Streetsblog.net

From around the Streetsblog Network today, here are a few developments affecting the walking environment in cities from Miami to Las Vegas. The news, unfortunately, is mostly bad.

We've heard some silly arguments against cycling before, but this one from Washington State Representative Ed Orcutt... well, it speaks for itself.

The National Transportation Safety Board, whose current chair, Deborah Hersman, is the reported frontrunner to replace Ray LaHood as transportation secretary, is the federal agency charged with “assisting victims of transportation accidents and their families.” These are the people who investigate every single plane or passenger train crash.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Stockton, California; Jefferson County, Alabama: They're the first wave in a new era of municipal bankruptcy.

There may be nothing sadder than distressed cities trying to compete with the suburbs by adding more parking spaces. (We're looking at you, Cleveland, Detroit, and Buffalo!)

You know we've reached a low point in U.S. infrastructure policy when state officials are selling off public utilities in order to fund $1.7 billion highway interchanges.

When it comes to transportation funding, President Obama always seems to say the right thing. The latest example was his State of the Union address, where the president promoted a fix-it-first approach to infrastructure spending. On Wednesday, the White House fleshed out the idea with a proposal to direct 80 percent of a $50 billion burst in transportation spending to "deferred maintenance" of existing infrastructure.

In the last few months, we've seen all sorts of proposals from states trying to keep their transportation budgets solvent.

Since the 1970s, the Netherlands and the United States have taken different paths when it comes to engineering streets. While the Dutch tackled traffic deaths and injuries by designing local streets where walking and biking are safe, convenient ways to get around, the prevalent approach in America was to apply highway design principles to local streets -- wider and straighter was thought to be safer. The superiority of the Dutch approach turned out to be dramatic: In 1975, the traffic death rate in the Netherlands was 20 percent higher than in America, but by 2008 it was 60 percent lower. About 22,000 fewer people would die on U.S. streets each year if the nation had achieved safety outcomes comparable to the Dutch, according to Gary Toth at Project for Public Spaces.