Streetsblog USA

The last federal transportation law gave states more than enough money to fix every crumbling highway and bridge in America — but a disturbing share of departments of Transportation sunk that windfall into expanding highways instead, a new report found. And unless Congress learns from its mistakes and finally requires transportation officials to “fix it first,” we will continue to set billions of taxpayer dollars on fire.

A stunning 16.3 percent of U.S. roads that were eligible for federal money were still rated in “poor” condition in 2024, according to a recent Transportation for America analysis — despite Congress providing state DOTs with $56.8 billion in largely unrestricted transportation funds that year alone, and nearly $1.5 trillion over the 30 years prior.

Experts say it would take $43.2 billion per year to maintain all of the country’s existing roads in “acceptable” condition, or roughly 23 percent less than Congress authorized annually under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

And the authors of the report say the waste may be even worse than it seems.

Because increasingly lax reporting standards conceal broken roads from public view, and DOTs routinely mis-categorize expensive expansion projects as simple “maintenance” or lump them into a mysterious “other” category, Transportation for America suspects the national highway network is actually even more drastically overbuilt than it appears on paper.

That means that even a steep increase federal dollars may not be enough to repair our rapidly expanding transportation network — at least without using that money to shift people onto modes other than driving and take pressure off our battered asphalt.

“We’re still adding to the system faster than we’re able to take care of it,” said Mehr Mukhtar, the group’s senior policy associate. “We’re still seeing inconsistencies and a lack of transparency in reporting standards. And all of this just leads us to the conclusion that until we see a meaningful shift in our priorities, and in how we’re tying our spending to our outcomes, the backlog of roads in poor conditions is going to persist — and likely it’s going to worsen.”

Mukhtar traces much of America’s pothole crisis to a long-standing tradition of giving states broad latitude over how they spend their federal “formula” dollars, or grants doled out to DOTs based on a pre-determined government calculation.

In the absence of federal rules to rein them in, many states pick ribbon-cuttings for new and “improved” — i.e., widened — highways over the unsexy work of repaving the lanes they already have, even if those lanes are falling apart.

A whopping 24 states chose to spend less than $2.35 on maintenance for every dollar they spent on expansion — a ratio that Transportation for America says is alarming — despite the fact that those states have a higher share of roads in poor condition than the national average.

Worse, experts say those expansions won’t come close to accomplishing the goals they’re theoretically supposed to achieve. Decades of research has shown that widening roads does nothing to fix traffic jams over the long term, encourages drivers to fill newly added lanes, and saddles communities with compounding long-term maintenance obligations that they can’t keep up with.

It’s a little like adding a ballroom to a house when the roof is so leaky that rain is pouring in — except that ballroom is somehow accelerating a traffic violence crisis that claims nearly 40,000 lives a year, super-charging climate change, and amplifying income inequality by reducing access to jobs, rather than, say, hosting waltzes.

“That’s fiscally irresponsible, and it’s a burden on taxpayer dollars,” Mukhtar added.

Of course, not all states are neglecting their maintenance backlog in favor of climate arson — and some of them are even offsetting the worst offenders.

Communities like North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Vermont won applause from the report’s authors for strong repair-to-expansion ratios, which helped bring their average road conditions above the national average — though, to be fair, many of those states have a high share of depopulated rural roads that need less-frequent maintenance than highly trafficked urban arterials. Still, Mukhtar credited those communities with lowering America’s total share of roads and bridges in poor condition by three percentage points between 2018 and 2024.

But she warned that extremely modest progress won’t be enough to outrun America’s looming maintenance obligations. The report says every new lane-mile of highway built will cost future taxpayers $47,300 per year to maintain in good condition — roughly the cost of a year’s out-of-state tuition at a decent public university — and America built 119,257 of them in the six years the researchers analyzed.

Worse, even some of the “good” states are still delaying maintenance until its bridges are on the brink of collapse, driving maintenance costs well above the average. Mukhtar pointed to Michigan, whose maintenance spending, which looks impressive on paper, actually masks the fact that the Wolverine State tends to postpone repaving until roads are so bad that they need to be totally rebuilt.

“With the costs of construction ballooning and inflation rising, even those same dollars don’t get stretched as far now as they would have decades ago, if [states] started prioritizing repair earlier,” she said.

With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act due to expire on Sept. 30, Mukhtar said Congress has a rare opportunity to restore sanity to the transportation system and finally require states to “fix it first,” rather than adding endless new ballrooms to a falling-down house.

That might look like setting “tangible goals, such as reducing the backlog by half,” requiring federal agencies to collect better data on the actual condition of roads, and establishing enforceable mandates that state DOTs be more transparent about how taxpayer dollars are spent.

And until they actually do, no voter should believe a politician who pledges to “fix America’s crumbling roads and bridges” — because nearly $57 billion a year later, they still haven’t done so.

“Whenever a transportation bill is passed, we hear the same thing come out of Congress time and time again: the same rhetoric about fixing crumbling roads and bridges, and why we need to increase funding,” said Mukhtar. “But I think what we need to see this time around are enforceable requirements, which actually compel states to spend that money on fixing it first.”

• The Guardian asked experts how to fix traffic-choked cities, especially in light of high gas prices. The answers: Expand and improve transit, create more space for pedestrians and cyclists, focus on providing alternatives for commuters traveling into the city core from car-centric suburbs, and address the reasons why people choose to drive, such as service hours and safety concerns.
• Uber is shifting tactics away from fighting with local governments and labor unions as it seeks to roll out robotaxis, according to Axios. Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Uber partner Avride after at least 16 documented autonomous vehicle crashes (Tech Crunch).
• Urban trees counter half the heat island effect from climate change in cities, but less so in poorer neighborhoods, according to a new study. (Associated Press)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit adopted a two-decade plan to close a $34 billion budget gap in future capital projects. (KOMO)
• The first Vision Zero report from Indianapolis indicates that traffic deaths fell to 85 last year from a high of 120 in 2021, but a number of major roads remain dangerous. (WTHR)
• Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell, whose major accomplishment has been passing the “Choose How You Move” transit expansion referendum, will run for re-election. (News Channel 6)
• San Antonio is considering dropping speed limits on neighborhood streets from 30 miles per hour to 25, but in places where it’s already been done, it hasn’t had an effect on driver behavior. (Report)
• Amtrak is adding cars to its Missouri River Runner route to accommodate additional riders traveling to the World Cup in Kansas City. (Mass Transit)
• Construction on Baltimore’s long-awaited Purple Line is complete, but service won’t begin until late 2027 at the earliest. (Maryland Matters)
• An Omaha traffic reporter is still out of work after having been hit by two different drivers in separate crashes; one as a pedestrian, one while she was behind the wheel. (KETV)
• Cincinnati’s Red Bike bikeshare had a record number of users in 2026. (CityBeat)
• Kansas City opened a new bike and pedestrian bridge on Grand Boulevard. (Fox 4)
• Lime introduced a new type of bikeshare bike in Seattle that looks like a scooter with pedals. (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Pending the governor’s signature, South Carolina recently became the first East Coast state to adopt the “Idaho stop,” allowing cyclists to proceed through a yield sign or red light when it’s safe to do so. (Palmetto Walk Bike)
• A lot of people like to ride the D: The new Metro line in Los Angeles opened last weekend to great fanfare. (Streetsblog LA)

What does a protected bike lane have in common with a hot glue gun, a lawn mower and a refrigerator?

That’s not the set-up to a bad joke — it’s a powerful lesson in safe systems.

For this week’s Friday Video, we check in on one of our favorite TikTokers Jon Jon Wesolowski — aka “The Happy Urbanist” — who just posted an explainer on “forcing functions,” or design features that force better behavior and prevent bad things from happening.

And whether that’s an automatic kill switch on a household appliance or a barrier that separates a driver from cyclist, these features should be a no-brainer — if we can stop playing the blame game and start getting to the root causes of why people get hurt.

Check it out:

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Injury rates for e-bike and scooter users are plummeting in Europe even as the use of those devices has exploded since 2021, according to a new study that debunks the myth that roadways are getting less safe as a result of the micromobility boom.

Between 2024 and 2025, total bike and scooter mileage of the four mobility companies in the report grew by 14 percent, while the risk of injury declined by a little more than 1 percent. Bike safety seems even greater: e-bike trips increased by 72 percent in the same period yet injuries per million trips fell by around 18 percent compared to 2024.

The data was analyzed by Micro-Mobility for Europe, an industry group comprising the European operations of Bolt, Dott, Lime and Voi. The 2025 data is based on more than 353 million shared e-scooter trips and 136 million shared e-bike rides in the 27 European Union member states, plus Norway, Switzerland, the UK and Israel.

The companies collaborated to form Micro-Mobility for Europe to push back on the notion that e-bikes and scooters are a threat to safety. Its mission calls for joint effort to “develop a framework that ensures micro-mobility solutions flourish in cities in full respect of all road users and to revolutionize urban transportation toward a shared, electric, and carbon-free future.”

