I would recommend The Transport Politic to anyone interested in transportation. The blog's author, Yonah Freemark, posts a new entry every two to three days providing his input on the currents happenings in the field of transportation policy. While a lot of time is spent analyzing transportation policy at the Federal Level, Freemark also uses many blog entries to discuss recently released state and city transportation plans.
Through the blog, Freemark explores transportation issues at many levels. Due to the current political climate, his discussions have focused upon funding issues for current and future transportation projects. A large part of Freemark’s commentary covers the recent cancellation of projects that, in some cases, have been under development or planning for a very long time. Freemark also discusses land use issues in his blog. For example, several months ago, there was a very insightful blog post regarding growth in the northern Virginia area near Washington D.C. Freemark used data from the 2010 Census to identify major and minor growth areas in northern Virginia. The data showed a strong correlation between growth areas and D.C. Metro Stations.
Although The Transport Politic is a great resource for in depth coverage of current transportation policy news and events, I must admit that the blog is very biased toward “new transportation planning”. From this perspective, there is a large emphasis on promoting the development and expansion of public bus and rail transportation, pedestrian facilities, cycling facilities and essentially any transportation approach that does not focus on automobiles. I wholeheartedly agree with this perspective, but I do recognize this bias when reading The Transport Politic. Despite the bias, it is still a good source of information and perspective on current issues in transportation planning.
