New Jersey

Montclair, New Jersey, is the latest American city to fall for the dangerous fiction that outlawing the act of walking while looking at a mobile device will make people safer.

A survey of Black and Hispanic residents in New Jersey found that one out five males reported being unfairly stopped by police while biking, and 14 percentage of respondents said fear of profiling is a barrier to biking.

While federal transit funding stagnates, the nation's largest rail and bus systems have been delaying critical maintenance projects. Without sustained efforts to fix infrastructure and vehicles, the effects of deteriorating service in big American cities could ripple across the national economy, according to a new report from the Regional Plan Association [PDF].

One of the big downsides to sprawl is the public cost of maintaining infrastructure that is extended over wide areas. A new study of New Jersey by Smart Growth America [PDF] attempts to quantify this relationship by looking at the amount of space devoted to roads in communities of varying densities.

New Jersey is the most population-dense state in the country, and many residents get to work via one of its several transit systems. But too many of New Jersey’s transit stations are surrounded by single-family housing, severely limiting the number of people -- especially low-income people -- with convenient, walkable access to transit. Some entire transit lines are out of reach for people of modest means.

Governor Chris Christie has really made a mess of New Jersey's transportation finances. Since 2011, the governor's "flipping the couch cushions" strategy has resulted in the state amassing an additional $5.2 billion in debt.

We're halfway through the first round of the 2014 Parking Madness tournament, with Kansas City, Detroit, Chicago, and Jacksonville having advanced to the next round.

eff Wood and I are back with episode 8 of the Talking Headways podcast. We talk about Los Angeles Metro's decision not to extend light rail all the way to LAX (and what they're doing instead), plus some analysis of what rail can really do in a city as spread-out as LA. Then we head east to Princeton, New Jersey, where we debunk the thesis that low sales of luxury condos somehow equates to a rejection of walkability. And finally, back west to Seattle, which finds itself with a similar problem to LA: how to bring more density to settled single-family areas?