Traffic

Barcelona is making headway on its "superblocks," clusters of nine city blocks where car traffic is restricted and public space is expanded. This BBC video shows how a superblock functions: Most of the street space is reserved for walking and biking, while motor vehicles are limited to narrow, indirect rights-of-way.

American elected officials are notoriously skittish about turning freeways into toll roads, but in Canada's biggest city the political stars are aligning to put a price on two major highways.

Even though the U.S. traffic fatality rate per mile driven has fallen by two-thirds in the last 50 years, America today still has the deadliest road system per capita in the developed world. Much of the improvement from safer driving and better emergency care has been wiped out by increases in total traffic.

Seminal research by Donald Appleyard in the 1970s found the volume of traffic on a street affects quality of life for residents in profound and unexpected ways. For example, the amount of social contact people had with their neighbors was curtailed for those who lived on high traffic streets compared with those living on quieter streets. People even defined their "home area" much more narrowly if they lived on a busy road.

DOT's "New York City Mobility Report" [PDF], released earlier this week, is the agency's first overview of NYC transportation trends in three years. As the number of people and jobs in the city has grown prodigiously in the past five years, DOT reports, the subway system and, increasingly, the bike network have allowed more New Yorkers to get where they need to go. But there are signs of strain -- bus ridership is declining and bus speeds are slowing, and traffic congestion in the Manhattan core is rising.

With New York City's population swelling to a record size, subways and bikes now account for about 700,000 more trips each day than 16 years ago, according to a new report from NYC DOT [PDF]. Car trips into the Manhattan core, meanwhile, are declining, but so is citywide bus ridership.

Heard this one before?

The Obama administration purportedly wants to use the lever of transportation policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx recently said he'd like to reverse the damage highways caused in urban neighborhoods, but you'd never know that by looking at U.S. DOT's latest policy prescription.

For the first time, a state legislator is sponsoring legislation in Albany to enact the Move NY toll reform plan. By creating a more rational toll system in New York City, the plan would significantly reduce traffic and raise revenue to invest in improving transit.