Studies & Reports
Basics
Sober Non-Partisan Analysis: America Wastes a Ton of Money on Highways
A good deal of the $46 billion the federal government pours into highway spending each year is going to waste, according to a new Congressional Budget Office report [PDF].
February 23, 2016
Study: “Shared Space” Slows Drivers While Letting Traffic Move Efficiently
The idea behind "shared space" street design is that less can be more. By ditching signage, traffic lights, and the grade separation between sidewalk and roadbed, the shared space approach calms traffic and heightens communication between drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists. Instead of following traffic signals on auto-pilot or speeding up to beat the light, motorists have to pay attention to their surroundings.
February 8, 2016
Highway Boondoggles: Widening I-70 in Denver
In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the original came out in 2014), U.S. PIRG and the Frontier Group teamed up to profile the most wasteful highway projects that state DOTs are building. Streetsblog will be serializing the case studies in the report. Today, we look at the widening of I-70 in Denver, a project with a potentially high social and economic cost.
January 25, 2016
Highway Boondoggles: Widening I-95 Across Connecticut
Last year Congress passed a multi-year transportation bill. Like previous bills, it gives tens of billions of dollars to states every year to spend with almost no strings attached. How much of this federal funding will state DOTs devote to expensive, traffic-inducing highway projects that further entrench car dependence and sprawl?
January 19, 2016
Study: Sharrows Don’t Make Streets Safer for Cycling
Sharrows are the dregs of bike infrastructure -- the scraps cities hand out when they can't muster the will to implement exclusive space for bicycling. They may help with wayfinding, but do sharrows improve the safety of cycling at all? New research presented at the Transportation Review Board Annual Meeting suggests they don't.
January 14, 2016
Social Engineering! Cities That Build More Parking Get More Traffic
Build parking spaces and they will come -- in cars. New research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board finds a direct, causal relationship between the amount of parking in cities and car commuting rates.
January 13, 2016
New Evidence That Bus Rapid Transit Done Right Spurs Development
More American cities are considering bus rapid transit, or BRT, as a cost-effective method to expand and improve transit. One of the knocks against BRT, as opposed to rail, is that it supposedly doesn't affect development patterns. But a new study [PDF] by Arthur C. Nelson of the University of Arizona and released by Transportation for America finds that BRT lines can indeed shape real estate and attract jobs -- if the projects are done right.
January 12, 2016
Real Estate Giant: Suburban Office Parks Increasingly Obsolete
What tenants want in an office building is changing, and the old model of the isolated suburban office park is going the way of the fax machine. That's according to a new report from Newmark, Grubb, Knight and Frank [PDF], one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world.
December 10, 2015
Avoid Bikelash By Building More Bike Lanes
Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.
April 24, 2015
Got Transit Troubles? The Problem Could Be the Chain of Command
If you still have to juggle multiple farecards for the various transit systems in your area -- or if urgent maintenance issues in the city core are going unattended while the suburbs get a shiny new station -- the problem might run deeper than the incompetence everyone is grumbling about. The root of it all might be embedded in the very structure of the agencies that govern your transit system.
October 13, 2014