A reporter for the Contra Costa Times spends a week without a car in the San Francisco Bay Area, weighing the pros and cons of public transport.

At Brooklyn Bounty’s forum “Farms, Food and Healthy Communities,” supporters of farmers’ markets in low-income neighborhoods of Brooklyn met to discuss the challenges they face in providing access to fresh, healthy foods, building relationships between farmers and consumers, and creating farmers’ markets that function as community meeting places.

The forum was part of a year-long planning effort funded by Project for Public Spaces.

Chicago DOT announced that this spring, traffic officers will pose as pedestrians, as part of an effort to crack down on drivers who endanger pedestrians.

Also as a part of Mayor Daley’s Safe Streets for Chicago plan, the city will be installing various safety measures, such as bulb-outs, elevated crosswalks, and pedestrian refuges in hazardous intersections.

After a screening of Contested Streets at a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Jim O’Grady finds himself lusting for safe bicycle infrastructure, dedicated bus lanes, and congestion pricing. The movie highlights the success that Copenhagen, London, and Paris have seen in prioritizing pedestrians, bicycles, and public transit riders over drivers.

Highways are unwelcome, noisy, polluting neighbors to people who live near them. They’re so imposing that it’s hard to imagine making one disappear. But that’s exactly what Oak Park, IL, might do.  A group is proposing to turn 1 1/2 miles of an expressway into a tunnel, with a 60 acre park on top.

A newly formed non-profit group is focusing on developing a network of pedestrian-friendly routes in downtown Minneapolis.

Outdoor holiday markets are a boon for artisans who sell their wares, as well as for the downtowns that host the markets.  Organizers of holiday fairs in cities around the country have seen them grow in recent years. “They’re just sort of being rediscovered as a no-brainer for downtowns,” says Ethan Kent, vice president of the Project for Public Space, an international nonprofit organization based in New York that promote activities like holiday markets.

“With the Wall Street Journal weighing in on transit-oriented development, has the movement that ties intensive, mixed land uses to transportation activity nodes finally reached the mainstream?” Asks Planetizen.

“Chicago can be stiflingly hot during the summer and rain-chilled in the spring, and its wind-whipped winters are the stuff of legend. So when the subject is “bicycle commuting,” Chicago is not the first city that springs to mind. But it’s becoming a hot bike-to-work town. In the next decade, it plans to expand its network of bike trails to 500 miles, and has set a goal of putting a bike path of some sort within half a mile of every city resident.”

“Atlanta’s newest park is planted in quite a place: 17 feet above Downtown Connector motorists.

There is nothing else like it in the state, say Georgia Department of Transportation officials. The Fifth Street Bridge, officially finished today, has more than tripled in size as it spans I-75/I-85 downtown, giving the feel of a garden rather than a bridge, and adding no additional car lanes.

Instead, a department that has often been accused of favoring road capacity over all other projects spent $10.3 million building the foundation for a sort of mini campus quad, connecting Georgia Tech’s main campus to its new buildings at Technology Square, providing a new main entrance to the university, and serving the mixed-use revival that has exploded on the east side.”

This image (c) Joey Ivansco/Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff