A handful of leaders in the House and Senate just introduced a bill that would finally require states and metro areas to design and build safer streets for everyone. Plus, our new report shows which U.S. House representatives have the highest rate of people struck and killed while walking in their districts.
Transportation for America, a program of Smart Growth America, announces its inaugural class of fellows for the new Arts, Culture and Transportation Fellowship to help 11 individuals in four cities take their work at the intersection of arts and transportation to the next level.
Charlotte is booming. Since 2003, upwards of 12,000 new housing units have opened along the LYNX Blue line. But when planners went back to look at the development over the last decade, they weren’t entirely satisfied with the results. So the city decided to create new TOD zoning that would better reflect the needs and context of different stations as we hear on this month’s episode of Building Better Communities with Transit.
The nation’s roads are deteriorating, contributing to a looming financial problem. When the first edition of Repair Priorities was released in 2011, the condition of the nation’s road network was a direct reflection of decades of underinvestment in repair. In the years since, policymakers continue to pay lip service to the notion of prioritizing repair … Continued
A new opinion piece in the Washington Post from Transportation for America takes a contrarian view of all the talk about money during Infrastructure Week. In short, let’s skip a special infrastructure plan and focus on policy; without good policy more spending could actually do more harm than good.
It’s Infrastructure Week again and politicians are back at it, bemoaning our “crumbling roads and bridges” and insisting we must spend more to fix the problem. But we’ve got some cold water to throw on this pity party: Despite more transportation spending over the last decade, the percentage of the roads nationwide in “poor condition” increased from 14 to 20 percent.
Advocates and policy makers around the country are working hard to make streets safer. But the messages some twitter accounts were sending on Bike to School Day inadvertently highlight how far we still have to go to make sure everyone can safely use the road.
Under President Trump, the USDOT has effectively turned the formerly innovative BUILD program—created to advance complex, hard-to-fund, multimodal projects—into little more than a rural roads program, dramatically undercutting both its intent and utility. A new analysis illuminates how the program has changed and what Congress can do about it.
Like a number of other 1950’s-era, aging elevated highways that are (or have already) reached the end of their designed lifespans, the elevated Buffalo Skyway bridge in New York could be the latest to be replaced with a more people-centric design that better connects the city to its waterfront. Smart Growth America’s CEO Calvin Gladney has been selected to join a panel of other notable experts to judge a state-chartered design competition about its future.
This month on Building Better Communities with Transit we talk with Kendra Freeman, the director of community engagement for the regional Metropolitan Planning Council, about TOD in Chicago. A recent update to the city’s TOD policy puts a new focus on equitable development in a city that has seen stark differences in outcomes based on zip code.