DC Streetsblog

For a time, a few years back, my friends and I used to play pick-up soccer every Sunday at a high school in my neighborhood. As many as 30 people, mostly adults in their twenties and thirties, would show up for a match on a particularly nice day. New moms would bring their babies to cheer on their husbands. It was good, clean fun. But then one Sunday in August we showed up at the soccer field and found the gate locked. Apparently, there had been a instance of vandalism -- and that was it, we were locked out. And that was the end of our soccer matches.

Is sprawl holding back social mobility in America? Paul Krugman didn't mince words yesterday in a follow-up to a post he wrote soon after the Detroit bankruptcy was announced. In that initial blog post, he compared Detroit to Pittsburgh and concluded that it wasn't just the loss of manufacturing jobs that hurt Detroit -- it was also the dispersement of jobs away from the city core. Yesterday, in a column titled "Stranded by Sprawl," he took the argument further, arguing, "Sprawl may be killing Horatio Alger."

Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts was elected to the Senate last month, setting off a chain of events that has led to the appointment of a new ranking member of the Highways and Transit Subcommittee in the House. That new ranking member is DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton.

Before he gained worldwide notoriety as the mayor allegedly caught on tape smoking crack, Toronto's Rob Ford was perhaps best known as the mayor who said, "Bicyclists are a pain in the ass!"

Should the nation’s largest infrastructure loan program finance projects that make the transportation system more productive and efficient? Hell no, says Senator David Vitter, ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Hundreds of millions of dollars should be available to any old project that comes along, as long as it has a good shot at repaying the loan.

Rand Paul is at it again.

There are five stages of mourning, and Congress is moving through them as they begin to face the inevitability of increased revenues for transportation. Lawmakers been through denial, anger, and bargaining, and now they’re pretty solidly in the depression phase. That leaves just one more: acceptance.

Transportation for America is gearing up for a fight over transit, rail, and TIGER funding, and they're asking supporters of smart transportation investments to make their voices heard.

Rob Perks couldn’t understand why his friend, Megan, drove to work every day instead of taking public transportation. She said driving was cheaper and more convenient, but Perks had almost an identical commute and he was pretty confident he was saving a lot by taking transit. A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation of all Megan’s driving costs showed that even paying $6.00 for the park-and-ride was cheaper than driving all the way in to the office. (Just imagine how much she could save if, like Perks, she could walk to the metro!)