One expert said the preliminary findings show that micromobility only gets safer as the devices reach broader use.

“This indicates that with technological advancements, responsible operation, and better urban infrastructure, safety can be boosted even as micromobility network expands,” said George Yannis, a professor at National Technical University of Athens, which is working with the coalition to further study safety outcomes. “Continued monitoring and increased availability of micromobility data as well as evidence-based policies by both the [companies] and [local officials] will be essential to sustain this positive trend and further support Europe’s Vision Zero ambition of reducing road fatalities.”

And in the long term, risks continue to trend downward even as use continues to grow. Between 2021 and 2025, the injury risk per million km for shared e-scooters decreased by around 20 percent. And for bikes, overall injuries per million kilometers fell by almost 6 percent between 2024 and 2025, even as the number of trips increased by around 72 percent in 2025, evidence that the sector is getting safer as it scales.

The short report attributes the decrease in injury risk to an increase in safety features, like speed caps, on devices, geofencing in busy pedestrian areas, and regular maintenance of bikes and scooters.

“A 24-percent reduction in the risk of shared e-scooter injuries per million trips since 2021 shows that safer vehicle technology, rider education, sensibilisation [sic] measures by operators and continued investments in infrastructure are delivering measurable results,” said Micro-Mobility for Europe Co-Chair Marc Naether, who is also head of public policy at Bolt.

• During President Trump’s first term, the administration dragged its feet on distributing transit funds approved by Congress. The problem has gotten worse in his second term the U.S. DOT has not funded a transit project in more than a year, using new strategies to stonewall projects as the U.S. falls further and further behind the rest of the world. (Transportation for America)
• Not including children, at least 30 percent of Americans are non-drivers, according to a study out of Washington state. By far their biggest barrier to travel is a lack of fixed-route transit service. (Cities)
• An Atlanta City Council member wants to put a bike lane on the crowded Beltline to reduce conflicts between cyclists and scooters on one hand, and walkers and joggers on the other. (Atlanta News First)
• Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill making it illegal to block a bike lane. (Denver Gazette)
• The Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure is asking residents to fill out a survey about street safety. (Pittsburgh Magazine)
• Detroit is spending $8 million to repair 5,400 sidewalks. (Free Press)
• Cincinnati bikeshare Red Bike is now integrated into the city’s transit app. (CityBeat)
• Amtrak canceled a controversial third vent to save money on a West Baltimore rail tunnel. (Banner)
• Charlotte is planning on expanding its regional light rail system, but doesn’t have enough skilled construction workers to build all the projects. (Observer)
• Northwest Arkansas is planning its regional growth around the 40-mile Razorback Greenway. (CNU Public Square)
• The Kansas City streetcar turned 10 years old on Wednesday. (Axios)
• Observer names seven scenic Amtrak trips that are worth taking the time.

Metro’s new D Line subway extension will open tomorrow. The transit riding public can get on “the D” starting at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, May 8. The entire Metro rail/bus/bike-share system is free from Friday through Sunday. Read more about tomorrow’s opening celebrations.

The $3.5 billion four-mile D Line Extension Section 1 will travel from Wilshire/Western in L.A.’s Koreatown all the way to La Cienega/Wilshire in the city of Beverly Hills. The project includes three new stations: Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and Wilshire/La Cienega.

The 4-mile D Line extension (mapped in purple) runs below Wilshire Boulevard with stations at La Cienega, Fairfax, and La Brea Map of Metro B and D Line heavy rail subway – from Metro timetable. The B and D Lines form a Y; they share tracks in downtown and MacArthur Park, and split up at Wilshire/Vermont in Koreatown

When Metro broke ground on what was then called the “Westside Purple Line” at a ceremony at the L.A. County Art Museum, section 1 was expected to be completed in 2023. Among several obstacles causing delays, Metro encountered and overcame challenging tunneling conditions.

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Streetsblog has been covering the progress of the D Line for more than a decade. Below are a couple of D Line facts that you may or may not already know.

It will be fast

In L.A. County, most rail trips are not faster than driving. Metro buses and light and heavy rail move fairly fast. Every day, transit gets a million Angelenos where they need to be. There are exceptions, but when comparing trip times today, driving is almost always faster than transit.

Detail of Metro D Line timetable – click to enlarge

There are great reasons to take Metro transit – driving stress, parking, gas prices, health, environment – but comparative travel time typically is not where Metro comes out ahead.

The D Line is different.

Metro has already posted the new timetable for the D Line and it’s so fast it seems almost unimaginable for Angelenos.

Riding the D Line from the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA) to City Hall will take just 15 minutes. The nine-mile trip from one end of the D to the other – from La Cienega to Union Station – will take just 23 minutes.

At less congested times of day, those same trips might run 30-40 minutes in a car. At rush hour, you’d probably want to budget an hour to be safe.

There are lots of factors that influence overall trip time for various modes – e.g. congestion, parking, reliability, transit frequency, first/last mile walk/bike facilities, etc.

The D Line is remarkably fast; for many trips, fast enough to compete favorably with driving.

It will improve the lives of transit riders

If you read comments sections, you will find some people complaining that there’s no point in providing a subway to Beverly Hills, because rich people live there and rich people won’t ride transit. The residents of Beverly Hills, which long ago (meaning until ~2018) bitterly fought the D Line, likely do ride transit less often than folks living in less tony areas.

True as that may be, Beverly Hills is also destination. For workers who often struggle with expensive and/or time-consuming commutes. For visitors who want to have the full experience of Los Angeles. And for other Angelenos who might otherwise not be able to access a community that has made a point of making itself less accessible – including by opposing effective transit, and by targeting of Black and Latino drivers and pedestrians.

A lot of people who are not wealthy enough to live in Beverly Hills work there: domestic workers, restaurant workers, janitors, teachers, etc.

Even if wealthy folks in Beverly Hills ride infrequently, plenty of working class folks already take transit to commute to their Beverly Hills jobs. Even if the D Line never attracts a new rider, when it cuts a 40-60 minute bus commute down to 20-30 minutes, it will give workers more time to spend with their loved ones. It will get transit riders more places more punctually and more reliably. It will improve transit rider access to more places – more jobs and other destinations.

It’s in the right place

Wilshire Boulevard is one of the best places to improve Southern California transit – because of its existing concentration of population and jobs. Author/scholar Ethan Elkind notes (including in D Line coverage at the L.A. Times today) that Wilshire is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi River.

Transit agencies often get political pressure to invest in high quality transit that serves less dense parts of the region. No Metro rail line is empty, but some Metro rail has been built in relatively low population density areas, where it struggles to attract large numbers of riders. Transit riders are already plentiful on Wilshire, which sees 30,000+ weekday daily boardings on Metro 20 and 720 buses.

The D Line is Metro is greatly improving service exactly where it is most needed.

Even more D Line Subway in the near future

This week’s opening is the first of three new D Line segments, all under construction and expected to be open by 2028.

Metro map of three-section nine-mile Metro D Line extension project

Very soon, the D Line will extend about 14 miles – from Westwood to Union Station. Take a peek at the next section’s new stations nearing completion.

Read more more about the D at Metro’s The Source, LAist, L.A. Times, and the Beverly Press.

SBLA will be putting the D Line to the test later this month. On May 19, Streetsblog will host a commuter race: the D Line Dash. The event pits three racers – a transit rider, a cyclist, and a driver – getting from Beverly Hills to Downtown Los Angeles.

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Tune in to Streetsblog, especially SBLA social media, to follow the great race! Contact Streetsblog if you’re interested in sponsoring and/or volunteering.

This post is sponsored by Find The Right Bike.

While Find The Right Bike paid the freelancer’s fee for this article, I was confident this was a topic that would interest Streetsblog Chicago readers. I appreciate the support, as well as FTRB’s new weekly ad on this site. We’ve still got about $17K to raise to meet our 2026 budget goal. If you haven’t already, please consider making a tax-deductible donation here. Thanks! – John Greenfield, editor

In 2024, Viktor Köves began a project of interviewing and photographing Chicagoans of all walks of life with their bicycles. His goal: demystify city riding for everyday needs and get more people on bikes. The Instagram and YouTube channel for Chicagoans Who Bike is filled with personal stories of families, children and elders from all corners of the city about why they ride and what they enjoy about it.

Now Köves has a new website to further nudge Chicagoans onto two wheels. Findtheright.bike uses a very short survey to recommend a style of bike according to the user’s needs, from e-cargo bikes to good old fashioned commuter bikes. The site includes brief guides on basic gear and maintenance, and links to product reviews. Find the Right Bike also makes a compelling case for the cost savings of bike versus car, all in Köves’ affable, encouraging tone. We spoke with Köves about the new tool and how things are going so far.

Screenshot from FTRB.

Sharon Hoyer: What gave you the idea for Find the Right Bike?

