Aaron Naparstek

Washington D.C.'s Transportation Director Emeka Moneme is resigning, opening up a window of opportunity for that city's active livable streets movement. Greater Greater Washington's David Alpert is pointing Mayor Adrian Fenty to New York City's recent experience in choosing a new DOT Commissioner:

From today's Crain's Insider:

Politico is reporting that conservative columnist Robert Novak, a.k.a. "The Prince of Darkness," hit a 66-year-old pedestrian with his black Corvette this morning in Washington D.C. and then drove away.

Thanks to Anil Makhijani, the Open Planning Project's crack web developer, it's now a whole lot easier to print a Streetsblog story. Click the little printer icon below. You'll get a web page formatted 8.5 x 11 with all of the links annotated at the bottom as footnotes. Check it out.

Here's a modest proposal for evaluating the success of a Summer Streets event: Measure the amount of time kids are able to run and play without their parents having to worry about them being hit by a car, the number of friends you bump into and new people you meet, the pounds of automobile exhaust and carbon that aren't being spewed into the hot summer air, the amount of horn-honking, engine-revving and boom stereos you're not hearing, and whether your local merchants are happy about the event and making more money than they usually do on a slow summer weekend.

You know it's summer vacation time for America's magazine editors when the top ten lists starting popping up. Forbes gets into the act this week with a rundown of North America's ten best biking cities:

Matthew Yglesias over at The Atlantic points us to this eye-popping chart from A Better Way to Go, a USPIRG Education Fund report published in March 2008. Download the report here. It's a good one to have on-hand. A few factoids to accompany the chart:

"We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change."

In case you missed it last week, New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is raising bucket-loads of campaign cash -- lots more than his two opponents, Paul Newell and Luke Henry. Groups that opposed congestion pricing are, no surprise, among some of the most enthusiastic contributors. The Times reported: