DC Streetsblog

Jeff Wood and I are back with episode 8 of the Talking Headways podcast. We talk about Los Angeles Metro's decision not to extend light rail all the way to LAX (and what they're doing instead), plus some analysis of what rail can really do in a city as spread-out as LA. Then we head east to Princeton, New Jersey, where we debunk the thesis that low sales of luxury condos somehow equates to a rejection of walkability. And finally, back west to Seattle, which finds itself with a similar problem to LA: how to bring more density to settled single-family areas?

In addition to some recent high-profile spins through the revolving door, we now have a new example of ethically questionable influence peddling in Washington: A powerful Congressman’s brother working to bring down a transit line in Maryland.

When former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood announced earlier this month that he was going to co-chair Building America's Future, I thought, "well that seems like a good place for him, but it's not going to make his wife happy." Mrs. LaHood has famously been needling him for years to get out of public office and make some money in the private sector.

A new bill introduced by Senators John Hoeven (R-ND) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) would further entrench rules that make it difficult for crash investigators to access black box data from cars.

The best thing about hosting a Streetsblog podcast is getting to call on other Streetsblog reporters for the lowdown on the biggest news of the week. In this case, Jeff Wood and I called Ben Fried, Streetsblog's editor-in-chief based in New York, to provide some context for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's big announcement of the campaign to eliminate traffic deaths in the city. Note that the podcast was recorded before the recent outbreak of jaywalking tickets in Manhattan.

It's the last thing you would expect to hear at the Detroit Auto Show from the CEO of Ford Motor Company. But last week, Ford's Alan Mulally showed some ambivalence about the role of cars in major cities.

Have we reached peak car in America? Research from the University of Michigan suggests the answer is "yes."

“Highway people like highways, transit people like transit, rail people like rail,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said yesterday at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board. “But our transportation system should be greater than the sum of its parts.”

It isn't window dressing. Or a "hip cities" thing. Bike infrastructure -- not the watered-down stuff, but high-quality bikeways that get more people on bikes -- is becoming a must-have for cities around the U.S.