If reading Streets.mn five times a week does not fully feed your hankering for news about transportation in all its forms, consider subscribing to the listserv from the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT): Library Alert – Sustainability, Public Health, and Transportation.
I subscribed because reading Streets.mn whet my appetite for knowing more about my options for moving around my community and beyond. The email is easy to skim. Sometimes I read only headlines. When I do open links, I read some of those thoroughly or cursorily depending on my mood and topic. Last year I found an item about what turned out to be a fascinating book, “Killed By A Traffic Engineer,” which inspired me to submit my first article to Streets.mn.
The email follows a template:
- First are links to news articles, the first set with a sustainability theme and the second with a public health theme — all through a transportation lens.
- Then a section called Related Materials from the MnDOT library which highlights published research.
The emails come about once a month, and news sources are varied. The message that arrived in my inbox on April 17 included links to the Union of Concerned Scientists (whose homepage currently declares “Scientists Make America Great”); Governing Magazine (“for the people making government work”); AASHTO Journal, which represents the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials; and the Ohio Department of Transportation — in addition to the usual large Minnesota news media organizations and other local community media here and in other states.
A sampling of the topics includes:
- “Major Changes to the Duluth Transit Authority,” from local news outlet WDIO, reporting on efforts to get more commuters to use mass transit in Duluth.
- CBS News in Chicago reported on Bike Lane Uprising, “an app that allows cyclists to report bike-lane instructions,” whose staff held its first class on bike-lane and street safety laws for the drivers of fleet vehicles (which often block bike lanes).
- A story by Route Fifty, a news site for state and local government policy makers, on how states are using technology for safer roads. California, for example, is exploring how to reduce deaths and injuries of pedestrians and bicyclists.
- “Vehicle Speed Limiting Technology Gets a Foothold in State Law” describes a new law in Virginia that allows courts to require devices in vehicles to limit the speeds they can reach as part of sentencing for dangerous driving. Six other states are looking at similar laws.
The library materials feature more detailed and in-depth reports, such as:
- Outcomes of Variability in Teen Driving Experience and Exposure from the Behavioral Traffic Safety Cooperative Research Program from the National Academy of Sciences.
- Last month: A 58-page document on On-Street Bicycle Facility Design Features published by the Cooperative Highway Research Program.
Click here to sign up. Choose “New Library Materials” toward the top of the page. Then scroll to the bottom of the next page for further instructions. Happy reading!