Few single actions have helped advance the cause of walkable neighborhoods more than the launch of WalkScore.com a few years ago. In a simple and elegant formulation, Walk Score summed up what it meant to be “walkable” and put a value on it. Since then, every real estate web site worth visiting has added it [...]

We’re not going to pile on in the story of the overly punitive principal who suspended 64 Michigan students for biking to school as a senior “prank”. After all, she later rescinded the suspensions. But it’s hard to let a teachable moment like this go by as Congress is negotiating whether to X out funding [...]

You may not have known it — it’s not the most publicized special day on the books — but today is National Walking Day. Some of you may have traded part or all of your drive or transit trip today for a walk to work. But for many, every day is “walking day,” and it [...]

A new academic study looking at the numbers of pedestrians killed while wearing headphones has been highly successful at winning credulous news coverage and shifting blame to the victims, but by focusing on a tiny sliver of fatalities it does more to obscure the true causes than explain what is happening. It examines a share of pedestrian fatalities so small as to be almost statistically insignificant when compared to the problem of pedestrian deaths writ large.

In a story far too similar to Raquel Nelson‘s ordeal, a boy was struck and killed while crossing a 5-lane arterial highway in metro Atlanta with his stepfather on New Year’s Day. Just like the incident that claimed the life of A.J Nelson, the child was halfway across a busy street with a parent and [...]

The attempt by Senator Rand Paul to take the relatively tiny amount of money that goes toward safer walking and biking on our streets and redirect it to our massive backlog of deficient bridges failed yesterday in the Senate. Busy bicycling bridge Originally uploaded by Steven Vance to Flickr. Send a message to your Senator to [...]

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 [...]

Many of you were shocked by the story of Raquel Nelson, the single mom in Atlanta charged with vehicular homicide when her son was killed while crossing an unsafe street with her. While shocking, head-scratching stories like hers are thankfully rare, it’s emblematic of the road design in many places that we live, and we want to make sure that Congress gets that picture loud and clear. We want to show them that roads like Austell Road by Raquel Nelson’s apartment — 4 lane speedways with few considerations for pedestrians — are far too common. So send us your photos of dangerous, unsafe and poorly planned streets out there across America.

The story of Raquel Nelson, the Atlanta mother charged with vehicular homicide when her son was killed while crossing a street with her, continues to make waves in the local and national media. It’s been a galvanizing story, as people across the country were shocked to see a grieving mother convicted and facing jail time [...]

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 [...]