Streetsblog Network

Is your city skittish about reducing parking minimums? Here's one way to ease people into the idea that new buildings shouldn't be forced to include lots of parking along with housing, and it comes from Portland -- Maine.

You can tell a lot about a place by its outdoor seating. So says Darin Givens at ATL Urbanist, who compares a sidewalk in Atlanta where cafe seating looks inviting to a place where it essentially fails.

Boulder, Colorado, is considered one of the best cities for biking in the U.S. But the car is still king on Boulder's streets, and designs like road diets and protected on-street bike lanes are still new concepts for people to digest.

Like any city, Atlanta needs real bike infrastructure to make cycling an appealing option for most people. But like many other cities, a lot of times Atlanta only seems to be able to muster the will to designate leftover, marginal spaces to cyclists, putting them in potentially dangerous, or at the very least, highly uncomfortable positions.

There's been a fair amount of fanfare recently about the news that Houston is likely to surpass Chicago sometime soon as America's third largest city. You can debate whether the comparison is very useful, due to variations in land area. But there's no denying that Texas is growing fast. The Lone Star State is attracting two-and-a-half times more new households from other states than the next biggest gainer: Florida.

According to a recent study of transit riders in Denver covered by CityLab, people who work within a 15-minute walk of a rail station are more likely to commute by train than people who live close to transit but don't work by a station.

An excellent recent Politico article "Overpasses -- A Love Story" -- took a close look at the policies of Republican Presidential hopeful Scott Walker and his big, big spending on highway infrastructure in Wisconsin. It's a pretty sick dynamic.

New Census data out this week shows that the bike commute rate in Portland, is higher than ever, exceeding the 7 percent threshold for the first time. Meanwhile, in the tier below Portland, about half a dozen large and mid-sized cities are neck and neck, Tom Fucoloro at Seattle Bike Blog reports:

Toronto fumbled on creating a more walkable, connected city when city leaders chose not to tear down the Gardiner East elevated waterfront highway. Mayor John Tory said it was important to rebuild the Gardiner "to keep congestion under control," even though experience suggests traffic would have returned to its former levels as drivers adjusted to the new situation.