Streetsblog USA

Alex Ihnen at NextSTL uncovered this video from a 1965 television program about traffic and commuting in the St. Louis region. Noting the growing number of businesses in the suburbs with "free parking," the narrator asks, "Who needs to go downtown at all?" This leads to a vision of the future that turned out to be eerily accurate:

Love ’em or hate ’em, big box stores are shrinking their footprints in an effort to fit into city locations.

This week my guest is Miriam Zuk of UC Berkeley’s Center for Community Innovation, who discusses how the team at the Urban Displacement Project has studied and mapped out gentrification and displacement risk in the Bay Area. We talk about the relationship between transit and rising property values, as well as the widespread portrayal of gentrification in the media as a rapidly occurring short-term process.

Indianapolis is building public support for a major street redesign the same way DIYers and tactical urbanists do: by testing out temporary changes.

After flatlining for nearly a decade, the mileage driven by Americans is rising once again. That means more traffic overwhelming city streets, slowing down buses, and spewing pollutants into the air. But to the Federal Highway Administration, it’s a development to report with barely contained glee.

Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.

Mary Newsom of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute joins me this week to discuss everything Charlotte, from its beginnings as a crossroads of Native American pathways to its current incarnation as a fast-growing metropolis. The enormous growth of the region, she says, includes a recent surge of suburban subdivisions that were lying in wait during the recession.

If only more police officials took dangerous driving as seriously as Frank Koss, chief of police in Hinesburg, Vermont. An outraged Koss took to the pages of his local paper this week after a 17-year-old driver killed a local cyclist, saying “this was not an accident.”

This week on the podcast we’re bringing you the keynote address from the 2015 National Bike Summit, hosted by the League of American Bicyclists. The LAB’s Liz Murphy introduces Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett, who talks about how he took his city from being rated as one of the least physically fit to one of the fittest.