time. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says it could “change the face of Atlanta.” The new […]