I want to take a moment draw your attention to the debate over transportation funding currently going on in Missouri. The Show-Me State is having a vote next month to amend their state constitution and provide a “temporary” increase in the sales tax to fund transportation improvements. As in other states with similar status-quo extension measures, the debate has created some strange bedfellows and attracted a lot of money.

Building complex streets with the design features of roads – one version of what we call a stroad – is generally done by the engineer for safety reasons. Pedestrian and cycling advocates know that this is a narrow vision of safety.

Texting while driving is a very real problem. The cause of the problem, however, isn’t recklessness but an incorrect perception of safety on behalf of drivers who feel little risk in texting. We can write all the anti-distracted driving laws we want but, at best, we will only displace the problem, replacing texting with some other distraction. To really address this problem, we need to be willing to incorporate driver psychology, including risk response, into our engineering approach.

Registration is now open to our members for the 2014 National Gathering in Minneapolis, September 12-14, 2014.

The most successful small towns are the ones that can see beyond their borders, understand how the world is changing and position themselves for that change. The small towns that become ghost towns stay locked in their thinking, irrationally believing that “what always worked” will always work, that we only need to keep doing what we are doing and things will work out.

"An aging society with rising expectations, burdened with rates of chronic diseases exacerbated by sedentary lifestyles, will probably divert spending from both military development and the economic growth that sustains it."