Viktor Köves: I’d been working on Chicagoans Who Bike for a while and I’m about to close out that project. I want to stop when I hit 100 interviews and I’m at about 92. I wanted to do more educational content about how to bike in the city. I keep hearing people say, “There’s no bike for me because I have kids or I need to haul things.” A lot of people don’t know what options they have. I wanted to distill the knowledge I have and the knowledge of the bike community into something really simple.

The other thing was integrating some financial data. One of the values of the site is showing people just how expensive cars are. I have two e-bikes – one that was about $4,000 and one that was about $6,000. When I tell people that they say, “That’s so expensive!” But I don’t own a car. One is my minivan; I haven’t needed to take a car-share for cargo since I bought that bike. If you’re interested in riding but know nothing, you can jump in my site and find something pretty reasonable. And before I show you models of bikes, I show price breakdown. 

I kept sharing the site with the bike community for feedback. I added the gear guide: Okay, you’re getting a bike but you don’t know about locks and helmets so I share links to the best resources for those. I added the basics on maintenance. The other thing was storage. Every time I talk about cargo bikes, people say it’s going to get stolen immediately. That’s not true, there are strategies to prevent that. I worked a lot with Bunch Bikes [electric cargo cycles], which has many articles about theft prevention.

Screenshot from FTRB.

The central idea is giving people a way of seeing that a bike can fit into their life and that it’s not a big expense, but a big money saver.

A lot of sites get into frame sizes. I don’t care. What are your life needs? And go from there.

SH: The tone of the site is that this is not for gear heads, that biking is really approachable. You don’t have to measure or research anything before you take a quiz about what bike is best for you and how to get started. How did you structure the quiz?

VK: I have a lot of bikes, so I have a decision-making process for which bike I take outside. It’s a privileged position; I have a lot of experience with it. And I’ve had a lot of conversations with other people where they walk me through their needs. What problem are you trying to solve? If it’s just you riding into the wind, that’s a very different problem than moving you plus another adult. It’s a totally different class of bike. It’s my experience owning these different bikes and knowing what they’re good for, and consulting with other people. 

The other aspect was storage – some people might need a cargo bike but have to carry it upstairs. We offer a lightweight alternative but offer a storage guide for keeping it outside.

SH: You avoid endorsing any particular brand. Was that tricky in any way?

VK: Commuter e-bikes are easy, there’s so many at different price points. The one I struggled with was e-trikes because there are a bunch of cheap alternatives with mixed reviews. My goal is to build trust but not saying a specific bike to buy, but to say, “go try these, here’s some third-party reviews.” Leaning on existing resources and reviews. I give you a class of bike, but it’s not meant to be definitive. I don’t provide a purchase link. 

SH: How much traffic has the site received and what has the response been so far?

VK: The feedback has been fantastic. The most reassuring thing I’ve heard is people who already have e-bikes pulling it up and saying I recommended the type of bike they have, so it’s working well. We’ve had about 850 users over the last month and a half. I’m working on some cross-promotion with bike shops to be listed on the site. One of the cool things is that its unaffiliated so I can do partnerships like this. My goal is to play nice with everyone so everyone can promote this tool.

SH: What do you feel is key for convincing more Chicagoans to try out riding a bike or replacing more of their car trips with biking?

Screenshot from FTRB.

VK: Honestly, I think hands on stuff is the most powerful. Last year in the 40th Ward [on the Far North Side, represented by Ald. Andre Vasquez] we hosted an e-bikepalooza that was really successful. It was in partnership with my project Chicagoans Who Bike. We had J.C. Lind [Bike Co.] doing Urban Arrows. When people try out a nice e-bike and see what it can do, it opens their mind a bit. 

I think storytelling is key too. Other people just like you are doing just fine with their bike. And maybe they still have a car for weekend getaways, but they’re saying, “It’s way easier to drop off my kids at school in this Bunch Bike or Urban Arrow than sit in the car line.” If you are dropping your kids off at school in an SUV, and you see four or five of the cool parents roll by on an Urban Arrow and drop their kids off and leave before you can drop your kids off, you’re going to think about it. There’s adoption, there’s infrastructure, and there’s tools like this, that make it easy and approachable. 

I don’t think my website will get people to buy a bike, but my goal is to get them in the funnel of trying out a bike and seeing how freeing it can be.

SH: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

Screenshot from FTRB.

VK: One thing is I talk about car-free living FAQs. The most common thing I hear is, “What if I need to move a couch?” Yeah. You can rent cars. I think it’s so important to use the financial lens. Look, if you use a car to haul a couch once a week, then a bike is probably not going to be sufficient for your needs. But once a year? Price that out. How much does a rental cost you? The other thing is when I talk about car ownership, people just look at the sticker prices, but that’s not the full price of a car. On my site, I use $25,000 as the initial purchase price for a used car. The five-year cost of car ownership is twice that. The bikes are more expensive upfront and then almost free to run. We forget about insurance and fuel. I talk about retirement savings a lot for my work, so I’m pretty financially literate. It was key to me to mention the investment – is your retirement funded? If you have the money for a new car that’s great for you, but put it in a 401k for ten years, my sense is you’ll have about $1.1M. I think that’s the question we should be asking people.

Visit Find the Right Bike here.

Read Streetsblog’s previous story on Chicagoans Who Bike here.

On November 12, SBC launched our 2026 fund drive to raise $50K through ad sales and donations. That will complete this year’s budget, at a time when it’s tough to find grant money. Big thanks to all the readers who have chipped in so far to help keep this site rolling to the end of 2026! Currently, we’re at $32,696 with $17,304 to go, ideally by the end of May.

If you value our livable streets reporting and advocacy, please consider making a tax-deductible gift here. If you can afford a contribution of $100 or more, think of that as a subscription. That will help keep the site paywall-free for people on tighter budgets, as well as decision-makers. Thanks for your support!

– John Greenfield, editor

This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by Stephanie Dockery of Bloomberg Philanthropies to discuss the foundation’s third Public Art Challenge. Dockery considers how bus art gains cult followings, how artists use temporary installations to attract attention in their respective cities, and what happens after those projects disappear.

Listeners have three ways of following the conversation: The audio player embedded below; a full (albeit AI-generated) transcript; and further down the page, a partial, human-edited transcript.

Jeff Wood: Thinking about the Hawaii bus, one thing that was interesting to me is that a lot of agencies are having trouble with their funding, and a lot of times for the buses, they’ll try to do wraps, and the wraps are advertising.

And I find it really great that instead of just putting advertising on your bus, you could actually put an art installation on your bus. There’s some frustrations with covering the windows, which I know a lot of transit advocates have. But the Hawaii bus was actually done very tastefully in terms of not covering up all the windows.

Stephanie Dockery: Yes, we follow all parameters with bus shelters and buses on not covering the windows, not covering the sides of the glass panels in the case of our Houston project. With our project in Philadelphia, which is a poetry project that’s responding to gun violence, Healing Verse Germantown, they are working not only with the Department of Transportation, but with the advertising agency and putting art in the panel of the bus shelters where advertising typically goes.

So now we have murals in a space where there’s typically advertising. So to your point —yes, we should absolutely be using art, and it was so smart of the teams to identify that as an opportunity for them.

Wood: I just find it very refreshing just because everything seems to be commoditized these days. A lot of folks are trying to advertise, and, and for good reason, obviously. The transit agencies need money. But at the same time, maybe that’s why the buses have maybe a little bit more of a following — because it isn’t the typical bus covering that you usually see.

I’m wondering how much of the art we should expect people to understand right away versus how much should be explained. I’m curious about how people come to it or how they experience it when they see it.

Dockery: That’s a great question. People absolutely happen upon the work. People go to the work on purpose. We are doing so much work with all of the teams to help promote [the art], whether it’s on their website, on our guide. We have created maps for all of the cities so they can share those with their constituencies, so they can actually see all of the sites. We have signage at all of the sites that explicitly talks about what the project is, what the installation is.

We have to be really deliberate and not expect or assume that people know what the work is, and that’s kind of the great thing about public art, especially if it’s in a vacant lot in a place where you’re not expecting to see anything, let alone something beautiful. And people get arrested by the installations and question why they’re there and, you know, start questioning why we don’t have more, which is a great question.

Wood: Excellent question.

Dockery: We do a lot of communications both on the press side and the onsite marketing, and then with social media to help let people know that the work is there because it’s for a pretty finite period. Some work is a performance, so that’s quite fleeting. Some work is up for a year.

So we’re just really communicating those timelines, what the work is, who the artists are, and expressing that this is a collaborative team. People should know that this is great work that their cities have done for them. So the cities are behind us and have brought together these nonprofits and artists. We also have an app called Bloomberg Connects, which is a free digital guide available to cultural organizations.

And on our Public Art Challenge guide, we have all of the cities listed and have built out their projects, both images and descriptions. So that’s a place where the projects can live in posterity since they are temporary in nature.

