Streetsblog.net

This transportation bill, it's just full of not-so-fun surprises for city dwellers.

Does the Tea Party hate transportation subsidies or not? Sometimes it can be difficult to tell.

The transportation bill is upon us -- and with it came some bad news for people who want to make streets safer for biking and walking. Not only does the bill reduce the overall amount of dedicated funding for programs like Safe Routes to School, it allows states to transfer some of these funds to other uses.

Yesterday negotiators from the House and Senate finally reached an agreement on the transportation bill. It wasn't as bad as it could have been -- rumors were that all dedicated funding to make streets safer for biking and walking might have been sacrificed. The final deal let local agencies control half of that funding, while allowing states to opt out of spending the other half. In states with highway-obsessed DOTs, the news is especially bad for cities and towns that value safer streets -- they will simply have fewer resources to improve conditions for active transportation.

A sizable amount of federal transportation funds dedicated for clean air projects goes to freight trucks. This money pays for things like diesel engine retrofits that help reduce the enormous environmental impact of the nation's delivery fleet.

Think of a place that you can reach by train, that is densely developed and easy to get around by walking or biking. You're probably thinking of a center city, or perhaps an inner-ring suburb. But in older regions of the country, there's another place that has the fundamentals for living car-free: the beach. Built over a century ago, many oceanside towns were designed to attract summertime urban visitors at a time when driving simply wasn't an option. And with beachfront property going for a premium, it's normal to see compact, even high-rise, urban-scale development lining the waterfront.

Attacks on transit drivers are not a new problem. But it seems to be getting worse.

Exposing the absurdity in the modern traffic engineering profession is the specialty of Charles Marohn at Strong Towns, and that's a big, and sometimes too easy, job.

There's no blight like a surface parking lot in the middle of downtown -- especially an empty one. And no city is safe apparently.