Melanie Curry

Despite laws against using a hand-held phone or similar device, a new report shows that people are not putting down their phones.

It's exciting times in Oakland, California. In the past six weeks, Oakland has passed a raft of policies that promise to have a lasting effect on the city's future transportation and development. This is all being done as part of the city government's reorganization, creating a new Department of Transportation to better strategize and coordinate transportation planning and construction.

It wasn't a total surprise, but exciting nevertheless for bicycle advocates gathered at the NACTO "Cities for Cycling" Road Show in Oakland last night. Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty announced that the agency will endorse the use of the National Association of City Transportation Officials Urban Street Design Guide, giving California cities the state DOT's blessing to install modern infrastructure like protected bike lanes.

In the first major travel survey since 2009, evidence grows that Americans are changing their transportation habits rapidly. The news from Caltrans' 2012 California Household Travel Survey is dramatic: Californians are making far more trips by walking, bicycling, and transit than they were in 2000. The survey found the percentage of trips by these modes doubled in ten years and make up nearly 23 percent of all trips in the state.

With little fanfare, California is considering a change in how it measures transportation impacts that could herald a major change in environmental law. SB 743, passed and signed into law in September, is a potential game changer because it could completely remove LOS — Level of Service, a measure of car traffic congestion — from the list of tools that must be used to analyze environmental impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act. As the state contemplates a broader, more sustainable metric to use for smarter urban planning, the public is invited to weigh in on what the LOS replacement should look like.