Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Studies & Reports

Highway Boondoggles: Widening I-95 Across Connecticut

By Jeff Inglis and John Olivieri | Jan 19, 2016 | No Comments

Last year Congress passed a multi-year transportation bill. Like previous bills, it gives tens of billions of dollars to states every year to spend with almost no strings attached. How much of this federal funding will state DOTs devote to expensive, traffic-inducing highway projects that further entrench car dependence and sprawl? In a new report, Highway Boondoggles 2 (the […]

Study: Sharrows Don’t Make Streets Safer for Cycling

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 14, 2016 | No Comments

Sharrows are the dregs of bike infrastructure — the scraps cities hand out when they can’t muster the will to implement exclusive space for bicycling. They may help with wayfinding, but do sharrows improve the safety of cycling at all? New research presented at the Transportation Review Board Annual Meeting suggests they don’t. A study by University […]

Social Engineering! Cities That Build More Parking Get More Traffic

By Angie Schmitt | Jan 13, 2016 | No Comments

Build parking spaces and they will come — in cars. New research presented this week at the annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board finds a direct, causal relationship between the amount of parking in cities and car commuting rates. University of Wisconsin researcher Chris McCahill and his team examined nine “medium-sized” cities — with relatively stable […]

Federal Report: Bad Street Design a Factor in Rising Ped/Bike Fatalities

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 11, 2015 | No Comments

A new report from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office [PDF] examines why people walking or biking account for a rising share of traffic deaths in the United States. While the conclusions aren’t exactly earth-shattering, one culprit the GAO identified is street design practices that seek primarily to move cars. The investigation was ordered by U.S. representatives Rick Larsen (Washington State), […]

Real Estate Giant: Suburban Office Parks Increasingly Obsolete

By Angie Schmitt | Dec 10, 2015 | No Comments

What tenants want in an office building is changing, and the old model of the isolated suburban office park is going the way of the fax machine. That’s according to a new report from Newmark, Grubb, Knight and Frank [PDF], one of the largest commercial real estate firms in the world. The old-school office park does “not offer the […]

How Much Can Bicycling Help Fight Climate Change? A Lot, If Cities Try

By Angie Schmitt | Nov 18, 2015 | No Comments

A new study from the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy attempts to measure the potential of bikes and e-bikes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. ITDP’s conclusion, in short: Bicycling could help cut carbon emissions from urban transportation 11 percent. The authors calculated the carbon emissions reduction that could result if cities around the world make a strong, sustained […]

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