Perhaps you saw video on social media this week showing hundreds of teenagers riding bikes, popping wheelies on a Philadelphia expressway. It was an unauthorized freeway takeover that ought to have brought a smile to even the sourest face.
It's not uncommon for bitter disputes to develop when state DOTs come into urban neighborhoods and start making changes to state-controlled streets. Pennsylvania DOT has a different idea: Rather than just muscle everything through, the agency will incorporate local ideas before engineering and design work gets started.
Reading, Pennsylvania, isn’t your stereotypical biking mecca. It’s a low-income, largely Latino, post-industrial city of almost 90,000 people. But without much of anything in the way of bike infrastructure, Reading has the third-highest rate of bike commuting in Pennsylvania and is among the top 15 cities on the East Coast. Some civic leaders in Reading have seized on the […]
In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2, U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. Today we highlight Pennsylvania’s $1.7 billion Mon-Fayette Expressway plan, a highway plan that has outlived its reason for being. The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission and the state Department of Transportation have been trying to […]