Recent Streetsblog LA posts about Streetsblog.net

For many people who have children and live in the suburbs, being without a car is definitely not a choice. But when a family with kids chooses to go car-free, it’s so rare that it tends to inspire curiosity. When a suburban Toronto family decided to ditch its cars, the Toronto Star wrote a full […]

On Monday, Mayor Ed Murray unveiled “Move Seattle” — a 10-year vision for transportation that synthesizes planning for street safety, transit, and bicycling. “More choices means fewer cars on our streets,” Murray said when announcing the plan. “That means, when you do need to drive, you’ll be up against less traffic. And with roads less […]

Scenes like the one above — enormous pieces of land devoted to half-empty parking lots — are ubiquitous throughout the United States. And that’s no accident. Chuck Marohn at Strong Towns was looking over some 1954 guidance from the American Planning Association. Today, most planners would recognize it as terribly destructive, but it still holds sway […]

Absent any foreseeable action from Washington, some states and localities are stepping up with policies that put a price on carbon. And that has a number of exciting implications for cities and sustainable transportation. California is using revenue from its cap-and-trade program, for instance, to subsidize housing near transit. In Oregon, advocates are now pushing a […]

In a testament to how quickly travel behavior can change, new stats out of Seattle show that the share of downtown workers who commute alone by car has dropped significantly in the last 15 years. The rate of solo car commuting to downtown Seattle was 50 percent in 2000. Now it’s down to 31 percent, […]

St. Louis is home to one of the more notorious failures of the “urban renewal” era: the Pruitt-Igoe housing project. When these towers were demolished a generation ago, it seemed like the end of an era in city planning. The clearance of city blocks to make way for mega-development projects is now considered a colossal […]