Angie Schmitt

The big rail line to the airport is an awfully seductive transit project to many political decision makers. So cities keep heaping resources on flashy airport transit even though the ridership is seldom worth the expense. Toronto, for instance, recently rolled out a new airport line that costs a bundle to ride and is drawing a disappointing number of passengers.

Cars are a very inefficient transportation technology for too many reasons to count. They take up huge amounts of space but get driven around mostly empty -- the average private car in the U.S. carries only 1.6 people. A lot of the time, people drive distances that are short enough to easily walk or bike -- 28 percent of car trips are a mile or less, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.

Pedestrian deaths rose 10 percent in the first half of 2015 compared to the same period the year before, according to preliminary data released by the Governors Highway Safety Association. If that increase held up over all 12 months of 2015, it would be among the worst single-year changes since the GHSA started collecting data in 1975.

Does your city have what it takes to compete in Streetsblog's fourth annual Parking Madness tournament? Who will join Tulsa, Rochester, and Camden, NJ, as winners of the coveted "Golden Crater"?

Public meetings hosted by state DOTs can be very frustrating. People who want safer streets and take the time to attend are often deluged with highly technical excuses about why their suggestions won't fly.

Rental assistance from HUD isn't enough to make the cost of living affordable when the subsidies go toward housing in car-dependent areas, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Utah. The study evaluated transportation costs for more than 18,000 households that receive HUD rental subsidies, estimating that nearly half of recipients have to spend more than 15 percent of their household budgets on transportation.

A big part of reducing car traffic involves using cars more efficiently. Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are supposedly assisting in this transition by making car ownership less necessary. But even though both companies operate carpool-type services, most of their business still comes from single passenger trips.

The Austin Police Department doesn't seem to understand what Vision Zero is about. Instead of making roads safer by enforcing pedestrians' right of way or ticketing speeders, police are proposing to ban people from standing by dangerous, high-speed roads.

In a relatively short amount of time -- a generation or two -- the number of American kids walking or biking to school has plummeted. This isn't the result of some natural law -- it's the product of public policy decisions about how to design streets and build schools.