• The U.S. lags so far behind other global cities on transit that it would cost $4.6 trillion to catch up. For example, Houston is about the same size as Paris, but Paris has 10 times the number of buses and light rail cars per capita. New York City has the best transit system in the U.S., but it’s not as good as Tehran’s. Instead of improving transit, we just build more roads and parking as cities sprawl. (The Guardian)
• Often overlooked in the furor over urban highways is the way traffic engineers turned downtown streets into one-way speedways to get car commuters home faster. Cities are now reverting to two-way streets that are safer for pedestrians and benefit small retailers. (Governing)
• No neighborhood is truly walkable without a good old-fashioned corner store. (The Third Place)
• Speeding in San Francisco dropped by 80 percent after the city installed enforcement cameras. (Examiner)
• After several years of an impasse over transit funding in Pennsylvania, some state lawmakers are looking to public-private partnerships to help sustain transit agencies. (Pittsburgh City Paper)
• Oregon Public Broadcasting interviewed Portland-based transit consultant Jarrett Walker about the state of transit in Rip City.
• The Portland Bureau of Transportation is replacing its 3,000-strong fleet of shared bikes with “zippier” models. (Axios)
• A Seattle driver was arrested on DUI charges after allegedly trying to run down a child riding a bike on the sidewalk. (MyNorthwest)
• Sound Transit voted to finish the West Seattle and Ballard light rail extensions despite a $35 billion shortfall for capital projects (My Ballard). But Mayor Katie Wilson refused to answer questions about those projects’ future (KOMO).
• St. Louis residents have the opportunity to weigh in on proposed routes for a $400 million bus rapid transit line. (KSDK)
• In Savannah, Chatham Area Transit faces an $8 million budget deficit, and is asking the county commission to raise property taxes. (WSAV)
• Fayetteville, Arkansas, is seeking public input on two complete streets projects funded by the Biden administration. (KNWA)
• Three-quarters of European cities that lowered speed limits to about 20 miles per hour saw reductions in traffic deaths and injuries. (Cities Today)
• Toronto rideshare drivers spend half their time deadheading, or riding around without a passenger. (Globe and Mail; paywall)
• Brandon Donnelly describes Toronto’s plans for a 16-block pedestrians-only street.

The Trump administration is deepening the national affordability crisis by withholding badly-needed funds for affordable transportation options — and advocates say Congress should refuse to negotiate the bill that will dictate America’s transportation future until the White House stops holding our transportation present hostage.

Washington lawmakers are reportedly abuzz over a recent letter lead by the National Campaign for Transit Justice, which called on Congress “to exercise its oversight responsibility” over the implementation of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — and demanded that the Trump administration release an estimated $2.8 billion in competitive grants for affordable transportation options before the bill expires on Sept. 30.

Trump’s executive orders and press releases from Secretary Sean Duffy’s USDOT have both repeatedly maligned grants for transit, walking and biking as little more than “woke” Biden-era larks or symptoms of the “Green New Scam.” In reality, these grants are a critical tool for easing the staggering burden of America’s household transportation costs, which consume 17 percent of the average paycheck, largely because mass car ownership is so inherently unaffordable.

Recommended Trump’s Funding Freeze Has Derailed Transit, Undermining Growth and Economic Opportunity For All Americans Kea Wilson March 11, 2026

And those funding freezes are only the tip of the iceberg.

The letter’s authors pointed out that after Trump reclaimed the Oval Office, his Office of Management and Budget withheld another $4.9 billion for multimodal transportation authorized under the Capital Investments Grant Program. And that’s in addition to millions more in affordable transportation dollars that Congress rescinded last fall, after the White House essentially ran out the clock on the process of finalizing a raft of Biden-era grants.

Collectively, all of these stalled, rescinded, and clawed-back funds were supposed to throw a lifeline to struggling U.S. families, many of whom are forced to own cars they can’t afford for lack of any other viable options, the authors argued. And they say that unless Congressional lawmakers can finally force the White House to disburse the money, they shouldn’t even think of passing a new federal transportation bill to replace the one that Trump has so flagrantly refused to implement.

“[We’re in a] crisis for working families across the US,” said Giancarlo Valdetaro, the Campaign’s senior transit organizer. “With the increase in gas prices recently, it is more expensive than ever to get around by driving. And at the same time, transit is still an underfunded mode of transportation.”

“We need [Congress] to be more aggressive and firm about releasing funds that they decided should be distributed to communities across the country through the IIJA, which the Trump administration is currently refusing to distribute,” Valdetaro continued. “[And they also need to be] proactively putting guardrails in the next surface transportation reauthorization to ensure that we don’t get these delays and outright cancelations of projects in the future.”

Recommended The ‘Affordability Crisis’ Conversation Can’t Leave Out the Cost of Cars Kea Wilson January 7, 2026

Of course, there are some guardrails to prevent a hostile White House from denying communities the federal transportation dollars they’re owed — even if the Trump administration has tried just about every trick in the book to leap over them, even when doing so has landed them on the losing side of litigation.

“There are provisions in existing law that are meant to prevent waste and abuse — and ironically enough, they’re being abused by this administration to warp Congress’s intent, [and] to keep money from going to certain projects,” he added. “[We need] changes to keep an administration from capriciously and maliciously using their own priorities to keep money from going out the door, to places they don’t want it to go to.”

In addition to better guardrails to ensure that discretionary grants actually get out the door, the authors of the letter say transit also needs more money that isn’t subject to the whims of whoever’s in the White House — in the form of more funds guaranteed directly to transit agencies by federal formulas.

Formula money for transit operations is particularly important, like the $20 million a year that would flow to agencies under the Stronger Communities through Better Transit Act introduced by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), which received a shout-out in the letter.

“Consistent support from the federal government for transit agencies has been missing for decades, and it’s part of why so many people don’t get the transit that they deserve in their communities,” said Valdetaro. “It’s all part of the same conversation.”

Recommended Could This Bill Finally Give Transit Agencies the Operations Funding They Need? Kea Wilson February 1, 2024

With a laundry list of virtually every major transportation advocacy group signed on, Valdetaro is hopeful the letter will compel lawmakers to co-sponsor Johnson’s bill and raise their voices about unfreezing IIJA funds — not to mention insulating the next federal transportation bill from executive interference.

And whether or not Congress heeds that call, he’s hopeful that America’s affordable transportation revolution can still get back on track — even if it seems like the Trump administration will always find new ways to quash it.

“The federal government has not been pulling its weight [to support transit] for decades, and yet we see [communities] putting forward these projects year after year,” he said. “No matter what happens with any single grant decision, or the specifics of what gets into the [next federal transportation] bill, people still need to be able to cross the street safely. People still need to be able to get to work and the doctor’s office and the grocery store.”

“One grant decision from an administration that will be over January 20, 2029 is not going to change that,” Valdetaro added. “And it’s not going to discourage people from fighting for the transportation and transit systems they deserve.”

Jordan: I live in Los Angeles, so I see autonomous vehicles every day. I ride in them. I also watch them stop in active travel lanes, idle in red zones, and sit at the curb in metered spaces for which they don’t pay, at which they can’t be ticketed, and that don’t appear in any city system as occupied. The car is physically present, but administratively it is largely invisible, unlike most other vehicles today where cities have at a minimum mechanisms for them to pay for curb use and receive citations for non-compliance.

Gabe: I live in D.C. and AV legislation for commercial service is just being introduced. We currently have robo-taxis testing on the streets, and myriad delivery and ride-hail services are visible throughout the city. The gap between what’s on the street and what cities can actually see, price, or enforce is the defining curb management problem of the next decade. And almost no one is treating it with the urgency it deserves.

Cities are underestimating VMTs

Enforcement is about to get much harder. By BloombergNEF’s count, highly automated vehicles are already operating in 103 cities globally, intermingling with around 310 million people daily. A peer-reviewed study published this year in Travel Behaviour and Society found that automated vehicles in US cities are associated with a roughly 6-percent increase in vehicle miles traveled — driven in part by AVs traveling empty between trips, searching for parking, or returning home after dropping off passengers. That’s not a forecast. That’s a measured effect at today’s deployment levels.

The economics push the curve up sharply from here. Fire the driver — historically the highest single cost in a for-hire trip — and per-mile prices fall. Demand at lower prices rises. Fleets scale to meet it. This is Econ 101, and it’s why we think most municipal planners are working off an expected volume of robotaxis on the street that will look far too low by 2030.

The usual playbook won’t work

Cities learned a hard lesson with shared scooters and bikes: get permitting, data sharing, and curb rules in place before the inventory shows up, or spend years chasing it. With AVs, the equivalent move is largely off the table. State pre-emption in California and elsewhere puts AV regulation with the state not with cities. Most local governments cannot cap AV fleet sizes the way they cap scooter permits. They cannot mandate the granular operational data for AV’s that they extract from micromobility operators today.

