Tanya Snyder
Tanya became Streetsblog's Capitol Hill editor in September 2010 after covering Congress for Pacifica Radios Washington bureau and for public radio stations around the country. She lives car-free in a transit-oriented and bike-friendly neighborhood of Washington, DC.
Recent Posts
Talking Headways Podcast: Hug This Streetcar
| | No Comments
Jeff Wood of the Overhead Wire (now working with NRDC’s crack transportation team) and I talk to Randy Simes in this week’s podcast about the streetcar movement in Cincinnati — and how they finally grabbed the long-elusive gold ring. Then Randy stayed with us to discuss the false choice between transit that’s useful and transit […]
Talking Headways Podcast: How Does This Podcast Make You Feel?
| | No Comments
This week, Jeff Wood and I get indignant about Miami-Dade County’s misuse of transit funds for roads, and we speculate about why — with the current success of pedestrian projects like Times Square — old-style pedestrian malls are still going belly-up. And then we peek behind the curtain at an exciting new frontier for urban […]
How to Reduce Traffic By 30 Percent: Strike Fear Into Motorists
| | No Comments
Organizers of major sporting events, from this weekend’s “Mass Transit Super Bowl” to the Sochi Olympics a week from now, may benefit from a lesson learned during the 2012 London Olympics: a tactic transportation planners secretly call “the Big Scare.” They don’t like to talk about it in public. But Graham Currie, a professor of […]
Talking Headways Podcast: Bikes of Ill Repute
| | No Comments
eff 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 […]
What If There Was No Highway, Transit, or Rail Agency — Just U.S. DOT?
| | No Comments
“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.” Foxx wasn’t the first to lament the atomization of the various modes at the federal […]
Talking Headways Podcast: The Year Ahead in Transit, With Yonah Freemark
| | No Comments
Readers, rejoice! Perhaps you feared that you would never get to sit in on nearly an hour of transit talk between world-renowned brainiac straphangers Jeff Wood and Yonah Freemark. But ho! Fear no more. This week, podcast co-host Jeff Wood and I got to chat with The Transport Politic’s Yonah Freemark about the outlook for […]
NHTSA Chief David Strickland Gets Caught in the Revolving Door
| | No Comments
When David Strickland announced last month that he was stepping down as the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, he didn’t give any clues about where he might be going. The news came out this week: The nation’s top auto regulator is going to be a lobbyist at a law firm that deals […]
Trucks and Cities Are Like Oil and Water. Is There a Solution?
| | No Comments
About 350 pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are killed each year by large trucks in this country. Big freight trucks are incompatible with cities in many ways, bringing danger, pollution, noise, and traffic congestion. They park in bike lanes and have shockingly big blind spots, putting everyone around them at risk. And yet, most cities haven’t […]
TED Talk: OKC Mayor Mick Cornett on Designing a City for Fitness
| | No Comments
I got to know Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett last year, when I interviewed him at the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors. We talked about his realization that he and his constituents (generally speaking) were obese, and how he stood in front of the elephants at the zoo on New Year’s […]
Study: Parking Minimums Cost Seattle Renters $246 a Month
| | No Comments
In Seattle, it’s now legal in certain neighborhoods to build apartment buildings with no parking. By saving on parking costs, owners can offer lower rents, and developers say there are waiting lists for parking-free buildings. But in most neighborhoods, Seattle still has laws that require a certain number of parking spaces per housing unit. According […]
Enrique Peñalosa: Democracy Is Bus-Only Lanes and Protected Bikeways
| | No Comments
I lived in Bogotá, Colombia, for about half of 2002. While I was there, a political party headquarters near my house was car-bombed, guerrillas attacked the presidential inauguration, and thousands of people were killed in routine violence. It was a stressful place to live. Adding to that stress was the speed and chaos of traffic. […]
Study: All Across America, Car Commuting Is Dropping
| | No Comments
U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group are on a mission to explore the downward trend in driving. In a series of reports, they point to evidence that it isn’t just a temporary blip, but a long-term shift in how Americans get around. Today, the two organizations released a new report, “Transportation in Transition: A Look […]