Sarah Goodyear

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we bring you a post from Greater Greater Washington in which a bus and a bicycle have a bad encounter, leading to a discussion about windshield perspective (that bus has a mighty big windshield) and sharing the road. Antonio López writes:

We talk a lot on this blog about abstractions -- theories of urban development, economic hypotheses, planning paradigms. But in the end, it all has to play out in the real world. And the real world of transportation is about one simple thing: moving your body from one place to another place.

Density, density, density. It's something of a mantra in sustainable transportation circles. But in today's featured post from the Streetsblog Network, UrbanCincy points to the cautionary example of Atlanta -- a place that could perhaps best be described as dense sprawl.

It's been nearly ten months since we first started building the Streetsblog Network -- a group of bloggers around the country and around the world who write about livable streets, transportation policy, sustainable development and related topics. To find these folks, we asked our friends for tips and then went out hunting on the Internet. We mined blogrolls, took suggestions, chased down tantalizing links and always stayed open to the possibility of serendipity.

In the last couple of weeks, the issue of cellphone use and texting while driving has finally been shoved into the national consciousness, thanks to an excellent series of articles by Matt Richtel in The New York Times. Even the United States Senate has been moved to sit up and take notice. Of course our attention will soon drift elsewhere, the way it does -- that's sort of the problem, isn't it? -- until some fresh incident brings it briefly to mind again.

When people who aren't transportation geeks ask me why transportation policy is a topic worthy of more attention on the national stage, I often start by talking about the public health implications. Not only are tens of thousands of Americans killed and injured in car crashes every year, not only are countless thousands of others killed and sickened by air pollution caused by motor vehicles -- on top of that, the link between obesity and automobile dependence is increasingly well-documented. As Elana Schor wrote here a couple of weeks ago, "Transportation reform is health reform."

It's the height of summer, the stretch of endless lazy days when -- at least in the American dreamworld -- kids hunt for adventure in packs through the shimmering heat. A time when they make their own fun. A time of bicycles and improvised games and ice cream, of luxuriant boredom and the discovery it makes possible.

The other day, a woman on foot was killed by a someone driving a car in New Jersey. Sadly, that isn't terribly unusual. What made this death more "newsworthy" -- elevating it briefly to the CNN headline stack yesterday -- was the fact that Alexis Cohen, the woman who was left on the side of the road by a hit-and-run driver, had auditioned for American Idol.

Can a bike-sharing program transform a city? To mark the second anniversary of the Vélib system in Paris, Streetsblog Network member World Streets has a post arguing that it can, if it's done on a sufficient scale:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we're headed to Louisville, Kentucky, where Broken Sidewalk highlights grassroots efforts to prevent a massive expansion of the I-64 highway on the Ohio River waterfront.