Tanya Snyder

If you think the United States is doing a bad job shifting toward sustainable transportation, take a look at the developing world. The places with the most to lose from auto-oriented development are doubling down on it -- to the enormous detriment of their citizens, especially the poorest.

Obstacles Already Cropping Up in Path of Seattle Bike-Share (Seattle Times) OpenPlans Fills Void Apple Left By Removing Transit Directions (SmartPlanner) What Makes a Workplace Bicycle Incentive Successful? (Sustainable Business Oregon) Express-News: Transpo Bill Doesn’t Address Infrastructure Needs on the Border The Rest of Latin America Finally Catches Up to Bogotá on Bikeability (WSJ) A Clear-Eyed Look … Continued

When Mark Lampert was a kid, his mom stayed home with him and his brothers. His dad was out the door by 4:30 every morning, driving to the commuter lot in their distant Houston suburb to take the bus in to the city for work. He had friends whose parents both worked, and when those friends came home from school they had the house to themselves – “which is why we went over there to build pipe bombs,” Mark said. At Mark’s house, dinner was ready and everyone was home by 6:00 every night.

Shifting demographics have countless repercussions. Today, one of those is the loss of a pro-transit voice in Congress.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reported last December that while overall traffic fatalities in the United States dropped in 2010, pedestrian deaths rose higher – up four percent in 2010 over 2009. Yesterday, the agency released some more detailed statistics about those crashes [PDF], but the report includes scarcely any data or analysis about the underlying causes of pedestrian deaths.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer likes to say that Oregon was the first state to adopt a gas tax and it will be the first state to get rid of it. In 2006-2007, the state conducted a pilot study of alternative revenue collection methods, with an eye toward moving to a better system. This fall, they’ll do another pilot, fine-tuning their process for replacing the gas tax with a vehicle-miles-traveled fee.

As yesterday's post about Oklahoma City's fight to replace a downtown highway with a real urban boulevard illustrated so well, cities are often at the vanguard of smart urban planning and transportation choices while state-level agencies can be laggards. So it's nice to see some governors and ex-governors stepping forward to emphasize the value of smart growth policies.

Every week, the White House honors leaders and innovators in a chosen field, and yesterday was transportation's turn. Their choices of honorees spoke volumes about this administration's principles around transportation.

How substantial are the benefits delivered by federal investment in bus rapid transit projects, and how can the feds help local governments build better bus improvements? A new report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office [PDF] looks at the results of BRT projects that have been completed in 20 cities since 2005, when SAFETEA-LU expanded federal funding eligibility for such projects. The GAO found that almost all of the projects have proven successful as cost-effective upgrades to increase ridership, but it also identified a few ways that federal policy provides incentives for local governments to avoid building bus projects that meet the standards for high-quality BRT.

Early Voters Reject Atlanta Transportation Tax (AJC) London Carmageddon Doesn’t Materialize Because Everyone’s Taking the Tube (NBC) Wendell Cox: Transit in Atlanta Sucks, So Let’s Not Fund Any Improvements (AJC) Why Treehugger Hippies in the Pentagon Want to Reduce Oil Dependency (Grist) Portland Steps Away from Enslavement to Vehicle Level of Service Standards (BikePortland) Are … Continued