And even when they can request it, they’ll be negotiating with Waymo, Zoox, Tesla, Nuro, Uber, Motional, and many others — each with different software, routing logic, parking behaviors, and APIs.

You’re not going to manage a multi-vendor robotic fleet by writing a memo to each company. The data asymmetry is too wide and the political leverage too narrow. Not to mention that every time a new “driver” is downloaded, the entire tech stack can be altered, and the vehicles may behave differently than minutes before.

What’s worse, the enforcement model itself is currently unworkable for AVs in many jurisdictions. Under California law, robotaxis are immune from moving violations because tickets must be issued to a human driver, though that changes in July 2026 when law enforcement will be able to issue “notices of autonomous vehicle non-compliance” to the companies themselves. D.C. plans the same. Even then, parking citations remain the primary enforcement lever, and they’re issued by humans walking up to vehicles with paper. That doesn’t scale to the fleet sizes coming.

The opportunity hiding inside the problem

Here’s where we want to push back on the doom framing, because there is a real opportunity in this — and it’s the opportunity Donald Shoup made the case for in The High Cost of Free Parking and Henry Grabar extended in Paved Paradise: cities have been largely giving away the right-of-way for almost a century, mostly to private passenger vehicles, mostly for political reasons, and mostly at enormous discount to the actual value. Curb space is some of the most valuable real estate a city owns, and it’s been priced as if it were nearly worthless.

AVs are forcing the conversation that should have happened decades ago. A robo-taxi sitting in a metered space all morning is functionally no different from a private car doing the same thing — it’s just more visible, more obviously commercial, and harder to politically defend. That visibility is leverage. It’s the wedge that lets cities finally price and manage curb access at something closer to its real economic value, and use the revenue to fund transit, road redesigns for safety, and the maintenance backlog that’s been deferred for decades. 

The best news? The robo-taxi companies want to pay for the time and space they use, but lack a mechanism. And if they pay, then everyone should, driver or no driver. You can only capture that opportunity if you have the infrastructure to actually do the pricing and enforcement. But time is of the essence. We learned that once America had “freeways,” it was nearly impossible to charge for their usage.

Cities most automate the curb (AI for AI)

If cities can’t realistically regulate AVs vehicle-by-vehicle or company-by-company, the strategic move is to manage the right-of-way itself, unilaterally, with a standard set of business rules that apply equally to every actor at the curb — human, commercial fleet, or autonomous. Essentially, a car is a car is a car. AI is not just for the private sector; the government needs to scale up its use quickly to handle the influx of new technologies and services that will automate a litany of tasks and mobility options and need a way to pay for usage.

That means three things:

Common rules, not per-operator negotiations. The city defines the business rules — at what price, where and when can companies operate, and for how long. Every vehicle in the right-of-way operates with the same rules. AV companies don’t get a special carve-out, and they don’t get to negotiate the data exchange on a fleet-by-fleet basis.

Automated curb payment. Every vehicle that occupies a curb space — whether it’s a Waymo dropping off a passenger, an Amazon van loading a package, or a private car parking for lunch — should be billed for the time it occupies that publicly owned space, automatically. No app required. No meter required. No officer is required to confirm the transaction. The infrastructure recognizes the vehicle and the duration, and posts the charge.

Automated curb enforcement. The same infrastructure that prices legal use should detect and cite illegal use — double parking, blocking a bike lane, overstaying a loading zone, parking in a no-stopping zone. Enforcement at the speed of the violation, not the speed of a parking officer’s walking route. We should be at nearly 100 percent compliance for proper use of the curb, and AV’s can be programmed to meet this standard if the right costs and feedback loop are baked into the system.

Pole-based cameras with computer vision is, in our view, the only technology that scales to do this across an entire city. It’s vehicle-agnostic, it works on existing infrastructure, it produces an evidentiary record sufficient for citation, and it doesn’t depend on each fleet voluntarily handing over telematics. It’s also the same approach a growing list of cities — Miami, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Portland, Los Angeles, Sacramento International Airport — are already using to manage commercial activity from Amazon, DoorDash, and Uber and Lyft via Smart Loading Zones. The use case is identical. AVs just make the need impossible to ignore.

Airports are a testing ground

If cities are the long-term battleground, airports are where the conflict is most acute right now. By some industry estimates, airport trips can generate up to 60 percent of taxi profit from approximately 15 percent of trip volume — meaning the curb in front of a terminal is one of the most economically intense roadways in the country, and AV fleets are entering it with the same playbook they’re running in cities. Cities that may be subject to state regulation for robo-taxis and Ubers, in many cases, do control the airport from the mayor’s office, like Los Angeles, and therefore have a real opportunity to think holistically about curbside management.

At the same time, the airport business model is being squeezed from the other side. Parking revenue — which has historically funded a large share of airport operations — has been in decline as travelers shift from self-parking to drop-off and ride-hail. Add AV trips on top of that, and the revenue line keeps falling while curb volume keeps climbing. That’s not a sustainable equation without a new way to monetize and manage the curb.

This is exactly the gap automated curb management is built to close. At Sacramento International Airport, Terminal A handles more than 175,000 vehicles a month at the curb. After deploying computer-vision-based monitoring automated enforcement, the airport went from 40 percent of vehicles dwelling at the curb longer than policy allows to only 11 percent — a substantial behavior change without adding enforcement headcount.

The same dynamic that makes airports the highest-value testing ground today makes them the most exposed to AV growth tomorrow. 

The window is closing quickly

The vehicles are scaling now. The miles are being driven now. The behaviors that San Francisco transit operators are documenting — stalled robo-taxis blocking public streets, problems that can take as long as an hour to resolve, requiring transit dispatchers to call Waymo’s call center or even police to clear the vehicle — are early symptoms of a much larger operational reality coming to every major city in the country.

Cities that build automated curb management infrastructure in the next two to three years will have priced, rule-based control over their right of way before the AV inventory peaks. Cities that wait will be doing it reactively, under pressure, with less leverage and less revenue. Additionally, if costs are lower for robotaxis than traditional Ubers and Lyfts, then the delta is important to be able to price, to assure that the best tool is used for the best trip (walk, transit, bike), and right-of-way pricing will be the mechanism most cities will have left to influence this. Think of it as congestion pricing-lite.

The right-of-way is the city’s. The decision about whether to actively manage it is, too — for now.

A new study argues that the notorious anti-development figure known as the NIMBY, for Not In My Backyard, has an equally toxic cousin in the transportation realm: the NOMS, or Not On My Street. And the researcher who coined the new term warns that U.S. communities will struggle to achieve lasting change until they reckon with the outsized influence of NOMS and their disturbing car-first ideology.

In a recent analysis of hundreds of public comments given at community meetings in Washington, D.C. across four years, researcher Ashton Rohmer found several troubling trends in the rhetoric of residents who resisted new livable streets infrastructure and policies, and what she calls the “car supremacist” attitudes that seem to underlie them.

For instance, many testimonies incorrectly characterized street space as a scarce, non-renewable resource with little room to spare for things like curb extensions — a phenomenon she calls “static scarcity,” which ignores the ancient history of streets evolving along with society. Other testifiers, meanwhile, participated in “blame inversion,” or raging against non-drivers for problems that are objectively caused by motorists, like traffic jams backed up alongside new bike lanes.

Research shows that congestion typically shrinks or remains flat when governments add cycling infrastructure to their roads — even if that infrastructure subtracts a little bit of lane space from drivers, many of whom hop on their bikes when they have a safe network to ride on. But that doesn’t stop the NOMS — whose ranks include USDOT Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy — from claiming the exact opposite, without any evidence beyond their personal bias.

Recommended USDOT Secretary Sean Duffy Is Dead Wrong About Bike Lanes Kea Wilson April 25, 2025

Even more alarmingly, Rohmer says those sorts of arguments seem to flow from unexamined beliefs that the harms perpetrated by drivers don’t really count — and conversely, that the people who endure them don’t really deserve justice or proactive measures to prevent other people from getting hurt.

And some testifiers heavily implied that non-drivers don’t deserve a say in how streets are built, whether because they “don’t pay for the roads” (when they absolutely do), or because “no one uses the bike lanes we already have” (when they absolutely do that, too). Some neighbors even alleged that cyclists are illegitimately “corrupting” city agencies to get their way. If that were actually true, drivers would probably not be killing so many people.

More than a century after the dawn of the automobile, Rohmer says these kinds of “car supremacist” ideas have become so deeply rooted that merely building new bus rapid transit lines will not be enough to heal the lasting damage to our broken culture.

“The issues posed by our mobility status quo are not engineering problems to be modeled or long range plans to be strategized, but constitute a moral project to be scrutinized, a social construct to be challenged and a system of power to be dismantled,” she wrote.

