Sarah Goodyear

We're taking it out of the city and into the suburbs and small towns today on the Streetsblog Network. Member blog Urban City Architecture takes a look at Moving Communities Forward, a recently released report on transit-oriented development (TOD) from the American Institute of Architects and the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota (it was funded by the Federal Highway Administration):

To finish off the Streetsblog Network week on an adrenaline-filled note, we've got a post about fear -- the biker's fear, to be precise -- from Livable Streets for West Palm Beach. Raphael Clemente relates a couple of all-too-familiar anecdotes about drivers who use their vehicles to intimidate, then says:

Automobile congestion is too often portrayed as mere nuisance or inconvenience. A new study from Germany, which we heard about via Streetsblog Network member blog The Hard Drive, reminds us that it is much more than that. The study, presented at the American Heart Association's 49th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention last week, shows that being in a traffic jam -- whether in a car, on a bike, or on a bus -- can triple a person's chance of having a heart attack:

Some disturbing news about stimulus spending on roads comes to us from Streetsblog Network member blog Sprawled Out, which covers the city of Franklin, WI. In that Milwaukee suburb, according to Sprawled Out's John Michlig, local bureaucrats are potentially on track to use stimulus funds to widen a local street in a particularly destructive way:

The Streetsblog Network is buzzing with bike news this morning, much of it related to the National Bike Summit in Washington, DC, where the mood sounds really upbeat. Bike Portland has been doing some great reporting from the summit; yesterday, we brought you their summary of DOT Secretary Ray LaHood's pledge to be a "full partner" with bike advocates.

So how can states best spend their stimulus money? How can livable streets advocates keep it from going to useless highway widening and other sprawl-inducing projects?

Today Streetsblog Network member The City Fix reports on the "cost of place" in the Washington, DC, area -- the way that the price of housing and transportation stacks up for people in the urban core and the suburbs. According to a report recently released by the Urban Land Institute,

Today on the Streetsblog Network, Richard Layman of Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space finds some interesting ideas about the future of American roads in a somewhat unlikely source -- the super-mainstream Parade magazine, which comes as an insert with more than 400 newspapers around the country and claims a circulation of 33 million. Layman looks at a Parade's cover story from yesterday, entitled How We Can Save Our Roads. The Parade article looks at an engineering practice called "practical design" that is being implemented in Missouri:

Today on the Streetsblog Network, we turn to member blog Trains for America, which looks at the idea of using  stimulus funds to bring rail-equipment manufacturing -- and expanded passenger rail service -- to the state of Montana: