The above photo could be a scene from Any Suburb, USA. Except … what’s the deal with the helmet-free cyclist in street clothes? “Welcome to Orange County,” writes Andrew Stokols at TheCityFix. “No, not Orange County, California. This is Orange County, Beijing.” Stokols says walled-off suburbs modeled on U.S. “gated communities” are gaining popularity among the affluent […]

Officials in Portland, Oregon, are expected to adopt a Vision Zero program, with the goal of preventing traffic deaths and serious injuries in the next 10 years. Jonathan Maus of Bike Portland reports: On Wednesday Portland City Council is poised to take two steps on the road toward a full embrace of Vision Zero. They’ll […]

Whether you own a car or not, if you live in a city, there’s a good chance you pay for parking. Building parking spots is expensive, but most cities require developers to build a certain amount of parking per residence, driving up the cost of housing. Nick Magrino at Streets.mn reports that Minneapolis is rethinking that […]

Earlier this year a street safety plan for Hillcrest and other San Diego neighborhoods was derailed after NIMBYs complained about the loss of curbside parking. The plan was prompted to prevent incidents like the 2012 crash when a driver hit a mother and her 3-year-old daughter in a Hillcrest crosswalk at an intersection with a history of […]

A Virginia state agency is weighing how to allocate new transportation funds, presenting an opportunity for the state to do more than widen and build roads. David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington reports that the Commonwealth Transportation Board is developing a formula to allocate funds approved by the state legislature in 2013. Though a new […]

Last year New York City made it a misdemeanor for a driver to harm a pedestrian or cyclist who is walking or biking with the right of way. Since then, the Right of Way Law has come under attack from the MTA bus drivers union and members of the City Council, many of whom helped […]

Washington, DC, is poised for big improvements to its performance parking program. Michael Perkins at Greater Greater Washington reports that ParkDC is set to expand “on some of downtown’s most in-demand blocks” in Gallery Place. By resetting meter prices every few months based on the rate of occupied curbside parking spaces, the new ParkDC zone could match […]

Looking at a map of commute times, Patrick Kennedy at Walkable Dallas-Fort Worth finds that people who live in census tracts with some of that region’s lowest household incomes spend the most time traveling to and from work. Many commutes are more than an hour each way. Kennedy says this is what happens when road-building guides […]

After a couple of vetoes by Governor Jerry Brown, California finally has a 3-foot passing law. As of June, 24 states plus the District of Columbia have such a law, which requires drivers to give cyclists a minimum buffer of 3 feet when passing from behind. With California’s law in effect as of today, Rick Bernardi […]

Chalk this one up as a worthwhile proposal offered in bad faith. Streetsblog readers may remember Mayor John Cranley as the pol who wasted a ton of taxpayer money trying to kill the Cincinnati streetcar. But lately Cranley has come out as a would-be parking reformer, proposing a $300 annual fee for on-street parking in […]

Six years after Lagos, Nigeria, launched the first Bus Rapid Transit program in all of Africa, the system handles a whopping 25 percent of all commutes and plays a key role in the city’s ongoing effort to reduce stifling vehicle congestion. The average Lagos commuter spends over three hours in traffic each day, writes the […]

David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington reports that city traffic engineers and city planners have very different ideas on what to do with a closed freeway segment in southeast DC. The District Department of Transportation came up with a range of proposals for the Southeast Freeway between the 11th Street Bridge and the Barney Circle neighborhood. […]