Bicycling

Today is Day Three of the Transportation Research Board’s annual conference. Interested in pavement composition and performance? There are 200 workshops with your name on them.

Tony Dutzik is senior policy analyst with the Frontier Group, a think tank working on issues of the environment and democracy.

Walk Score came out with its bikeability rankings in the spring, but they were only at the citywide level. If you wanted to plug in your address and come up with a custom rating for your own address, like you can with Walk Score, the system wasn't quite ready. That all changes today. Using an algorithm that takes into account factors including bike infrastructure, topography, and the number of cyclists on the streets, Walk Score has released "Bike Scores" for addresses in 25 American cities and 11 Canadian cities.

As you might expect, given the billions America spends on highways, measuring the activity of motorists is practically an industry unto itself.

The current transportation law dealt a few hard knocks to bicycling and walking programs. One big one was the restructuring of the Transportation Enhancements program into something called Transportation Alternatives, which has to fund more types of projects with less money.

Darren Flusche is the policy director of the League of American Bicyclists.

With the election just days away, it’s a good time to reflect on what the Obama administration has done with transportation policy – and what a Romney administration might have in store. Streetsblog does not endorse candidates. This is an overview of their respective records and a look back at what we know of these two men. We’ll start with President Obama in this post and move on to Mitt Romney in the next one.

The election is less than a week away. Americans have a choice between a) a president who has overseen notable transportation and land use innovations but failed to provide leadership when the national transportation bill could have been reformed, and b) a former governor who enacted a progressive, pro-smart-growth agenda but who has renounced those positions as a candidate.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched their "New Public Health" website last year with the goal of meeting community members where they are to talk about public health. A lot of those conversations happen online, and they explore the connections between public health and policy decisions related to everything from education to transportation. Last week, they published an interview with U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood.