• Albany Attempting to Fund Transit and Avoid Bridge Tolls (NYT, Post)
• Obama Admin Takes Firmer Approach With GM and Chrysler (NYT, NYT, WSJ, Yglesias)
• Brooklyn Bridge Face-Lift Headlines List of NYC Stim Projects (News, Post)
• Pols ‘Protest’ MTA Doomsday Measures at City Hall (Bklyn Eagle)
• Without Rescue Package MTA Would Cut 3,000 Positions (News)
• Rental Housing on the Rise in the Exurbs (WSJ)
• How Much High-Speed Rail Does $8 Billion Buy? (MSNBC)
• CA Bill Would Set the Stage for Mileage Tax (Streetsblog SF)
• WashCycle Wades Into the Bike PR Debate
• Albuquerque Getting a Bike Bridge Across Rio Grande (Bike ABQ via Streetsblog.net)

• Albany Hashing Out MTA Rescue Plan Behind Closed Doors — Tolls Off the Table? (News, CBS, NY1)
• Van Driver Jumps Curb, Kills Pregnant Woman in Midtown (NYT, News)
• News Begins Series on Albany Dysfunction (Here’s Part 2)
• Post: Bloomberg, Not State Senators, Likely to Get Hit With Fallout From MTA Crisis
• Obama Initiates Next Phase of Carmaker Bailout (NYT, WNYC)
• Are Road Builders Underbidding for Stimulus Projects? (NYT)
• Some 8th Ave Biz Owners Don’t Want Their Street to Be Safer for Cyclists and Peds (Chelsea Now)
• The State of Traffic Justice in NYC (Gotham Gazette)
• China’s Subway Boom Not Keeping Pace With Car Sales and Sprawl (NYT)
• Bike Corral Spotted in Baltimore (Rebuilding Place via Streetsblog.net)

The news coming out of Washington last week jacked up expectations for national transportation policy to new heights. Cabinet members Ray LaHood and Shaun Donovan announced a partnership to connect transportation and housing policy, branded as the “Sustainable Communities Initiative.” The second-in-command at DOT, Vice Admiral Thomas Barrett, told a New York audience that “building communities” is a top priority at his agency.At the moment, however, the scene on the ground shows how far we have to go before the reality catches up to the rhetoric: State DOTs flush with federal stimulus cash are plowing ahead with wasteful, sprawl-inducing highway projects. Ultimately, you can’t end car dependence or create livable places without enlisting the people building those roads — the metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), state DOTs, and other entities that shape local policy. How can the feds affect their decisions?

The Congress for the New Urbanism has some intriguing answers. During the stimulus debate, CNU proposed a new type of federal road funding that would help to build connected grids — the kind of streets that livable communities are made of. The proposal didn’t make it into the stimulus package before the bill got rushed out the door, but the upcoming federal transportation bill will provide another chance. CNU President John Norquist — a four-term mayor of Milwaukee who first got into politics as an anti-freeway advocate — was down in DC last Thursday to share his ideas with Congress. Streetsblog spoke to him afterward about what’s broken with national transportation policy and how to fix it. Here’s the first part of our interview.

Ben Fried: During the stimulus debate you sent a letter to James Oberstar, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and among other things you said that discussion of national transportation policy often presents a “false dichotomy” between transit funding and road funding. What did you mean? 

John Norquist: Well, maybe “false” is the wrong word for me to have used, but it’s a dichotomy that’s very limited. If the debate is about transit versus roads — and currently the battle lines are drawn at 20 percent funding for transit, 80 percent for roads — it’s a really limited debate. It leaves out the whole discussion of what kind of roads to build. So if you have a city with boulevards and avenues and no freeways, it’s going to be a lot more valuable. You look at Vancouver, they have no freeways whatsoever, and they have a fabulously intense and valuable real estate and job market. And then you look at the places that have invested all the money in the giant road segments and they tend to be degraded. It’s not roads versus transit — it’s good street networks-plus-transit versus mindless building of out-of-scale roads. I mean they’re basically putting rural roads into urbanized areas and it’s counterproductive, it reduces the value of the economy, it destroys jobs, destroys real estate value. For what, so you can drive fast at two in the morning when you’re drunk?

• MTA Doomsday Is Here (NY1, News, 2nd Ave Sagas)
• Everyone’s Telling the State Senate to Wake Up and Rescue Transit (NYT, News, Politicker)
• …Except This Daily News Columnist
• Park Slope Groups Push for Two-Way Streets on 8th Ave, Prospect Park West (Bklyn Paper)
• Gehry: Atlantic Yards Not Gonna Happen (News, Post)
• City Room Launches a New Weekly Column on Cycling
• Police Parking on Sidewalks, the Neverending Story (The Local)
• What a Livable Suburb Looks Like (TC Streets via Streetsblog.net)
• Oklahoma City Needs to Downsize Its Streets (How We Drive)
• How Would You Design a Car-Free Bike Oasis on Governor’s Island? (Gov’s Island Blog)

Q: Can you please let us know what the 88th is doing to keep the streets safe from criminal drivers? We regularly see drivers flying through our streets (perhaps especially along Washington Park, right along the park, where there is no stop light for two blocks). Running red lights is also common. I live on Clinton between Myrtle/Willoughby and it seems that that block is a continual double-park fest. I’ve lived here since 2000 and cannot recall ever seeing a police officer issuing a traffic violation — I don’t doubt that it happens from time to time, but clearly it doesn’t happen enough to deter dangerous behavior from drivers.

A: We’ve never heard that we don’t give enough summonses. I do have a summons officer and will send him over to Clinton and Willoughby if that’s an issue. But so far this year, we’ve already issued 1,200 violations in the precinct for hazardous driving, including running red lights, speeding, talking on a cell phone and backing up unsafely. That’s in addition to many summonses for less hazardous moving violations. We’ve also issued 2,400 parking violations so far this year.

Citing the number of summonses handed out is typical of how NYPD measures traffic enforcement, and it doesn’t come close to telling the whole story. Consider that nearly 40 percent of New York City motorists were clocked speeding in Transportation Alternatives’ report Terminal Velocity [PDF]. Or that drivers burn through red lights in the city more than a million times every day, according to a 2001 study conducted by the city comptroller [PDF]. It stands to reason that those 1,200 citations issued in the 88th comprise only a very small fraction of all hazardous driving violations committed in the precinct this year.

Click here to read the entire article.