Network Roundup

Earlier this year we wrote about the Ciudad des Luces/City of Lights program in Los Angeles -- a project of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition "to increase working-class Latino immigrant bicyclists’ safety and empower them to educate and spread bicycle safety information and advocacy to their communities." The outreach is especially important because low-income Latino cyclists in L.A. are at higher risk of injury and death.

What if cities used parking fees to improve public transit? Toronto has been doing just that, to the tune of roughly $50 million per year. In the U.S., Boulder, Colorado uses revenue from public parking garages to fund bus passes.

New Jersey is becoming a safer place to walk and bike, new data shows. The state has seen an eight percent decline in traffic fatalities, according to preliminary crash statistics for the year, and the trend is particularly encouraging for pedestrians and cyclists, writes Michelle Ernst at Mobilizing the Region:

Yesterday, we featured a post from Yonah Freemark at The Transport Politic about Atlanta's decision to put a streetcar project in line for federal TIGER funds before another local transit proposal known as the Beltline. Yonah argued that the Beltline -- a ring of recreational amenities and transit features that would circle the city -- was the more innovative of the two projects. He questioned whether the city would be able to move forward with such an ambitious idea while simultaneously pouring resources into a streetcar downtown.

Plans to expand Amtrak service from Milwaukee to Madison, Wisconsin are facing organized opposition from a political candidate with his eye on the state's highest office. The state of Wisconsin has been awarded $810 million in stimulus funds to extend the Hiawatha line, which runs between Chicago and Milwaukee, about 80 miles to the state's capital. The project is expected to create thousands of jobs.

Earlier this week, Ken Archer at Greater Greater Washington posted this revealing graphic showing the relationship between the amount of driving we do in the United States and the death toll on our roads. Even as conventional traffic safety techniques have made driving less deadly, the rise in miles driven knocked back those improvements. It wasn't until our collective mileage flattened out that safety gains could be fully realized. Thousands of lives were saved when the growth in driving came to a halt.

The holy grail for many urbanists contemplating long-term development and growth trends is the transit village. Adding growth adjacent to functional transit has the benefit of making it easier for the new population there to drive less and use transit for a multitude of trips. Likewise, transit villages can add to ridership on the transit lines, no small matter for operators seeking to maintain a consistent customer base.

As California's big four metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) try to determine how much they can influence growth and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, significant questions remain. The state's Senate Bill 375, typically referred to as the Anti-Sprawl Bill, requires planners and policymakers to develop meaningful solutions to curb sprawl, reduce driving, and promote growth in areas that will have the least impact on the environment.

Last month in San Francisco we covered the shocking story of a man who went on a rampage and ran down four cyclists. While that kind of pathological behavior is rare, those of us who pedal through traffic-choked streets every day know it doesn't take much for a driver to get angry behind the wheel and cause a great deal of harm, whether it's careless or intentional.