Sarah Goodyear

So how can states best spend their stimulus money? How can livable streets advocates keep it from going to useless highway widening and other sprawl-inducing projects?

Today Streetsblog Network member The City Fix reports on the "cost of place" in the Washington, DC, area -- the way that the price of housing and transportation stacks up for people in the urban core and the suburbs. According to a report recently released by the Urban Land Institute,

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Richard Layman of Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space finds some interesting ideas about the future of American roads in a somewhat unlikely source -- the super-mainstream Parade magazine, which comes as an insert with more than 400 newspapers around the country and claims a circulation of 33 million. Layman looks at a Parade's cover story from yesterday, entitled How We Can Save Our Roads. The Parade article looks at an engineering practice called "practical design" that is being implemented in Missouri:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we turn to member blog Trains for America, which looks at the idea of using  stimulus funds to bring rail-equipment manufacturing -- and expanded passenger rail service -- to the state of Montana:

We want mass transit in American cities, right? Right. So how are we going to pay for it?

Barack Obama is justly renowned for his speaking style; he chooses his words with professorial precision. But on today's featured Streetsblog Network post, the NRDC's Deron Lovaas, writing at The Infrastructurist, points out that the president used the "H" word -- that would be "highways" -- inaccurately during a recent visit to the USDOT:

Is the whole plummeting economy thing forcing you take stock of what you truly value in life? Yep, us too. And we'll take a wild guess that accessible, beautiful public spaces are on the short list for you as well.

Several Streetsblog Network members, including the Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia and Decatur Metro, have blogged about the latest numbers from traffic information firm INRIX, which show declining congestion in 2008 vs. 2007 in nearly every metro area surveyed (Baton Rouge, LA, bucks the trend; go figure). INRIX reports "peak hour congestion on the major roads in urban America decreased nearly 30% in 2008 versus 2007."

Yesterday was a big day for livable streets and progressive transportation advocates -- and not just because of what happened in New York City.