Ben Fried started as a Streetsblog reporter in 2008 and led the site as editor-in-chief from 2010 to 2018. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, with his wife.
Ben Fried
Recent Posts
Congestion Costs Chicago $7.3 Billion Per Year
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You know a city is getting serious about congestion mitigation when a new report comes out measuring how much gridlock costs the region. In New York, it was the 2006 release of Growth or Gridlock, which pegged the annual price of traffic at $13 billion, that set off a public debate about congestion pricing that […]
This Just In: The Media Business Is Auto-Dependent Too
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Think web sites are saturated with car ads? The internet’s got nothing on local TV. The graphic on the right comes from a recent Wall Street Journal article (preview only) on car makers’ attempts to curb their advertising budgets. The amount of money pouring into the media from the auto industry is staggering. Analysts predict […]
Obama’s Energy Platform Has a (Small) Livable Streets Platform
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When Barack Obama gave his big energy speech on Monday, his campaign released an eight-page fact sheet [PDF] to go with it. All the way at the end, at the very bottom of the last page — after the parts about plug-in electric vehicles, oil shale, and clean coal technology — there’s this paragraph: Build […]
Wiki Wednesday: Ciclovía
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With New York’s big Summer Streets premier less than 72 hours away, this week we’re highlighting the StreetsWiki entry on the mother of all car-free events, Bogotá’s Ciclovía. Actually, the phrase "car-free event" doesn’t quite do justice to a weekly gathering of a million people along 70 miles of streets. And as the authors note, […]
Hillary Clinton Introduces Senate Version of Transit Relief Bill
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Transit operators struggling to keep pace with demand as rising fuel costs strain their budgets received some welcome news on Friday. New York’s junior senator has introduced a version of the Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act. The bill, which would provide $1.7 billion for local transit agencies over the next two years (including $237 […]
House Bill Makes Connection Between Transit Funding and Gas Price Relief
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Here’s an alternative to the "Drill Now!" mantra that doesn’t involve ethanol subsidies or depleting the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Earlier this month, Congressman Earl Blumenauer introduced the Transportation and Housing Choices for Gas Price Relief Act [PDF]. Blumenauer’s hometown paper, The Oregonian, calls the measure a "smart bill": The key word in that title is […]
Wiki Wednesday: Bike Box
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This StreetsWiki entry is rounding into encyclopedic form quite nicely. Andy Hamilton, DianaD (who also brought us the VMT entry last week) and Streetsblog’s own Aaron Naparstek have been piecing together a detailed look at the history and effectiveness of bike boxes: With nearly 40% of daily commuter trips taken by bike, Copenhagen, Denmark is […]
NYPD Thug Attacks Cyclist without Cause. Cyclist Goes to Jail
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Words fail when watching this clip of an NYPD officer forcibly knocking a Critical Mass rider to the pavement last Friday. The assault was caught on video by a bystander in Times Square. Compounding the injustice, reports Gothamist, is what happened next: A representative for TIMES UP! tells us that the cyclist in this video […]
How to Ease Pain at the Pump Without Deepening Oil Dependence
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As the drumbeat for domestic drilling grows louder, can the Democratic leadership come up with a better alternative than tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? Over at the Huffington Post, Shelley Poticha and Geoff Anderson of Transportation for America propose a few ideas that will actually pay dividends. Pols who are serious about reducing the impact […]
Wiki Wednesday: Vehicle-Miles Traveled
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Until recently, VMT had been rising steeply in the U.S. In the second installment of our serialized tour through StreetsWiki, we turn to DianaD’s entry on Vehicle-Miles Traveled: Vehicle-Miles Traveled (VMT) is the total number of miles driven by all residential vehicles within a given time period and geographic area. We’re seeing more about VMT […]
Cartoon Tuesday: Drilling Deeper
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Nick Anderson / Houston Chronicle
Tom Vanderbilt Ponders Motorist Sociopathy
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Yesterday, at the end of our piece about the recent road rage incidents in usually-polite Portland and Seattle, we posed a question to Tom Vanderbilt, author of the forthcoming book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us. We asked: What is it about automobility that often seems to […]