Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Traffic

Why Creating Meaningful Transportation Change Is So Hard

By Daniel Hertz | Oct 21, 2015 | No Comments

Cross-posted from City Observatory. At his blog, The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark pushed back this week on the idea that we’re seeing a revolution in the way people get around cities and suburbs, largely thanks to new transit-and-bike-friendly Millennials. In fact, he cites one of City Observatory’s posts as an example of a narrative he doesn’t […]

The End of Peak Driving?

By Joe Cortright | Oct 7, 2015 | No Comments

Cross-posted from City Observatory. A little over a year ago, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $3.70. Since then, that price has plummeted, and remains more than a dollar cheaper than it was through most of 2014. Over the same period, there’s been a small but noticeable uptick in driving in the US. After nearly […]

Pope Francis and the Flexibility of Our Streets

By Ben Fried | Sep 28, 2015 | 22 Comments

Add Pope Francis’s tour of New York to the long list of carmageddon scares that successfully frightened off would-be motorists. I grabbed these two shots of traffic from Google Maps, and despite all the alarming car detour icons, you can see that traffic was lighter during peak Francis than it normally is on a New York City weekday. While […]

Without Transit, American Cities Would Take Up 37 Percent More Space

By Angie Schmitt | Sep 28, 2015 | No Comments

Even if you never set foot on a bus or a train, chances are transit is saving you time and money. The most obvious reason is that transit keeps cars off the road, but the full explanation is both less intuitive and more profound: Transit shrinks distances between destinations, putting everything within closer reach. A new study published by the Transportation Research Board quantifies […]

Why Is There So Much Traffic in NYC? It’s the Free Roads, Stupid

By Stephen Miller | Sep 17, 2015 | 63 Comments

Since the de Blasio administration attempted to cap for-hire cars this summer, the debate over Manhattan traffic has gotten louder, but not more productive. Uber claimed it definitely wasn’t the problem. Some council members wondered if bike lanes were slowing down cars. Amid all the noise, something important got lost. At a hearing about Manhattan traffic this morning convened by Borough President Gale Brewer, a simple […]

Another Tall Tale About Congestion From the Texas Transportation Institute

By Joe Cortright | Aug 26, 2015 | No Comments

Crossposted from City Observatory. Everything is bigger in Texas — which must be why, for the past 30 years, the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) has basically cornered the market for telling whoppers about the supposed toll that traffic congestion takes on the nation’s economy. Today, they’re back with a new report, “The Urban Mobility Scorecard,” which purports to […]

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