Reports

Los Angeles is in the top six major U.S. cities when it comes to using technology to get around, according to a report released today. California Public Interest Research Group (CALPIRG) and the Frontier Group released The Innovative Transportation Index: The Cities Where New Technologies and Tools Can Reduce Your Need to Own a Car which analyzes cities' adoption of technologies that help people live car-free or car-light.

Livability proponents celebrate that car-centric Level of Service (LOS) is finally on its way out, at least in California.Wouldn't it be great if there was a similar bike- or walk-centric metric that could be used instead? UCLA Lewis Center and Institute for Transportation Studies researchers have studied some of the published metrics for evaluating how well streets serve pedestrians and cyclists. The researchers' conclusion: in all of the bike and ped metrics they reviewed, there is no silver bullet. Moreover, adapting LOS doesn't look like a fruitful approach.

Last week, the Brookings Institute, one of Washington's oldest think tanks released, Transit Access and Zero Vehicle Households, a report that looked at transit access for the country's most dependent populations and ranked each major American metropolitan area on how well they provided bus service to this population.

A new study shows that, despite their supposed reputation as government revenue collectors, red light cameras are saving lives.

The high-water mark for American parking policy came in the early 1970s, when cities including New York, Boston, and Portland set limits on off-street parking in their downtowns. They were compelled to do so by lawsuits brought under the Clean Air Act, which used the lever of parking policy to curb traffic and reduce pollution from auto emissions. This level of innovation went unmatched over the ensuing three-and-a-half decades. Only now are U.S. cities implementing effective new parking strategies that cut down on traffic.

When Vice President Joe Biden visited Minnesota's New Flyer bus company to tout the economic stimulus law's $8.4 billion investment in transit, hopes were high for a boom in cleaner-burning vehicle production -- which made for some bad press when the nationwide transit funding crunch forced New Flyer to lay off 13 percent of its workers.

The National Academy of Science’s new report on the hidden health costs of U.S. reliance on fossil fuels has generated high-profile media coverage around the country, most of it focusing on the $62 billion annual estimate for coal rather than the $56 billion projection for vehicles. (Photo: SILive.com) But Greenwire’s write-up is particularly interesting, if … Continued

MARTA train in Atlanta, Georgia, where officials are studying the link between transit and job growth. How could federal job creation programs be greener? Making access to public transit a priority would be one way. A report called “Uncle Sam’s Rusty Toolkit,” released today by Good Jobs First, details the group’s finding that federal job-creation … Continued

(Editor's Note: A lot of what's in this post, available at Streetsblog,  but its findings certainly apply to Los Angeles as well.-DN)