Angie Schmitt

Here's an interesting way to evaluate how well a street network works for biking. Stephen Tu and Alex Rixey are mapping streets in Montgomery County, Maryland, based on how comfortable riders of different skill levels find them.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx opened up earlier this spring in a refreshingly personal speech about how highway construction in American cities isolated many neighborhoods -- especially black neighborhoods -- and cut people off from economic opportunity. Now U.S. DOT is following up with an effort to demonstrate how those wrongs can be righted.

Yesterday was national Bike to School Day, an event that shows kids what it's like to power their own way to school. The fact that we have a special day to promote what used to be part of the daily routine for many children also speaks to the way biking and walking have been marginalized on American streets.

Everyone's paying tribute to Jane Jacobs today, on what would be the pioneering urbanist's 100th birthday. Jacobs' classic critique of mid-century American urban planning dogma, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is probably the most influential book ever written about planning. But her legacy is also contested, and her ideas still go unheeded in most cities. Was she too averse to change? And how do her theories of city-building work in practice?

It's not enough for highway builders to carve out land at great public expense so they can jam more cars into cities. Now they want you to believe their projects are great for the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of the added traffic and pollution.

Right now, the Seattle region is hashing out how to spend $50 billion to expand transit. The project list, known as ST3, is tilted heavily toward the suburbs, not the urban core where ridership would be higher.

Boris Johnson says that one of his goals as mayor of London was to make cycling "more popular and more normal." As Johnson's eight-year tenure winds down, it looks like the progress he made in his second term has accomplished that mission.

Impermeable surfaces like parking lots are terrible for the environment in several ways, including the water pollution that results when stormwater runoff causes sewer systems to overflow. In Ohio, the state's highest court recently upheld a fee on parking lots to help mitigate the damage to water quality.

Every once in a while you have to step back and gape at the sheer scale of the highway interchanges America has built smack in the middle of our cities.

This video from the Minneapolis-based satirical site Wedge LIVE sends up the not-in-my-backyard resistance to infill development that could help alleviate the shortage of affordable housing affecting a growing number of American cities.