Angie Schmitt
Recent Posts
How Much Can Bicycling Help Fight Climate Change? A Lot, If Cities Try
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A new study from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy attempts to measure the potential of bikes and e-bikes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Buenos Aires has been building out a network of protected bike infrastructure. If this kind of commitment were employed in cities worldwide, the climate benefits would be huge. Photo: ITDP
ITDP’s conclusion, in short: Bicycling could help [...]
Animation Explains How Bad Planning Makes Car Ownership Compulsory
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This is a pretty great animation explaining how American cities were undermined by a slavish dedication to storing and moving cars. It’s by comedian Adam Conover from TruTV’s “Adam Ruins Everything,” who also made this great video explaining the screwed up origin of the word “jaywalking.”
The best part may be the animated version of parking guru [...]
More Evidence That Helmet Laws Don’t Work
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Living in an area with high cycling rates is linked to lower levels of hospitalization for bicyclists. There is no similar link for helmet laws. Graph: University of British Columbia
If you want to increase cycling safety in your city, drop the helmet law and focus on getting more people– particularly women — on bikes, with [...]
Parking Requirements Are Based on Wild Guesses
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People trying to build walkable places around transit stations still have to contend with parking requirements. Photo: City of Millbrae
This week there’s a huge gathering in Dallas for the annual Railvolution conference. One of the hot topics for all those people trying to build walkable places: parking requirements.
At one session, University of Utah professor and eminent urban researcher Reid Ewing spoke alongside [...]
House Transpo Bill Spells Trouble for Transit Projects Across America
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Chicago’s Red and Purple Line modernization project could be delayed or worse under the funding formulas in the House transportation bill, says Representative Dan Lipinski. Image via CTA
A provision in the House GOP’s new transportation bill threatens to upend how transit agencies fund major capital projects, delaying or killing efforts to expand and maintain rail and [...]
“Adam Ruins Everything” Explains the Origins of “Jaywalking”
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Think the origins of “jaywalking” in 1920s car industry propaganda are too esoteric for a mainstream audience? Watch this clip from truTV’s “Adam Ruins Everything” that adapts research from Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic, a history of how motordom conquered American streets in the early 20th century. It’s a good sign when productions backed by the entertainment industry start devoting attention to topics like this.
Hat [...]
Is This a Downtown Street or a Surface Highway?
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This is the plan for West Street in a part of Indianapolis that’s supposedly becoming more pedestrian-friendly. Image: Urban Indy
Indianapolis recently decided to convert two downtown streets — West New York and West Michigan — from one-way speedways to calmer, two-way streets. The changes should help make the city’s downtown campus area more walkable, but now it looks [...]
Cleveland Traffic Engineer Puts Buffer on the Wrong Side of the Bike Lane
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At the behest of a not-very-forward-thinking traffic engineer, Cleveland has been installing buffered bike lanes backwards. Photo: Angie Schmitt
Cleveland is finally installing buffered bike lanes along some major streets, but with the buffer between the bike lane and the curb, not between the bike lane and traffic.
At first, many people thought this design was a mistake. But it has now [...]
Program Would Make Transit Free for Commuters to Downtown Columbus
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Downtown Columbus workers might soon have access to free transit. Photo: DowntownColumbus.com
Only about 5 percent of workers in downtown Columbus arrive by transit daily, according to census data. So Columbus — technically the fifteenth largest city in the U.S. — isn’t a huge transit city, by any means. But an innovative new proposal could help dramatically increase the [...]
Ohio Cities to State DOT: No More New Roads, Just Fix What We Have
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A potholed street in Boardman, Ohio, a middle-class suburb of Youngstown. The Youngstown area has a Facebook group with almost 800 members devoted to mocking these potholes. Photo: Potholes of Youngstown and Surrounding Areas
Given that the federal Highway Trust Fund is broke and the Interstate Highway System is more or less complete, maybe — just maybe! — [...]
Parking Madness 2015: Can Your Parking Crater Compete?
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Rochester won last year’s Parking Madness bracket with this downtown catastrophe where a real neighborhood once stood.
March is a special month on Streetsblog. It’s the time when the nation’s worst downtown parking scars face off head-to-head for the shame of winning the “golden crater” — and the local publicity bonanza that comes with it. For [...]
How the Lure of Spending Keeps Dumb Highway Projects Alive
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Decades ago, Ohio officials drew a line on a map — the Eastern Corridor, a highway for commuters living in Cincinnati’s eastern suburbs. No matter how much time has passed and how little sense it makes to build that highway today, that line can still seem like destiny.
This is the message from the village of [...]