Streetsblog Network

In San Rafael, California, a woman is dead and a man is in critical condition after a dump truck driver, who claimed not to see them as they were crossing the street, turned left and ran them over in the crosswalk last week. It's just one of countless similar tragedies playing out in the U.S. In this case, writes David Edmondson at the Greater Marin, simply giving people a walk signal before turning drivers get a green light could have prevented the loss of life:

At The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark has made it a tradition to catalog new transit projects every year. He reports that 2014 will see a significant expansion of rail and bus rapid transit lines. "Virtually every metropolitan region in the United States and Canada is investing millions of dollars in new transit expansion projects," he writes:

We live in an era when school ratings are everywhere. Assigning "grades" to schools based on academic performance is a famously tricky proposition, though. Maybe there are other metrics that are much more straightforward.

Looking back at the year in transportation reform, there are certainly many reasons to be encouraged about what's happening in cities around the United States. Here are some 2013 retrospectives from Streetsblog Network members that give snapshots of two places that are making progress on active transportation, and one where the prevailing dynamic is still stuck in the 20th Century.

Remember how suburban office parks used to be all the rage? Their strongest selling point was that you didn't have to pay to park at them. And if you lived in the suburbs anyway, you could avoid the hassle of going into the city, basically, ever. What could go wrong?

The Seattle City Council is poised to pass some legislation that would crack down on popular ridesharing services like Lyft and UberX.

The conflict over the Cincinnati Streetcar is clearly rooted in some sort of geographic tension. The new mayor, whose strength comes from the city's outer neighborhoods, has taken aim at a project held very dear by people who live in the city center -- and now the whole country's watching to see if the city will squander the millions it's already spent on the project.

Street grids are a key ingredient in a walkable city. Fortunately, many American cities -- especially the older ones -- were endowed with tightly knit grids, dispersing traffic of all types and creating good connections for people on foot.

This is a make or break week for the Cincinnati streetcar. The Federal Transit Administration has given the city until Thursday to provide "unequivocal" assurances that the "paused" project will proceed at the agreed upon schedule, or the agency will revoke its $45 million grant to the project.