Sarah Goodyear

I've been trying a little experiment lately as I ride around town on my bike: doing my level best to follow the letter of the law. I've been inspired by both the carrot and the stick. In the carrot department, Transportation Alternatives' new Biking Rules handbook has made a very nice case for more rule-based cycling in the city: "the simple principle that our responsibility to others on the street increases in relation to our potential to cause harm. With Biking Rules, NYC cyclists are taking the lead to create safer, saner streets." I would like to be a part of that sanity, even if I think it would be more appropriate for law enforcement to take the lead by enforcing the laws that apply to motorists. So I'm giving it a shot. So far I've gotten thanks from two pedestrians for stopping at red lights, and that felt pretty good.

Have regional planning efforts in Morris County, New Jersey played a key role in stopping sprawl? And can they provide a model for communities around the country?

Today the issue of pedestrian safety has popped up a couple of times on the Streetsblog Network. First, the folks at WalkBike Jersey report that a bill giving pedestrians more protection in the crosswalk has passed the State Assembly and is moving to committee in the Senate:

I've been thinking a lot about slowness lately. Part of my inspiration has been from necessity: I recently found an old tandem bike on Craigslist and have been using it to get around Brooklyn with the kid. It weighs roughly one ton. It has only one speed, and only one pace: stately. When riding it, I affect a lordly indifference to the cars and bikes that whiz by.

When President Obama announced his plan for a national  high-speed rail network earlier this year, one of the people invited to attend was the Republican mayor of a city you've most likely never heard of -- Meridian, Mississippi. And one of the rail routes, running from Atlanta to New Orleans, went right through Meridian.

Today on the Streetsblog Network, member blog Worldchanging has an interview on the future of American transportation with Nancy Kete, a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute and the managing director of EMBARQ, the WRI's Center for Transport and the Environment.

Whenever anyone asks me why I like Twitter so much, I tell them it's about the information. If you follow the right people (and who that is obviously depends entirely on you) you can tap into an amazing amount of great stuff from around the Internet (and real life too). It's like having a custom-made news feed filtered through some very intelligent, and idiosyncratic, human brains.

Last week, several of our Streetsblog Network member blogs picked up on a recent policy statement from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), "The Built Environment: Designing Communities to Promote Physical Activity in Children." It examines how sprawl harms the nation's children by reducing physical activity, and how denser development, traffic-calming measures and more parks could result in better health for America's young people.

We talk a lot on this blog about the way that government policy can help to create livable streets. But we don't often discuss the role that individual property owners can play when they're inspired to create a more pedestrian-friendly space.

This morning, Jeff Wood at The Overhead Wire points us to a newly released measure of CO2 emissions from the Center for Neighborhood Technology (which just won a 2009 MacArthur Foundation Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, BTW). He says maps like these help to show why changing land-use patterns is vital in the fight to diminish greenhouse gases: