Tuesday’s Headlines See the Light

• The New York Times looked into why pedestrian deaths at night are rising even faster in the U.S. than other times of day. There are lots of explanations — darkness itself, dangerous roads, bigger vehicles, drivers fiddling with their phones on their way home from work — but Streetsblog‘s Kea Wilson hit on one the Times missed: Walkers are safer in numbers, but Americans walk a lot less than they used to.
• More stories are trickling out about the Biden administration’s recent $8 billion passenger rail announcement (Route Fifty).
  • Washington and Oregon officials had hoped for $198 million for high-speed rail connecting Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, but had to settle for a $1 million planning grant (The Urbanist).
  • The feds also denied funding for lines from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas and Boise (Salt Lake Tribune).
  • Chicago received $94 million for Union Station and planning money for improvements on lines to Indianapolis and Ontario (Audacy).
• A new poll shows that Bay Area voters aren’t willing to pay higher taxes to fund transit unless the region’s 27 agencies become more seamless to ride. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Baltimore’s light rail shutdown raises questions about why the Maryland DOT didn’t upgrade its 30-year-old rail cars earlier. (Banner)
• The Port of San Diego wants to turn some rental car parking lots into an entertainment district with a TopGolf and a park along the bay. (Times of San Diego)
• An Orlando transportation engineer writes that even when streets are designed to be safe, it doesn’t matter if drivers are distracted. (Sentinel)
• Seattle police are looking for the driver or drivers who appeared to deliberately target pedestrians in two separate vehicular assaults. (KING 5)
• A Bakersfield man, irate that a road was closed, plowed his truck into a Christmas parade, injuring three people. (Bakersfield Now)
• When drivers killed six pedestrians in West Hartford last year, it convinced city officials they needed a Vision Zero plan. (CT Insider)
• After installing one protected bike lane, Santa Monica’s mayor proclaimed that the SoCal city is coming for Amsterdam’s crown as the bike capital of the world. (Momentum)
• In preparation for congestion pricing, Streetsblog NYC editor Gersh Kuntzman has donned his metaphorical bat-mask once again and is back to the “criminal mischief” of fixing obscured license plates. (Curbed)

source https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/12/12/tuesdays-headlines-see-the-light