Recommended Friday Video: How ‘Car Brain’ Warps the Way We See the World Streetsblog January 16, 2026

Of course, Rohmer isn’t the first scholar to argue that concepts like “motonormativity,” “windshield bias,” and “car-brain” have pervaded American life — and she isn’t the first to point out how powerful interests in the oil, road, and auto industries have systematically ingrained that perspective into our everyday lives.

Still, she argues that until we closely examine how everyday Americans perpetuate autocentrism from the bottom up — and how policymakers allow them to do so — we will never fully shift our transportation status quo, even if we do confront car culture’s top-down causes.

“I haven’t seen much theoretical work to explain the process by which a grumpy neighbor can complain about a speed bump, and then two days later, it gets removed,” she added. “There isn’t just a global political economy at work in that situation. It’s powered by individuals at the hyper-local level, within a bureaucratic process that enables that power to continue.”

Recommended Where Does ‘Motonormativity’ Come From — And Which Country Has It Worst?  Streetsblog May 6, 2025

Rohmer says community meetings, where motorists often disparage and intimidate their non-driving neighbors, provide a startling illustration of car culture’s corrosive impact.

In the D.C. testimonies she studied, many residents pointed to low bike ridership as evidence that cyclists constituted a “nefarious minority” hellbent on making life harder for their neighbors — rather than average people who just want to survive their ride home. Some even accused bikers, without evidence, of being paid actors or bribing politicians to enact their unwanted “agenda.”

“There’s no recognition that people who ride bikes or busses or [who use] sidewalks could possibly be members of the community,” Rohmer continued. “They’re always cast as outsiders … What these arguments are saying is that [non-drivers] shouldn’t have access to safe streets — like your life matters less.”

While her sample focused on D.C., Rohmer says car-supremacist arguments and attitudes turn up in conservative and liberal places alike because they’re fundamentally about power, not partisan politics. She recalls a recent conversation with a colleague about Copenhagen, where debate over a proposed bus lane in fell prey to similar dynamics.

“It’s not that Copenhagen suddenly hate buses,” she added. “It’s that a new bus lane announced that car driver’s privileged position was contestable, and that’s what activated the opposition.”

Recommended How Windshield Perspective Shapes the Way We See the World Angie Schmitt January 7, 2014

While she stops short of offering a full-scale de-radicalization program for the NOMS, Rohmer says that decision-makers must recognize that car supremacy is a moral wrong just like any other dehumanizing ideology – and it’s past time for policymakers to check its influence on civic society.

That might look like disempowering tiny groups of unelected, unrepresentative community members who want to publicly debate whether things like bike and bus lanes should exist at all — while engaging the larger community even more deeply on the details of how those projects are rolled out, without compromising on the need for life-saving projects.

“If we use our community engagement practices to enable someone who thinks that it is okay not to make our streets safe for everyone who uses them, that is a failure of community engagement,” she said. “When we relegate decision-making to people who have these ideas about whose lives are worth valuing, I don’t think that that should count as ‘consulting the community.'”

Editor’s note: a version of this article originally appeared on the RailsToTrails.org and is republished with permission.

Within a few weeks, we may see the first public text and committee action for the next federal bill that governs the nation’s transportation policies — including the programs that provide the lion’s share of funding for active transportation and set the priorities for states and municipalities across the American landscape.

In the face of recent federal volatility toward trails, walking and biking, this will be a litmus test. While demand for this infrastructure is unprecedented — with hundreds of impressive projects underway that will deliver safe, convenient routes to travel by foot, bike or wheelchair in every single state — the question remains: Will federal legislators prioritize the transformative impacts of active transportation networks?

A leading indicator will be what happens with the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program (ATIIP).

Why is ATIIP So Critical? Photo: Allison Abruscato

Authorized under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), ATIIP is the only federal program dedicated to making concentrated investments to establish safe, connected routes to walk and bike to the places people need to go—within their communities, to the next town, or even to the next state over. It solves a very specific problem that no other program is equipped to address, delivering the scale of investment needed to close gaps and complete active transportation networks.

With sky-high public demand for this essential community infrastructure equally evident in both Republican and Democratic strongholds, legislators should commit to grow and improve ATIIP in the federal transportation bill currently under development. A fortified ATIIP will improve the connectivity of trails, protected bike lanes and sidewalks into seamless transportation routes, meeting real needs for people walking and biking and increasing use by as much as 80%, according to a study Rails to Trails Conservancy led in partnership with Strava.

In part, that’s because the majority of trips taken in the United States are within a short walk or bike ride; it’s practical to move around our communities without a car. Considering that nearly 1 in 3 Americans lacks access to a motor vehicle — and many more are facing tough choices as gas prices continue to break records — finding accessible, affordable ways to get around is a real need many families face.

The stakes are staggering. When people walk or bike today in America, they’re taking their lives in their hands. As many as 20 people die while walking in the United States every single day.

Powerful Benefits for Communities Photo: City of Missoula

While preventing injury and death should be enough of a motivating factor to accelerate the pace of developing active transportation networks, the return on investment for traffic safety, economic development, health and the environment is also powerful. Research outlined in RTC’s 2019 “Active Transportation Transforms America” study puts the annual benefit of investing in walking and biking infrastructure at $34 billion; that can be quadrupled by building networks of trails and other safe infrastructure.

In many American communities across rural, suburban and urban geographies, residents and leaders alike recognize the urgency and potential to build these networks. But the opportunity to take this progress to scale, and make seamless walking and biking routes a norm, requires leadership and partnership at the federal level — signified by a consistent, dependable source of sizable federal grants that can be used to leverage local and state investments.

As we consider strategies to strengthen America’s transportation options, we must consider the discrepancy in how infrastructure has been built. Roads and rails are built as connected networks as a matter of course. Historically, trails and other walking and biking infrastructure have been built incrementally, relying on opportunism and thinly spread-out resources. But that incremental approach has established the foundation to build the country’s active transportation networks at a discount.

Longstanding foundational federal programs like Transportation Alternatives and the Recreational Trails Program, alongside state and local programs, have contributed to more than 42,500 miles of multiuse trails crisscrossing the American landscape.

ATIIP will leverage these impactful projects to achieve connectivity through gap filling and deliver resources on a scale sufficient to enable functional systems in a reasonable time period. It is the only federal program designed to fill multiple gaps in a network or to address critical but expensive connections, such as bridges.

This approach has already been proven to work.

Proven Impact of Connected Infrastructure Photo: John Faulk, Frontera Media

In 2005, Congress funded the Nonmotorized Transportation Pilot Program, designed to test whether increasing the connectivity of walking and biking infrastructure would result in increased use. The program was implemented with great success across four disparate communities in Missouri, Minnesota, California and Wisconsin.

A later study of pre- and post-conditions issued by the Federal Highway Administration found that the connectivity investments made through the program increased walking by 22.8 percent and bicycling by 48.3 percent, with safety improvements across urban, suburban, rural and college town contexts.

Another example can be seen in Texas, which created a wildly successful large-grant category within its Transportation Alternatives program focusing on connectivity investments. Most of the money requested and provided flowed to these highly strategic and impactful projects. By shifting their programmatic approach, the Texas Department of Transportation elevated the striking demand for investment in connectivity and functional networks — illuminating the opportunity the federal government has to multiply its impact.

A Critical Opportunity Is Upon Us Photo: Derry Rail Trail Alliance

IIJA created and authorized ATIIP for $200 million per year over five years, but it was subject to annual appropriations. That approach proved ineffective. Appropriators only delivered one $45 million infusion to the program—severely insufficient to meet the demand. In the first round of grant funding, the program was oversubscribed with a whopping $40 in applications for every dollar made available.

This next surface transportation bill is the opportunity to unlock ATIIP’s full potential. But it will require the predictability and consistency that comes from contract authority under the Highway Trust Fund.

The House bill passed for the last transportation reauthorization would have provided ATIIP with $250 million per year in contract authority if it were enacted. Matching that is the baseline that Congress should meet to begin to address the immense unmet demand and need for such resources going forward.

ATIIP has bicameral and bipartisan support. Rep. Chris Pappas (D) of New Hampshire just introduced a House bill to make these critical improvements to the program. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) of Alaska continues to champion ATIIP in the Senate. Both are joined by others of their party and respective legislative bodies.

This breadth of support reflects the reality that this infrastructure delivers for Republicans and Democrats and is valued by voters across the spectrum. We’re counting on bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress to deliver ATIIP — and safe walking and biking routes—to America.

