Monday’s Headlines Are Still Stuffed

Sen. Daniel Inouye toured the site of the Honolulu rail transit project in 2012. Plagued by cost overruns, it's nowhere near complete. Photo:Office of Daniel Inouye
Sen. Daniel Inouye toured the site of the Honolulu rail transit project in 2012. Plagued by cost overruns, it's nowhere near complete. Photo:Office of Daniel Inouye
  • Engineering and political challenges have made it virtually impossible to build major U.S. infrastructure projects for decades. (New York Times)
  • U.S. traffic deaths are rising because the blame usually goes to road users rather than bad road design. (The Atlantic)
  • MSNBC‘s Chris Hayes and writer Jay Caspian Kang discuss why everyone should get a free e-bike, as Kang wrote in an NYT op-ed last week.
  • Every state will get at least a 30 percent bump in transit funding from the infrastructure bill over the next five years. (Next City)
  • People keep using cars as weapons, and last week’s Wisconsin attack is just the latest example. (Streetsblog USA)
  • San Francisco is updating its Vision Zero strategy to include quick-build bike and pedestrian infrastructure and lower speed limits. (Cities Today)
  • A judge upheld a Nashville law requiring developers to either build sidewalks or pay into a sidewalk fund. (Axios)
  • Cyclists will share lanes with buses in Houston’s new red lanes. (Chronicle)
  • A Pennsylvania grant will help Pittsburgh divert stormwater and make 21st Street safer. (City Paper)
  • Scooters are coming back to Fort Lauderdale, pending safety regulations, while their fate remains in limbo in Miami. (Sun Sentinel)
  • A new docked bike-share program will bring 200 bikes and e-bikes to Portland, Maine, this summer. (News Center Maine)
  • Six years after the feds put a spotlight on Baton Rouge, the Louisiana city remains deadly for cyclists. (The Advocate)
  • Former NYC subway chief Andy Byford drew Twitter’s outrage for a new London ad casting equal blame on cyclists for crashes that are mainly caused by drivers. (Streetsblog NYC)
  • Uber is essentially shut down in Belgium following a court order. (Tech Crunch)
  • When she went into labor, the New Zealand Green Party’s spokesperson for transportation rode her bike to the hospital to give birth. (BBC).

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The number of annual traffic deaths in America is heading in the wrong direction, climbing back above the 40,000 mark. To reverse this trend, the AAA Foundation for Road Safety this week released a report that prioritizes six road design changes it says would do the most to reduce the death toll. There's just one problem: AAA's report doesn't consider the idea that, to save lives, we should be driving less.