Matthew Roth

PG&E workers installing an LED streetlight. Photo: PG&E

The Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Portland, Oregon, in early November for the annual Project for Transportation Reform, a summit to further define and clarify emerging urban transportation policies that embrace entire networks, rather than interdependent transportation segments, and that seek to balance modal transportation splits and reduce overall vehicular miles traveled (VMT).

In case you don't qualify for the federal "cash for clunkers" rebate program, Mark Muller of Max Motors in Butler, Missouri, has an offer you might want to consider: get a free AK-47 with a new truck.

We get a lot of Greenversations press releases over the transom and most go right to the trash, in no small part because “Greenversations” is one of the more odious portmanteaus a government agency or corporation has yet proffered. Not quite as annoying as the idea that Ray LaHood’s multi-modal transportation blog is called the … Continued

The Inhofe/Boxer stimulus bill amendment for $50 billion in additional infrastructure funds appears to be dead, with official word expected soon from Senator Harry Reid's office. Sources close to the negotiations say that at least five Democratic Senators were not going to support the amendment if transit and water provisions weren't improved, while Senate Republicans vowed to obstruct such improvements.  

A revised draft of the Boxer/Inhofe amendment just came over the transom from a source in DC close to the negotiations (PDF).  This is a draft from yesterday and negotiations are ongoing, so expect changes. 

Barbara Boxer and infamous global warming denier James Inhofe will present an amendment to the Senate stimulus plan that could funnel as much as $50 billion in additional funding to highways, Streetsblog has learned. Friends of the Earth tells us that Boxer's staff confirmed she will introduce the amendment, which could bring the total for highways close to $80 billion, exactly the figure Inhofe demanded last week in a letter to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. 

At a groundbreaking ceremony for the long-awaited Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco yesterday, Mayor Gavin Newsom asserted the project will be "so much more extraordinary than Grand Central Station."

"When I was a visiting professor at Berkeley in the 1980s, I used to come to Fisherman's Wharf and walk around," Danish urban designer Jan Gehl said Wednesday night, to more than 100 San Franciscans at the Pier 39 Theater near Fisherman's Wharf. "Now it's like deja vu; it's exactly like I remember it 25 years ago."

It's a good day in a city's urbanist evolution when Jan Gehl comes to town, and now San Francisco can add itself to the growing list of cities around the world that have embraced his people-first approach to urban design and planning.