Sprawl

In his storied career at New Jersey DOT, Gary Toth played an indispensable role changing the culture of the agency, promoting a place-based ethic instead of the auto-centric transportation planning dogma. Today Toth heads transportation initiatives at Project for Public Spaces, where he has written "A Citizen's Guide to Better Streets." The book, which will be published by AARP, serves as a how-to for working constructively with your local transportation and planning agencies. (It is not yet available for purchase.)

The American Prospect reports on a bi-partisan panel at the University of Minnesota last week where some dyed-in-the-wool Republicans declared their affinity for urbanism and opposition to sprawl:

In the second installment of our serialized tour through StreetsWiki, we turn to DianaD's entry on Vehicle-Miles Traveled:

Gas Prices Altering Rural Life in More Ways Than One

Suburbanites in northern Virginia are finding their streets more clogged with traffic than ever, and, as the Washington Post reported earlier this week, they aren't about to get bailed out by road-widening projects. Here's the crux of the problem, told from the Post reporter's decidedly windshield perspective:

NYC Blog directs our attention to the map above, which depicts every street in the continental U.S. Map creator Ben Fry (no relation) posts a larger version on his site, and explains it like so:

Democratic front runner Barack Obama just released a campaign "Fact Sheet" entitled, "Strengthening America's Transportation Infrastructure" (download it). While Hillary Clinton has put forward some outstanding and heavily transit-oriented plans of her own, Obama appears to be the first major party presidential candidate to outline a national transportation platform that explicitly seeks to "create policies that incentivize greater bicycle and pedestrian usage of sidewalks and roads" (if anyone knows differently, let us know in the comments section). Whatever the case, it's a significant step up from the 2004 campaign featuring George W. Bush's mountain bike fitness regimen and John Kerry, spandex-clad on an $8,000 Serotta.

Working for a failing automaker to make enough money to keep your beat-up, failing mini van rolling through your sprawled-out, failing city. From today's New York Times story on escalating gasoline prices.

This scarifying nine-minute peek into an auto-enslaved Disney world of the future, as seen from 1958, is as amazing for what it gets right (like urban sprawl) as much as what is laughably off the mark (like urban sprawl = Utopia).