Sarah Goodyear

Over the past couple of months, we've been following a story in Savannah about a crackdown on jaywalking -- a crackdown prompted by the death of a tourist who was hit by a car on Oglethorpe Avenue in the city's historic district. Streetsblog Network member Sustainable Savannah has done a great job of articulating why the jaywalking ticket blitz was an inappropriate and ineffective response to the problem of unsafe streets.

Streetcars provoke strong emotions in transpo geeks. A recent post on Human Transit called "Streetcars: An Inconvenient Truth" precipitated a very informed and sometimes heated thread of discussion on the relative virtues of light rail vs. bus rapid transit (a mode that got its moment in the limelight just this morning).

As the leaders of the G-8 meet in L'Aquila, Italy, to discuss how to tackle climate change on the global level, we bring you a report from Streetsblog Network member GreenCityBlueLake about a victory on the local level in Ohio.

This morning, I'm making use of a mass transit system while sitting at my desk at home.

An update today from Design New Haven, the excellent Streetsblog Network member that has been promoting the use of SeeClickFix. This rapidly growing service gives citizens a way to document problems in the public space, and back in March the issue getting the most attention in New Haven was the dangerous situation that exists for cyclists on US Route 1 at the Tomlinson Bridge, where a railroad grade crossing has caused multiple bike crashes.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we bring you some reflections on commuter comfort from network member Cap'n Transit. As he points out in a post called "Many Segments of the Population Are Too Old for This Shit," a lot of people are put off of certain modes of transit because of the perception -- and often the reality -- that they are crowded and uncomfortable (yes, New York subway, we're looking at you).

If you're a person who is accustomed to getting around the place you live without a car, you've probably spent at least some time trying to sell your auto-dependent friends on the concept. Maybe you've even gone so far as to map out a route for them so that they wouldn't get frustrated. And sometimes you've succeeded in getting another person onto a bike, bus, train or trolley to make a trip across town. It's a good feeling, right?

Yesterday's New York Times blog item about why New York women are underrepresented among the city's bike commuters didn't sit well with the authors of Streetsblog Network member Let's Go Ride a Bike. Trisha, one of the blog's authors and a bike commuter herself in Nashville, sees the piece as part of a trend (epitomized by a recent Treehugger post called "6 Reasons the World Needs More Girls on Bikes"). Too often, she says, people looking at female cyclists take a cosmetic approach to a complex subject: 

We hear the arguments again and again from DOTs: they need to widen highways and expand interchanges to improve safety on the nation's roads.

Excited about the prospect of high speed rail in America? Lots of people have been. But as Yonah Freemark reports on The Transport Politic, yesterday the General Accountability Office threw a bit of a wet blanket on the growing enthusiasm. The GAO is saying the Obama administration has so far failed to provide clear goals and a comprehensive plan for a high speed rail system: