Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Federal Highway Administration

Engineers to U.S. DOT: Transportation Is About More Than Moving Cars

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 26, 2016 | No Comments

A trade group representing the transportation engineering profession thinks it’s high time for American policy makers to stop focusing so much on moving single-occupancy vehicles. U.S. DOT is currently deciding how it will assess the performance of state DOTs. Will it continue business as usual and equate success with moving huge numbers of cars? That’s […]

Stark Divisions Between Dems and GOP on Climate Impacts of Transportation

By Angie Schmitt | Aug 22, 2016 | No Comments

How polarized are the two political parties on key questions about transportation policy and climate change? As you can imagine, the answer is “very.” The senior Democrat and Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — California’s Barbara Boxer and Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe, respectively — each wrote an opinion this week for the Eno Center for […]

It Just Got Easier for Cities to Design Walkable, Bikeable Streets

By Angie Schmitt | May 13, 2016 | No Comments

We probably haven’t seen the last of engineers who insist on designing local streets like surface highways. But at least now they can’t claim their hands are tied by federal regulations. Last week, the Federal Highway Administration struck 11 of the 13 design rules for “national highways” — a 230,000-mile network of roads that includes many urban streets. The rule change eliminates […]

Finally, a Little Accountability for State DOTs on Bike and Pedestrian Safety

By Angie Schmitt | Mar 15, 2016 | No Comments

In a win for bike and pedestrian safety, the Federal Highway Administration announced yesterday that it will require state transportation agencies to do something they have never had to do before: set goals to reduce bike and pedestrian fatalities, and track progress toward attaining those goals. The news is part of FHWA’s roll-out of several “performance measures” […]

The Feds Want to Reform the Cult of “Level of Service”

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 28, 2016 | No Comments

“What you measure is what you get,” the saying goes. That’s certainly true for transportation policy. And for a very long time one metric has reigned supreme on American streets: “Level of Service,” a system that assigns letter grades based on motorist delay. Roughly speaking, a street with free-flowing traffic gets an A while one where […]

The Feds Aren’t Crowing About the Record Amount of Driving in America

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 26, 2016 | No Comments

Gas is as cheap as ever, and cumulatively, Americans are driving a record amount. Newly released U.S. DOT data shows that through the end of November, Americans drove a cumulative 2.88 trillion miles last year, well above the same period in 2014, indicating that 2015 will set a new national record for driving mileage. Adjusting for population growth, driving […]

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