Tanya Snyder

How embarrassing. The Republican National Committee’s outreach to young potential voters misses the mark so badly they're just proving the point they were hoping to disprove: The party is absolutely clueless about young people.

You think the conflict between Uber and regular taxi drivers -- and cities like Seattle -- is bad? Check out how new taxi apps in China are upending the transportation system and central economic planning. Meanwhile, in Houston, a flea market has brought revitalization without gentrification to a depressed area near the airport, and now an urban design firm is bringing in pop-up infrastructure like mobile libraries and grocery stores, along with sidewalks and bikeways. And Californians are proving that the culture shift away from the automobile and toward other modes of transportation is happening -- maybe even faster than we'd thought.

Secretary Anthony Foxx has made clear that safety -- and specifically, safety for bicyclists and pedestrians -- is a priority of his administration. If that’s true, his administration sure has a funny way of showing it.

What a week! Transit ridership skyrocketed (ahem, by 1.1 percent) to levels not seen since 1956 (depending how you look at it). Radio Shack is shutting down 20 percent of its stores. Is brick-and-mortar retail collapsing -- and is it just as well, if getting delivery from Amazon is more efficient than driving to the store anyway? Plus, there's a new video game for transit nerds to stay up all night obsessing over!

Yesterday the American Public Transportation Association reported that Americans made more transit trips in 2013 than in any other year since 1956. Of course, per capita ridership is still low compared to the 1950s, and we're nowhere near the ridership peaks of the 1940s. But when transit trips increase 1.1 percent while population rises 0.7 percent, you know change is afoot.

Bike advocates from places like Portland, New York, and Boulder got a little Rust Belt envy this week when Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto spoke to the National Bike Summit Tuesday morning.

So, Bertha is stuck digging an enormous highway tunnel underneath Seattle. Jeff Wood and I ask the essential question: Does Seattle really need to spend $2.8 billion on a new traffic sewer, when traffic on the Alaskan Way Viaduct has been plummeting?

Jeff Wood of the Overhead Wire (now working with NRDC's crack transportation team) and I talk to Randy Simes in this week's podcast about the streetcar movement in Cincinnati -- and how they finally grabbed the long-elusive gold ring.

This week, Jeff Wood and I get indignant about Miami-Dade County's misuse of transit funds for roads, and we speculate about why -- with the current success of pedestrian projects like Times Square -- old-style pedestrian malls are still going belly-up. And then we peek behind the curtain at an exciting new frontier for urban planning: connecting urban form with the feelings they inspire.

Organizers of major sporting events, from this weekend's "Mass Transit Super Bowl" to the Sochi Olympics a week from now, may benefit from a lesson learned during the 2012 London Olympics: a tactic transportation planners secretly call “the Big Scare.”