A rendering of a proposed parklet for Highland park. Photo via Living Streets LA.

Here is a look at some of the transportation headlines gathered by us and the Metro Library. The full list of headlines is posted on the Library’s Headlines blog, which you can also access via email subscription or RSS feed.

Huizar, Living Streets, unveil parklet designs for El Sereno Ave., York Blvd. (L.A. Streetsblog)

Two parking space–to–parklet conversions on L.A.’s Eastside are starting to take shape with the release of these renderings. Collaborating on the project are Living Streets LA and Los Angeles Councilmember Jose Huizar. The two proposals would go into some of the busier commercial areas of Highland Park, creating a public porch for the community right in the street.

Higher fuel standards could reduce federal transportation funds by $57 billion by 2022 (Transportation Issues Daily)

Larry Ehl notes an inconvenient truth: even as federally-mandated fuel economy standards help us conserve fuel, they’re undermining the principle way that we finance highways, transit and other transportation programs — the gas tax. The gas tax, faithful Source readers will recall, is levied as a flat per-gallon fee that hasn’t changed at the federal level since the first Bush administration. Ehl sees three courses of action for how to make up this yawning funding gap:

• Reducing spending on highways and mass transit,
• Transferring additional money from the Treasury’s general fund to the Highway Trust Fund, and
• Increasing the gasoline tax or raising revenues from other sources to provide receipts to the [transportation] trust fund.

Does suburban local service get cars off the road? (Human Transit)

Jarrett Walker provides another great look into the nuts of bolts of transit in this piece. Walker notes that suburban local service can serve a lot of valid goals, like providing universal access to all, but reducing car traffic is not likely to be an outcome. The crux? The geometry of most suburbs — low density, non-gridded streets — makes high ridership difficult to achieve.