Tanya Snyder

Yesterday was a relatively quiet election day for transportation-related ballot measures, but of the six transit initiatives that came before voters yesterday, five six passed, with a sixth seventh too close to call. That’s in line with last year’s 79 percent success rate -- 71 percent since 2000. When asked, voters overwhelmingly choose to raise their own taxes to improve public transportation.

Behold, Streetsblog's brand-new podcast! In what we aim to turn into a recurring feature, Reconnecting America's Jeff Wood and I recently chatted about the week's news in livable streets, urbanism, and sustainable transportation. The topics are drawn from Jeff's excellent daily compendium of transportation and planning links, The Direct Transfer, and from stories we're tracking at Streetsblog Capitol Hill. It's a treat for me to get back to producing audio -- I was a radio reporter before joining Streetsblog.

“This is a money and power grab.”

Soon after the government shutdown ended, we heard murmurs that the TIGER grant program for innovative transportation projects had been a casualty of the negotiations.

Streetsblog reported earlier this month that transportation agencies are increasingly aware of the insidious consequences of using "Level of Service" as the primary metric for their projects. Because Level of Service only rewards the movement of motor vehicles, it promotes dangerous, high-speed streets and sprawling land use.

Reading this sentence in a mainstream publication just validated everything I feel about the kind of parent I want to be: "It doesn’t mean millennials put parenthood second, but their definition of what makes a good parent is Mom and Dad being happy, and exposing their child to all the things that they have enjoyed."

Congratulations, gentle Congresspeople. You have come up with a deeply flawed solution to a problem only you would create. Never mind that it set up another showdown three months from now. The good news is the government shutdown is almost over, for the moment. More than 18,000 furloughed U.S. DOT officials can return to work.

There’s nothing quite like listening to a preeminent expert in pediatric injury prevention telling you you’re taking unnecessary risks with your child’s life.