Federal Highway Administration

The heavyweights of American transportation engineering continue to warm up to design guides that prioritize walking, biking, and transit on city streets. On Friday, the Federal Highway Administration made clear that it endorses the National Association of City Transportation Officials' Urban Street Design Guide, which features street treatments like protected bike lanes that you won't find in the old engineering "bibles."

This story has been updated to reflect comments and clarifications from the FHWA.

Think of it as a Christmas gift: On December 24, the gatekeepers who determine which street treatments should become standard tools for American engineers decided to add bike signals to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, sometimes called "the bible of traffic engineering."

The Federal Highway Administration is seeking to impose a new layer of bureaucratic review on New York City bike projects, which could significantly delay the implementation of street redesigns that have proven to reduce traffic injuries and deaths.

Many transportation reform advocates were disappointed in the performance measures included in MAP-21, which was signed into law in July 2012. They weren’t tied to funding, they gave states and localities too much leeway to set their own performance targets, and they measured the wrong things. But there’s still a chance for them to get much stronger.

Looks like we’re heading for a real, honest-to-goodness government shutdown tomorrow due to a childish Congressional food fight over budgets and health care. Already this year, thousands of government employees faced furloughs due to sequestration, and now they're looking at an indefinite unpaid leave. It'll last until Congress can play nice and make a deal on the budget and health care, and who knows when that will be.

In a significant step forward for American bike infrastructure, the Federal Highway Administration issued a memorandum late last month essentially endorsing street designs like protected bike lanes.

The Federal Highway Administration classifies roads as either "rural" or "urbanized." But the "urbanized" label is deceptive, because it applies suburban street design standards to any street that isn't rural. So if you live in, say, downtown St. Louis, the FHWA applies the same standards to your streets as to the streets in Orlando's most distant suburbs. This contributes to a horrendous mismatch: Many city streets where walking should take precedence are in fact designed for moving massive amounts of traffic.

“In 2014, federal investment in surface transportation -- which is currently about $50 billion per year -- will drop to $6 billion or $7 billion. In one year.”