the increasing size and weight of personal vehicles are also having an impact on the steadily increasing number of people struck and killed while walking. In addition to designing safer streets, improving vehicle design along four main criteria is also critical for reducing pedestrian fatalities.
The new Opportunity Zone tax incentive was conceived as a tool to promote economic development, job creation, poverty reduction, and support for new businesses in areas of concentrated poverty. A couple years in, is it having the desired effects for small business stability and growth, especially for minority-owned legacy businesses?
With transportation accounting for the largest share of carbon emissions in the U.S., we’ll never achieve ambitious climate targets or create more livable and equitable communities if we don’t find ways to allow people to get around outside of a car—or provide more housing in places where that’s already an option. Our new report shows how we can reach those targets while building a more just and equitable society.
Our Transportation for America program has released a comprehensive report on why our default “solution” to traffic congestion—widening highways—simply does not work. The Congestion Con proves with data that one more expensive freeway lane most certainly will not solve congestion, and perhaps congestion is the wrong thing to be trying to solve in the first place.
In an expensive, decades-long effort to curb congestion in urban regions, our transportation agencies and elected leaders have overwhelmingly prioritized spending hundreds of billions of dollars to widen and build new highways. Yet this strategy has utterly failed to “solve” the problem at hand, and in many cases, has actually made it worse. The Congestion Con, a new report from our Transportation for America program, examines how and why, and in this post we look at how land use is right in the middle of it all.
Smart Growth America recently released The State of Transportation and Health Equity, a field scan looking at the intersection of transportation and health equity in the U.S. today. Last month, Emiko Atherton walked through the high-level findings on a webinar. A recording of the webinar with closed captioning is now available. You can also download a PDF of the presentation or read the brief recap below.
A handful of leaders in the House and Senate just introduced a bill that would finally require states and metro areas to design and build safer streets for everyone. Plus, our new report shows which U.S. House representatives have the highest rate of people struck and killed while walking in their districts.
Our new Foot Traffic Ahead report shows that walkable neighborhoods are in high demand in all of the country’s biggest metro areas but also massively undersupplied, leading to price premiums that make it a challenge for everyone to experience the benefits of living in them.
Walkable urban places (i.e. WalkUPs) occupy less than one percent of the total land mass in the 30 largest metro areas, but deliver outsized economic performance and there is great demand for more of such places. Meeting this pent-up demand for new WalkUPs would create a new economic foundation for the U.S. economy, one far more resilient than one predicated on suburban growth.
In Foot Traffic Ahead 2019, we rank the top 30 metros based on their WalkUPs.
Smart Growth America/LOCUS today released Foot Traffic Ahead 2019, a report which ranks the 30 largest metros in the United States based on the percentage of office, retail and rental multi-family space each has in their walkable urban places. The report powerfully illustrates the price premiums investors and buyers are willing to pay to live or work in walkable, transit-connected neighborhoods—and why we urgently need to build more of them.