Streetsblog Network

Traffic collisions are one of the leading killers in America, particularly for young people.

With Milwaukee looking to implement a BRT system connecting downtown to the suburb of Wauwatosa, Ken Smith of Urban Milwaukee was eager to get a look at how BRT works in Quito, when he was in the city for the recent UN Habitat III summit. The system impressed him, and Smith wonders if Milwaukee will be able to duplicate the factors that make Quito's BRT successful:

Tuesday night was a great night for transit in Seattle, where the region's $54 billion light rail measure sailed to a win. Under normal circumstances, transit advocates would have been elated.

On Tuesday night, voters approved major transit improvement plans in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Raleigh, and Seattle.

America just elected Donald Trump, who got a foothold in national politics by fanning a conspiracy about Barack Obama’s country of origin, who ran a campaign premised on a naked appeal to racist anger and resentment, who shredded every norm of conduct on his way to the presidency. He’s going to occupy the White House for at least the next four years, and for at least two years the Democratic opposition won’t control either house of Congress.

Today's a huge day for transit on local ballots.

Milwaukee has shrunk since the 1960s, when its population was about 19 percent bigger than today, leaving the city with a lot of excess road capacity. As a result, Milwaukee is a city where it's relatively easy to replace general traffic lanes with bike lanes. Other cities in the Rust Belt -- and anywhere suffering from population loss -- could be doing the same.

Wide highways, big parking lots, dangerous intersections designed for speed -- there are a lot of downsides to all this car-centric infrastructure, including the way it saps the fiscal health of cities.