Ben Fried

Toward the end of last week, City Council speaker and current 2013 mayoral frontrunner Christine Quinn set off a burst of transportation policy buzz when she said she still supports congestion pricing but doesn't expect it to get revived in Albany.

Since the 1970s, the Netherlands and the United States have taken different paths when it comes to engineering streets. While the Dutch tackled traffic deaths and injuries by designing local streets where walking and biking are safe, convenient ways to get around, the prevalent approach in America was to apply highway design principles to local streets -- wider and straighter was thought to be safer. The superiority of the Dutch approach turned out to be dramatic: In 1975, the traffic death rate in the Netherlands was 20 percent higher than in America, but by 2008 it was 60 percent lower. About 22,000 fewer people would die on U.S. streets each year if the nation had achieved safety outcomes comparable to the Dutch, according to Gary Toth at Project for Public Spaces.

More headlines at Streetsblog Capitol Hill

Streetsblog will be offline the rest of President's Day and publishing regularly tomorrow.

After some pressing from Capital political reporter Azi Paybarah, Christine Quinn followed up her evasive and pessimistic statements about congestion pricing this morning with a firmer but still pessimistic statement about her position:

Dana Rubinstein reports that City Council speaker and current mayoral front-runner Christine Quinn is bearish on congestion pricing's political prospects:

Michael Bloomberg's twelfth and final State of the City address neatly encapsulated the internal contradictions of his transportation and planning policies. In his prepared remarks, the mayor called the impending launch of bike-share "the biggest change to our transportation network in ages," but the speech was also peppered with boasts about stadium-related mega-projects that are going to generate torrents of traffic on city streets. Also in the mix: some references to the welcome push for transit-oriented density in Midtown East, and an electric-car incentive that we'll be taking a closer look at in the days ahead.

Matt Flegenheimer got five leading mayoral candidates on the record about bike lanes for a story in the Times today, and one of the encouraging things about it is that you can start to see the candidates running against each other (and not just the three-term, lame duck incumbent) on bike policy.

Can we get a James Vacca City Council hearing on this?

Our post last Friday about Ed Koch's transportation legacy inspired a flood of Koch-related reader email. From his days as an upstart Democratic district leader in the 1960s through his career in Congress and his early years as NYC mayor, Koch was, in many ways, ahead of his time on transit, bicycling, and reclaiming street space from cars. Many of Koch's transportation causes had staying power, and some of the ideas he championed in Congress were either enacted or came to pass after he left Washington.