Recent Streetsblog LA posts about Streetsblog.net

As our Chicago readers are well aware, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has made bike infrastructure a key part of his economic strategy. Since Emanuel took office, Chicago has been adding protected bike lanes perhaps faster than any city in the United States. The famously sharp-tongued Emanuel has even pledged to attract businesses from other cities, notably Seattle, […]

For a long time in the United States, driving activity moved in step with the economy. Since economic growth was fairly steady, consistent growth in driving was built into all the traffic modeling the engineers used to plan and build streets and transportation infrastructure. But now per capita driving has declined eight straight years in America. Total […]

All summer, the city of Portland, Maine, has been chipping away at the space it devotes to asphalt. With a reduced lane here, a curb extension there, an added landscaped median, the city is creating a safer, more inviting environment for pedestrians, reports C. Neal at Network blog Rights of Way. Neal says these incremental […]

Many American cities, at this point, are waking up with a sort of hangover from the “Interstate Era” that demolished urban neighborhoods to build life-sapping highways. Heck, some really proactive cities are demolishing their underused, elevated, antiquated urban freeways. Then there are places like Bakersfield, California, where the Interstate Era continues to this day: One […]

Ever encountered a transportation agency that says it’s not worth the money to install bike access on an urban bridge, because bikes aren’t “real transportation”? Point them to the case of Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge. Jonathan Maus at Bike Portland reports that the bridge just recorded its two millionth bike trip since it began electronically tallying […]