After putting out the call far and wide for pictures of streets designed for speeding traffic at the expense of safe travel by people on foot or bike, we’ve been getting some great — and by great, we mean frightening and terrible — photos of inconvenient, poorly-planned, dangerous and downright hostile conditions for pedestrians. Here [...]

“I feel like her sentencing, it doesn’t just criminalize her, but people in like circumstances whose sole transportation is their feet” – Lisa Cupid, South Cobb resident who delivered 17 letters from Nelson’s supporters to the judge today. Updated 7/26 5:41 p.m.: Raquel Nelson told the AJC that she has opted for a new trial. [...]

This morning Raquel Nelson got to tell a little of her own story on national television, thanks to a Today show piece, embedded below. The Georgia mom faces sentencing tomorrow of up to 36 months in jail on charges of vehicular homicide in the death of her son, who was killed by a hit-and-run driver [...]

Updated 7/25: This petition at Change.org for Raquel Nelson has a lot of momentum. Sign it if you haven’t already. It will be delivered to the judge in the case before sentencing tomorrow. The response to our post on the Atlanta mother who was charged with vehicular homicide when her child was struck by a hit-and-run [...]

More than 47,700 pedestrians were killed in the U.S. between 2000 and 2009, and the majority of those deaths were preventable, according to Dangerous by Design 2011. This new report shows how roadway designs promoted by federal investment endanger people on foot and ranks major metropolitan areas to assess how safe pedestrians are while walking. The top four – Orlando, Miami, Jacksonville, and Tampa – are all in Florida.

Walking in the ditch Originally uploaded by Transportation for America to Flickr. If this woman got hit by car, it’s probably her fault, right? Photograph by Stephen Lee Davis/Transportation for America. We noted on Twitter this morning a story in the USA Today about pedestrian deaths increasing in 2010, halting a decline that had been [...]

We mentioned this on Twitter when the issue came out back in July, but National Geographic had a nice one-page feature on Dangerous by Design, our study from 2009 ranking metro areas on their relative danger to those on foot and bike, focusing on Florida’s overall risk based on having 4 of the top 10 most dangerous metros. In the last 15 years, more than 76,000 Americans have been killed while crossing or walking along a street in their community, and it’s high time that more attention was paid to this preventable loss of life that we far too often ignore or simple believe to be inevitable.

A couple of years ago, we profiled Dr. Scott Crawford, a wheelchair user and resident of Jackson, Mississippi who has long fought for accessible buses with wheelchair lifts, curb ramps and better sidewalks. As Dr. Crawford’s story reminds us, there is still a lot of work to do, but he’s had a powerful legal tool in his fight to make streets and transit services equitable and accessible for all users: The Americans with Disabilities Act, which turned 20 years old just this week.

Do yourself a favor and check out this short video from PBS’ Blueprint America series that aired in just the last few days. The overall package is about “disappearmarks” — earmarks totaling millions in the last federal transportation bill that have never been allocated or spent, according to the Sunlight Foundation. But this from Atlanta focuses much more specifically on how unsafe, incomplete streets and outdated transportation planning has resulted in a major road in Atlanta (and countless others) where pedestrians take their lives into their own hands each and every day, just to get to work, school, or the closest bus stop.

We’re facing an epidemic of childhood obesity, and this could very well be a generation of children who live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents. A healthier transportation system for America’s kids requires change in federal policy. But change will remain out of our grasp without a sense of urgency from everyday people on the ground. So where’s the meeting point between policymakers in Washington and citizens in their neighborhoods?