Transportation Policy

In a report for CBSnews.com on Berlin, Germany's booming bike culture, Christine Lagorio expresses shock at the sheer number of bikes she saw in Berlin and the way in which motorists and cyclists share the road "gracefully." This, she says, is something she has never experienced in her home town of New York City.

A buffered section of Manhattan's 8th Avenue bike lane.

Thanks all for reading and commenting on our non-motorized honeymoon travel series (see parts 1, 2, 3 and 4). Below is a table Susan put together to briefly summarize some of our observations on the cities we visited.

Streetsblog commenter and Newton Streets and Sidewalks blogmaster Sean Roche has a commentary on cheap municipal parking in today's Boston Globe:

Yesterday afternoon the Dept. of Transportation launched a new and improved web site loaded with features designed to make information more available to the public. Now you can use the DOT's site not only to watch traffic cams and sign up for e-news updates, but also to request different types of permits, report potholes, file complaints about newsracks, report damaged bicycle racks (and our favorite, request bicycle racks).

Join Transportation Alternatives and the Citizens Committee for NYC at Everything Goes Book Café in St. George on Staten Island for a screening of Contested Streets, a one-hour documentary about New York's traffic crisis and how congestion pricing can solve it.

Transportation Alternatives has teamed up with cycling advocates from Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle to issue the Urban Transportation Report Card (PDF), which rates these cities' progress on greening their transportation systems. The report notes that transportation accounts for 20-60% of carbon emissions in major U.S. cities, so it is very encouraging that in each city the most significant growth occurred in bicycling, with Chicago registering an 80% increase in cyclists from 1990-2000.

My wife and I were married last month in Brooklyn. For our honeymoon, we wanted to see as many great American cities as we could. In 19 days of travel, we visited Chicago, Seattle, Portland (Ore.), San Francisco, Los Angeles and New Orleans (and also stopped briefly in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia).

We'd expect this kind of thing from some people, but not U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters.  On PBS' "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" this week, Peters stated that instead of raising taxes on gasoline to renew the nation's sagging infrastructure, Congress should examine its spending priorities -- including investments in bike paths and trails, which, Peters said, "are not transportation."