Sarah Goodyear

This morning, I'm making use of a mass transit system while sitting at my desk at home.

An update today from Design New Haven, the excellent Streetsblog Network member that has been promoting the use of SeeClickFix. This rapidly growing service gives citizens a way to document problems in the public space, and back in March the issue getting the most attention in New Haven was the dangerous situation that exists for cyclists on US Route 1 at the Tomlinson Bridge, where a railroad grade crossing has caused multiple bike crashes.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we bring you some reflections on commuter comfort from network member Cap'n Transit. As he points out in a post called "Many Segments of the Population Are Too Old for This Shit," a lot of people are put off of certain modes of transit because of the perception -- and often the reality -- that they are crowded and uncomfortable (yes, New York subway, we're looking at you).

If you're a person who is accustomed to getting around the place you live without a car, you've probably spent at least some time trying to sell your auto-dependent friends on the concept. Maybe you've even gone so far as to map out a route for them so that they wouldn't get frustrated. And sometimes you've succeeded in getting another person onto a bike, bus, train or trolley to make a trip across town. It's a good feeling, right?

Yesterday's New York Times blog item about why New York women are underrepresented among the city's bike commuters didn't sit well with the authors of Streetsblog Network member Let's Go Ride a Bike. Trisha, one of the blog's authors and a bike commuter herself in Nashville, sees the piece as part of a trend (epitomized by a recent Treehugger post called "6 Reasons the World Needs More Girls on Bikes"). Too often, she says, people looking at female cyclists take a cosmetic approach to a complex subject: 

We hear the arguments again and again from DOTs: they need to widen highways and expand interchanges to improve safety on the nation's roads.

Excited about the prospect of high speed rail in America? Lots of people have been. But as Yonah Freemark reports on The Transport Politic, yesterday the General Accountability Office threw a bit of a wet blanket on the growing enthusiasm. The GAO is saying the Obama administration has so far failed to provide clear goals and a comprehensive plan for a high speed rail system:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Mobilizing the Region is talking about highway removal. Specifically, the proposed teardown or reinvention of the 40-year-old Aetna Viaduct in Hartford, CT, which has already outlived its projected lifespan. Now the Hartford Courant has become a proponent of the idea that getting rid of the road could transform Connecticut's capital city:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we've got a post from The WashCycle about speeding, new red light cameras and a reduction in fatalities in Montgomery County, MD. Police there report that "a 2008 study of 11 camera locations found a 25 percent reduction in crashes on the roads where the speed cameras were located." Deaths have gone to 9 from 19 over a the same period last year. While the WashCycle cautions against reading too much into a relatively small amount of data, they also say the cameras have likely been effective. They also report on some novel citizen objections to the technology:

The other day, we looked at a supermarket in a densely populated part of New Haven that is unwelcoming to pedestrians. Today, courtesy of member blog The City Fix, we're taking another look at urban supermarket planning -- specifically, the issue of how to get quality food markets built in underserved neighborhoods (so-called food deserts) where people often walk or take transit to the store. They write about how cities like New York and Washington, DC, can encourage supermarket construction by relaxing onerous zoning requirements for parking spaces: