Today’s Headlines

  • Note to conservatives: You should be fans of passenger rail! (Am. Thinker)
  • Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s transportation record becomes fodder for his foes (Politico)
  • Are federal stimulus dollars working for minority contractors in Illinois? (CPR)
  • D.C.’s real-time government data-sharing wins a Harvard award … (WaPo)
  • … but does Harvard know about the city’s grim record on transit data-sharing? (EFF)

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

Harvard Researcher Calls for Better Police Reporting of Bike Crashes

By Angie Schmitt |
Police departments need to improve the way they investigate, document, and convey information about crashes involving cyclists, according to a new study by Harvard public health researcher Anne Luskin in the Journal of Injury Prevention. While police reports are standardized to record relatively detailed information about car collisions, the same is not true of collisions involving bikes. Better police […]

A Promising Start for Minneapolis Bike-Sharing

By Angie Schmitt |
The early data is in on one of the country’s pioneering bike-sharing systems, and it brings some encouraging news. Minneapolis’s Nice Ride, which launched this summer, topped 100,000 trips in its first five months. Crash rates and vandalism were very low. Perhaps most interesting was the effect on driving, reports The Bike-Sharing Blog. Nice Ride […]

Reminder: States Already Control Transpo $, and They Waste Billions

By Angie Schmitt |
To hear some key Republican lawmakers talk transportation policy, you’d think that state DOTs are straining under the burden of onerous national mandates. Even some notable voices in the urbanist camp, like Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, are saying that federal control leads to inefficient spending, notes Yonah Freemark at the Transport Politic in his latest […]