Month: October 2010

The complete list of TIGER II grants has been released by U.S. DOT today, after members of Congress revealed many winners last week. In keeping with the department's livability goals, the list is filled with transit projects (especially streetcar lines), efforts to bolster the country's non-trucking freight network, and fix-it-first projects aimed at deteriorating roads and bridges.

It is nearly universally accepted that transit agencies must serve entire regions to succeed in American cities. They can't be splintered into separate entities with one serving the center city and another serving the fringes. As homes and jobs have traversed city borders, transit agencies must not only get suburban residents to downtown jobs, but increasingly, carry urban dwellers to suburban jobs.

I promised in my last post to tell you the triumphant stories of citizens beating back highways, both planned and already built. Here are more stories from the Rail~volution bike tour around Portland's "lost highways."

Memo to the City of Los Angeles: stop trying to ruin Donald Shoup for the rest of us.

Rail~volution is underway in Portland, Oregon, bringing together more than 1,000 city planners, engineers, transit advocates, bike policy experts, and elected officials to strategize about making cities and towns better for transit, walking, and biking.

This Thursday, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is coming to town to hold a public hearing on the design of new fuel economy stickers that will be placed on "for sale" cars.  The agency, in partnership with the USDOT, will select either the sticker type pictured above, or a more simple "letter grade" sticker that would have an "A, B, C, or D" letter grade and a brief explanation of the grade. The new sticker will be the first change in environmental information given to consumers in three decades.  The hope is that by informing car buyers of the environmental consequences of their vehicle choice that they'll make better choices.

Allow me to speak for the Streetsblog Network as a whole when I say, everyone is excited about the Center for Transit Oriented Development's new national database.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill