Month: August 2009

Recently, the City of Santa Monica completed a series of speed surveys on it's streets, as required by state law.  The result might be a surprise to people that have followed the inability of the City of Los Angeles to maintain lower speed limits when these surveys are done.  In Santa Monica, fourteen street locations are seeing their speed limits lowered while speeds will be increased in only two areas: on Colorado Avenue between Ocean Avenue and Lincoln Boulevard and on Second Street between Wilshire and Colorado.

In a report released this morning, Transportation for America (T4A) expands on its months-long effort to map transit cutbacks across the nation and concludes that 10 of the largest 25 local agencies are being forced to hike fares by more than 13 percent.

Since the impact of bike lanes on businesses has emerged as a peripheral issue in the New York City mayoral race, a post today from the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia seems especially timely.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

This morning's Times brought the grim economic news that traffic at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are struggling.  In fact, the ports have lost the momentum that brought them to annual record highs traffic numbers as recently as 2006.  In fact, the soonest the ports can expect to reach the 2006 numbers would be 2013, and that's a best case scenario.

The $787 billion economic stimulus effort was intended to be a model of government transparency -- but a privately run website called Recovery.org soon began beating out the government in the race to trace federal dollars. Now, as the Pew Charitable Trusts begins to expand its Subsidyscope fiscal monitoring project, some similar gaps in spending data are emerging.

Thanks to conservative groups that have worked for months to stoke false rumors about Congress' health care effort, a wave of negative "town hall" stories is now dominating the media -- and inspiring the oil industry to work up a similar campaign of its own against the climate change bill.

Last week I emailed to all of the candidates running to replace Wendy Greuel as the Council Member representing the Second Councilmanic District a copy of the questionnaire first posted on Streetsblog last month.

Today on the Network, Ohio member blog Xing Columbus questions a recent article in The Columbus Dispatch that attributes Franklin County pedestrian fatalities to carelessness on the part of the victim. According to a Columbus police officer interviewed in the story, local people killed by cars are usually jaywalking or “just walking in the road” … Continued