• A new American Lung Association report found than almost half of Americans live in a place with an unhealthy amount of air pollution. The report found that smog, caused in large part by car exhaust, is making a comeback after years of decline. Los Angeles has the worst smog problem in the country, as it has for 26 of the past 27 years. Bangor is the only city with low levels of both smog and particle pollution, also caused by cars.
• The cost of gas is one of many reasons to ditch your car, or at least get a smaller one. Filling up the 36-gallon tank of a Ford F-150, the most popular vehicle in the U.S., costs $46 more now than it did a year ago. (The Independent)
• Bloomberg Philanthropies committed to invest $350 million in bike infrastructure in more than 30 cities worldwide. (Momentum)
• An obscure federal insurance requirement could have a big impact on passenger rail service — and possibly bring some lines to a stop altogether. (Streetsblog USA)
• California first responders say the problem of stuck Waymos blocking the street is getting worse. (Wired)
• San Francisco residents who rented apartments specifically to be near transit stations could be forced to move or start driving again if a fiscal crisis forces BART to close 15 stations. (Standard)
• Baltimore residents are happy a grocery store is coming to their neighborhood, but in a reversal of the usual NIMBY arguments, say the suburban design includes too much parking. (Brew)
• San Antonio is considering expanding its on-demand van service. (News Express via Yahoo)
• Milwaukee passed Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s goal of building 50 miles of protected bike lanes, and is still building more. (Journal Sentinel)
• The Connecticut legislature removed a section of a transportation bill that would have allowed the DOT to set up automated speed cameras on highways. (CT News Junkie)
• Spokane will ask voters to renew a 0.2 percent sales tax for transportation this August. (Range)
• The Kansas City streetcar opens in two weeks, and businesses are hoping for a boost. (KCTV)
• Smooth Corinthian leather? Amtrak’s new commercials use the language of luxury car TV ads to sell the public on train travel. (Jalopnik)

When Cara Leibowitz, a wheelchair user and disability studies professor in New York City, peered outside her window after one of the East Coast’s many winter snowstorms, she realized she was completely stuck inside.

“I’d look out and I’d be like, ‘Oh, the sidewalk isn’t too bad,’” she said. “And then I’d look at the curb cut, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, never mind. Guess I’m not going outside today.’”

This experience is a common one for disabled people during snowstorms and other severe weather events. Disabled people in cities all over the East Coast suffered this winter due to cities’ lack of planning for how to ensure mobility for disabled people in the aftermath of the snowstorms. 

This was a tough winter; approximately 123 million people faced above-average snow accumulation, the highest amount in five years. This has also been the winter with the most extreme cold in over two decades for large portions of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

Disabled people living in East Coast cities faced similar challenges this winter: the snow blocked sidewalks and curb cuts for weeks, preventing residents from accessing necessary medical care, causing increased physical pain, and the emotional loss of social activities. 

These experiences are not just anecdotal. Research has shown that wheelchair users make fewer trips outside per day and travel shorter distances during winter months, with the gap widening sharply on days with snow accumulation. A study conducted after Winter Storm Uri in 2021 found that Texas households with a disabled person had more service disruptions, adverse experiences, and slower recovery after the storm compared to households without any disabled people.

Of course, the snows of winter have long since melted, but advocates say that is never too early for cities to begin preparing for next season to better incorporate accessibility. 

Snow problems

Advocates say snow causes real safety concerns for the many disabled people who are trapped inside.

“It makes me feel like our government officials think or care very little of the independence and safety of people with disabilities because they are knowingly putting us at increased risk,” said Germán Parodi, the co-executive director of The Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, which focuses on equity, access, and inclusion of disabled people before, during, and after disasters and emergencies.

“When a disaster happens, like a massive winter storm, it is the government’s responsibility, the city’s responsibility, the local government’s responsibility to provide safety for the people living in that area,” continued Parodi, a wheelchair user in Philadelphia. “Keeping mountains of snow on curb cuts is not only a risk factor for people with disabilities who use mobility aids, but an argument can be made that it is a failure for the whole community.”

In many cities, property owners are legally required to clear snow and ice from the adjacent sidewalks and curb cuts. But just one forgotten stretch of sidewalk can make an entire path unusable for disabled people. More cities could adopt a system like New York’s, where day laborers are paid to shovel sidewalks, but even that program didn’t quickly create clear paths across a wide area of even that most-walkable city. 

Sometimes, the sidewalks were cleared, but the path wasn’t wide enough for wheelchair users to be able to use it. Emma Albert, a wheelchair user and master’s student at Northeastern University in Boston, got stuck in the snow multiple times and had to rely on her friends to free her. Her experiences violate Boston’s snow removal policy, which specifies that property owners must clear at least a 42-inch-wide path within three hours of the snow stopping or otherwise face a fine.

“A lot of the pathways that they paved weren’t wide enough for my wheelchair to get through. I called them ‘Ozempic paths,'” she said. “Obviously a wheelchair can’t fit through this, but also I don’t know how anyone is fitting through this path.”

Physical and social harm

Many disabled people experienced a worsening in their physical condition due to being stuck inside when it snowed.

“Winter is a worse time for me physically in general,” said Kelly Mack, a wheelchair user and writer in Washington. So the aquatic therapy followed by the whirlpool are things that help me maintain my strength, and I definitely lost strength and I was having worse chronic pain.”

Bri Arce, a student in Philadelphia with multiple disabilities, has occasional chronic pain that can interfere with her walking. The snow made her pain worse as well.

“I’m already in pain, I can barely keep my balance. The last thing I needed was to be trudging through thick piles of snow and darn near slipping on ice every two seconds, so it just made the journey a lot harder,” she said.

Snow doesn’t only harm people with mobility disabilities; it also gets in the way of people with visual disabilities.

Kenia Flores, a policy advocate in Washington who is blind and uses a white cane, said the snow made it difficult for her to navigate. At times, Flores had to rely on others to help guide her while she walked, even though she is usually fully independent. 

“I feel very confident using my cane, but what’s like kind of scary is even if you feel a clear path, you don’t know what awaits you on the other side if there’s more ice or more snow,” she said.

The winter weather has also caused social isolation, as Albert of Boston explained. 

“It’s definitely been really frustrating in terms of having to say no to plans that I wanted to go to or trying to go to plans that I was excited about and then realizing that I wouldn’t be able to get there,” Albert said.  

Planning for the future

There are some resources available to disabled people during snowstorms. The Partnership runs a Disability and Disaster Hotline that provides information, referrals, and other resources to disabled people seeking urgent disaster-related needs. Parodi said 13 percent of the calls they received in 2026 have been related to snow, such as inquiries about disruptions to basic needs and services, damage to property not fully covered by insurance, and problems getting food and other supplies. 

Much of the work to clear snow after severe storms falls on individual cities, but this is clearly a systemic issue, according to Parodi, due to a lack of national leadership focused on accessibility in emergency management. He said it is unclear who is currently leading the Disability and Integration Division of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Additionally, because the partial Department of Homeland Security shutdown includes FEMA, the agency was operating at reduced capacity for much of the winter.

Advocates mainly want cities to listen to the voices of disabled residents, perhaps, as Parodi has called for, by creating committees focused on the needs of disabled people during disasters.

“Those spaces need to be accessible, physically, communication, programmatically, and compensation needs to be built in for the time and expertise that members of these community will be contributing and spending to properly identify your localities’ issues, gaps, and opportunities in disasters,” he said. “So there is no one blanket answer, but bring your community.”

• As funding for transit from the Biden administration dries up, Americans who live in food deserts and can’t afford cars increasingly have problems accessing groceries, with some paying money they don’t have for delivery service because they have no other option. (The Guardian)
• Unless wages, safety and scheduling flexibility improve, the shortage of workers at transit agencies is likely to worsen, according to the American Public Transportation Association. (Smart Cities Dive)
• This list of cities with the most frustrating commutes doesn’t include a lot of surprises. (The Hill)
• Amtrak is considering making it easier to carry guns onboard trains, even though that’s how the man accused of trying to assassinate President Trump last month traveled to Washington, D.C. (Baltimore Banner)
• An NYU study found that a significant proportion of shared bike and scooter trips replace car trips, but those networks do not reach far enough into low-income neighborhoods.
• Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey is introducing legislation that differentiates between e-bikes/scooters and faster, more dangerous types of two-wheeled transportation like motorcycles, which the administration said would protect pedestrians while keeping the safety focus on trucks and SUVs. (Streetsblog MASS)
• California is going to start citing driverless vehicles for violating traffic laws. If a Waymo breaks the law, the company gets the ticket. (CNET)
• Amtrak is discontinuing a route between Fort Worth and Oklahoma City after those respective states failed to include funding in their budgets. As a result, a proposal to extend the line to Kansas is probably kaput. (KERA)
• According to Greater Greater Washington‘s analysis of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s long-suppressed congestion pricing study, drivers would benefit the most from the policy because of the time they’d save as a result of would reduce congestion.
• Pittsburgh is seeking input from residents on their perception of mobility and transportation safety. (WPXI)
• After a month-long education campaign, Richmond is now ticketing drivers who park in bike lanes. (12 On Your Side)
• Urbanist gamers have more choices than Sim City. (Planetizen)

A little-known federal insurance requirement could soon bring American trains to a halt — even though commuter rail is far safer than other modes of travel.

The commuter railroad industry is bracing for the impending publication of a new federal “passenger rail liability cap,” which will start a 30-day doomsday clock for every rail operator in America to either secure millions of dollars in additional insurance, or immediately cease operations.

