Sarah Goodyear

A few weeks back, we told you about the dire situation for transit in Lorain County, Ohio, part of Greater Cleveland that's been hit hard by the recession. At that time, county officials were threatening to cut all bus service after voters rejected a sales tax increase that would have gone in part to fund transit operations. A redeployment of unused stimulus funds managed to rescue a skeleton of the former service, but the remaining cutbacks are still painful -- as was noted by President Obama in his visit to Lorain County last week.

When does going backward mean progress? When you're talking about bicycle use in the city of Beijing.

The importance of core urban areas to a region's economy is the subject of a post today from the always thoughtful Aaron Renn, who blogs at The Urbanophile. Renn examines data that suggest job growth (or decline) in a metro region's core counties is a good indicator for the overall health of those regions. Renn argues that it's important to keep a close eye on what's happening in the urban core in order to forestall the kind of catastrophic decline we've seen in places like Detroit and Cleveland.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic looks at the new Brookings Institution report on suburban poverty levels and the connection to future transportation planning in those regions. Freemark, who recently wrote about how the city of Paris is extending its transit infrastructure to its traditionally lower-income suburbs, points out that the challenges to transit in American suburbs are greater. The infrastructure of American suburbs, as well as the governmental planning mechanisms, present significant challenges to reducing automobile dependence -- a dependence that weighs especially heavily on people with low incomes. Freemark writes:

"There's nowhere to park." That's what a lot of drivers think, even when there is parking available very nearby — say, on the upper level of a parking garage. This disjunct between perception and reality, which can lead to municipalities overbuilding parking facilities that end up standing empty, is the topic of an intriguing post today from Tom Vanderbilt, on How We Drive.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, a fascinating look at the top 50 "low-car cities" in the United States -- that is, cities in which a high proportion of households do not own a car at all. Human Transit's Jarrett Walker digs into a list (from Wikipedia) of the US cities with populations over 100,000 with the highest percentage of zero-car households.

Sidewalks blocked by construction are a problem everywhere -- perhaps even more so since the real estate bubble burst, and so many projects have been indefinitely halted. Today on the Streetsblog Network, Broken Sidewalk reports on the issue from Louisville, Kentucky. Apparently developers in that city routinely make no provision for the safe passage of pedestrians during construction -- and one local advocacy group, the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation (CART) is calling for change:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, a post from member blog VTA Watch, which covers the Santa Clara Valley Transit Authority in California. The blog’s author discusses the impact of upcoming service cuts on the people whose mobility, and ability to participate meaningfully in their communities, depends on public transit. The post also goes on to … Continued

Today on the Streetsblog Network, member blog Riding in Riverside sets out to explode the myth of the "wundercar" -- a vehicle powered by sustainable fuels that will allow us to hold onto our driving lifestyle and all its accoutrements, while saving the planet and feeling "green."

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we have a post from Andrew Faulkner, who writes a blog called The Exquisite Struggle in St. Louis. Faulkner writes about how for many people his age (he's 25), living in a walkable neighborhood is a high priority. He has set his life up so that a car is just one of several options he has for getting around.