Philadelphia

Police and local reporters rushed to blame a 14-year-old girl who was struck by a speeding driver in a marked crosswalk.

In many American cities, free on-street parking remains more abundant than affordable housing. Despite the housing crunch spreading to more urban areas, the politics of parking threatens to keep it that way.

Perhaps you saw video on social media this week showing hundreds of teenagers riding bikes, popping wheelies on a Philadelphia expressway. It was an unauthorized freeway takeover that ought to have brought a smile to even the sourest face.

The official name for it was the "traffic box" -- the 4.7-square-mile chunk of center city Philadelphia where incoming motor vehicles weren't allowed when Pope Francis was in town this weekend. But rather than the traffic nightmare some anticipated, something wonderful happened: #popenstreets.

Of U.S. cities with more than a million residents, the one where people bike the most is Philadelphia. In 2012, the U.S. Census estimated Philadelphia’s bicycle commute rate at 2.3 percent [PDF], higher than Chicago (1.6 percent) and New York (1.0 percent).

In a decision that local advocates say delivers a “strong message” to drivers, a Philadelphia jury awarded a cyclist $2.4 million in damages earlier this month for injuries she sustained in a 2011 collision.

This weekend, Philadelphia ran subways all night on two of its lines for the first time in 23 years, and ridership jumped. The city normally runs a night-owl bus that mirrors the subway between midnight and 5 a.m., but the early Sunday morning subway ridership this weekend was 35 percent higher than the average for the bus.

Transit-oriented development in the Chicago region is falling behind cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, according to a report released in May by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a local "think and do tank." In "Transit-Oriented Development in the Chicago Region" [PDF], CNT warns that Chicago's failure to focus housing and jobs near transit is creating additional financial burdens for households who have no choice but to shoulder the costs of car ownership.

Chicago’s Union Station is a key national transportation hub and one of our city’s iconic structures, but in some ways it’s sadly underutilized. The Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable transportation and development in the region, wants to change that. Their fifth annual placemaking contest, Activate Union Station, challenges Chicagoans to come up with low-cost ideas for activating three of the station’s grand public spaces: the Great Hall, the east-facing Canal Street arcade, and the riverside plaza of the station’s east building.