Recent Streetsblog CHICAGO posts about Streetsblog Network

Today’s a huge day for transit on local ballots. Ballot measures in Detroit, Indianapolis, Raleigh, Seattle, and Los Angeles, among other places, could significantly expand transit access for millions of people. In many of these cities, transit opponents have seized on the same feeble argument: Investment in transit isn’t needed because soon Uber and Lyft and self-driving cars will […]

Milwaukee has shrunk since the 1960s, when its population was about 19 percent bigger than today, leaving the city with a lot of excess road capacity. As a result, Milwaukee is a city where it’s relatively easy to replace general traffic lanes with bike lanes. Other cities in the Rust Belt — and anywhere suffering from population loss — could be doing the […]

Wide highways, big parking lots, dangerous intersections designed for speed — there are a lot of downsides to all this car-centric infrastructure, including the way it saps the fiscal health of cities. Bill Lindeke at Network blog Streets.mn lists seven, from the erosion of the local tax base due to land consumed for highways to public health costs in the form of […]

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have indicated that they intend to spend big on “infrastructure” if elected president. Whether this ends up making cities stronger or just fueling more wasteful sprawl, however, is an open question. Cities usually have a hard time accessing federal funds, since the current system funnels most of the money to states DOTs, […]

It’s bad enough that Washington DOT is building a huge underground highway by the Seattle waterfront at enormous expense and financial risk. Now the city is poised to ruin the one benefit of the highway tunnel — better pedestrian connections to the waterfront. Advocates have been warning against replacing the current elevated highway with a highway-like surface street. But […]