Even more troubling: It’s unclear whether the insurance industry will be able to issue the requisite policies. Experts said it almost certainly won’t.

Rail advocates have repeatedly warned that global insurance companies have struggled for years to write policies for railroads, thanks to a rise in climate change-related claims straining the insurance market as a whole and the sheer scale of the liability coverage that Congress forces railroads to secure.

Worse, the level of those liability caps has little to do with the actual probability of insurable incidents, which is significantly lower than cars. And because many rail fans are unfamiliar with the wonky world of underwriting, few have spoken up about a potentially existential threat to their favorite mode of getting around.

“What we really need is a public groundswell,” said Jim Mathews, President and CEO of the National Rail Passengers Association. “You need the public to comment in the docket and send letters to their members of Congress … Regular people [need to know that] train services are potentially threatened because very safe train operators, who have never had a wreck, are facing the reality that their insurance is going to go up — just because the law says it has to. And the insurance market doesn’t want to do it.”

How we got here

The rail industry’s looming insurance crisis traces back to 1997, when the Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act first mandated that railroads secure $200 million in excess liability insurance to cover the maximum allowable settlement that all passengers can secure from a single incident. (That requirement also functioned as the minimum allowable liability insurance policy railroads can hold and still run trains, making the “cap” both a ceiling and a floor.)

At the time, the number seemed fair to many rail advocates, who recognized that serious train crashes are rare compared to serious car crashes, but can be devastating and costly for surrounding communities. What wasn’t fair, though, was how the cap continued to increase — even if the number of train crashes held steady.

Under the FAST Act of 2015, the liability cap ballooned to $294 million — a development some advocates attributed to the influence of trial lawyers chasing bigger settlements rather than any meaningful analysis of the current costs of railway disasters.

“[It’s] a little self serving, if I will say,” said KellyAnne Gallagher, CEO of the Commuter Railway Coalition. “The more that railroads have to carry, the higher a trial lawyer can push for a jury verdict.”

Visit the National Safety Council for an interactive version of this graphic.

Worse, federal law requires Congress to adjust the cap every five years; in 2021, the legislative body raised it to $323 million. The next adjustment is due any day now, and advocates believe the cap will rise to around $400 million — an increase of nearly 24 percent.

Some larger carriers will be able to adjust their budgets to cover the gap; smaller carriers, who are already paying a tenth or more of their budget on insurance, may not be so lucky.

Other modes of travel, meanwhile, have it far easier. The liability cap for freight truck companies, for instance, hasn’t budged since Congress set it at just $750,000 in 1980 — a staggering 46 years ago. This is particularly notable given the surging number and associated costs of truck crashes, which often leave victims and survivors destitute, especially when a big rig causes a grisly, multi-car pile-up with damages comparable to train crashes.

Furthermore, the federal government imposes zero liability minimums on the individual drivers of passenger cars, who cause the vast majority of transportation tragedies in America, and largely leaves insurance matters up to the states. Legislators in New York are actually working to reduce motorists’ insurance costs, even as advocates warn that crash victims will pay the price.

How a broken insurance market is getting worse

Even if the pending liability cap increase is arbitrary, both Mathews and Gallagher said that railroads have tried to prepare to pay it. If the insurance market isn’t ready to provide the necessary policies, however, rail operators may not be able to secure new policies anyway, which could take the trains entirely offline.

Mathews explained that, due to the sheer size of the liability coverage that railroads are obligated to secure, no single insurance company can afford to offer them a single, comprehensive policy. That forces operators to cobble together insurance “towers” of more than a dozen different policies that collectively reach the federal cap.

Because there are simply not enough American insurers to fully assemble these teetering “towers,” railroads are forced to rely on foreign insurance markets in places like Bermuda and London to cover the gap. That means a significant portion of railroad budgets, most of which heavily rely on local tax receipts, flow directly to overseas entities — all because Congress dictated an arbitrarily high liability cap.

“Even when we’ve gone on the Hill and pointed out how much has to be spent overseas to acquire this insurance, it doesn’t seem to resonate that tax dollars are being sent abroad,” Gallagher added. “We would have thought that that would be a trigger, and it hasn’t really triggered anyone.”

Recommended Op/Ed: Oil Shocks Will Keep Coming. High-Speed Rail Can Boost Our Resilience.  Alan Minsky April 21, 2026

With the insurance market across all sectors buckling under the weight of climate disasters, Mathews fears the Londons and Bermudas of the world will think twice before insuring a U.S. railroad. If that happens, and Congress doesn’t relax its unrealistic standard, American trains could stop rolling.

“Wildfires in Madagascar will affect the rate that you as a commuter operator in San Diego are paying for insurance,” he told Streetsblog. “We’re reaching a point where the insurance market just does not want to sell policies to these railroads anymore. And as the cap gets higher, the insurance just becomes out of reach.”

What to do — and why to do it now

An industry-wide insurance crisis would be a disaster for commuter rail passengers. But Gallagher said it would be a particular tragedy given the mode’s recent gains in service and ridership.

Commuter rail largely recovered its pre-pandemic ridership by 2024, and some systems, like Caltrain, even doubled weekend passenger counts. Railroads have made massive investments in safety since the cap was last raised, too, and they’re just starting to record the long-term benefits of innovations like “positive train control” systems, which advocates said make trains safer every year they operate.

Rail advocates hoped that this summer’s World Cup games would be an opportunity to show the world how far we’ve come on the rails. They now wonder if trains will run at all.

“We would have hoped that market forces would have had a positive impact on the premiums we pay for this insurance,” added Gallagher. “We would have hoped that a drop in ridership during COVID would have had a positive impact on the premiums. It is not so … Our safety record and our safety investments have no bearing [on what we pay].”

Recommended Ask An Insurance Industry Insider: Safe Streets Are The Best Way To Bring Down Insurance Costs DJ Falkson April 15, 2026

As Congress drafts the next major federal transportation bill, Gallagher is lobbying legislators to defer the recalculation of the liability cap by four years, and to provide railroads (and the overwhelmed insurance market) year to comply with it.

Mathews said Congress could explore more radical solutions, too, such as requiring the Federal Railroad Administration to use actuarial science when estimating the costs of rail disasters, and creating tiered minimums to accommodate a diverse range of operators. Authorizing state-level transportation departments and commuter rail agencies to create their own insurers to pool risks regionally is another idea he supports; so is the creation of a “risk-sharing backstop” at the federal level, and giving the Surface Transportation Board more power to help set fair requirements rather than forcing Congress into the weeds on such a complex issue.

As wonky as all that might sound, though, Mathews said the stakes of this conversation couldn’t be higher — and the time to call your Congressional representative is now.

“It’s very esoteric and nerdy, and people don’t really want to talk about insurance because it seems bizarre,” he added. “But at the same time, you’re going to care if your commuter operator has to suspend service because they can’t get insured.”

• Replacing a second car with a cargo e-bike can save a family thousands of dollars a year. While the initial purchase price and storage for apartment-dwellers can be a concern, buyers save on fuel, car repairs and insurance, reduce their carbon footprint and live a healthier lifestyle. (Momentum)
• Voters in one suburb voted Saturday to withdraw from Dallas Area Rapid Transit, but two others voted to stay in the system. (Texas Tribune)
• Sound Transit is moving forward with the West Seattle Link light rail project, but will need to make improvements to dangerous Fourth Avenue to shift bus traffic there from the SoDa bus corridor. (The Urbanist)
• Seattle reached a $9.25 million settlement with a cyclist who was severely injured in a crash in a protected bike lane and sued the city arguing that it was poorly designed. (Seattle Times)
• A driver drove onto an Oakland sidewalk and injured seven people, then abandoned the vehicle at the scene (SFGate). In Las Vegas, a driver who killed one person on a sidewalk along the Strip and injured dozens more in 2015 was sentenced to at least 18 years in prison after reached a plea agreement (8 News Now).
• A coalition of San Diego transportation, business and climate advocates jointed together to oppose proposed eliminating the city’s multimodal team. (Circulate)
• The Knoxville City Council approved a $22 Vision Zero project on Chapman Highway, one of its most dangerous roads. (WATE)
• Asheville needs a strong bus system as its economy continues to recover from Hurricane Helene. (Citizen Times)
• Albemarle County, Virginia, is boosting funding for Charlottesville transit by $700,000. (29 News)
• At a conference in Columbia — a major coal exporter that’s trying to diversity its economy — representatives from more than 50 countries gathered to discuss transitioning away from fossil fuels. (NPR)
• Former Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo and British architect Norman Foster participated in a discussion on the benefits and challenges of removing cars from public spaces. (CityLab)
• Montreal residents once used an abandoned railbed as an informal trail, and now the city has turned it into an official linear park. (Landscape Architecture)

The city of Santa Monica will begin automated enforcement of vehicles parked illegally in bike lanes on May 1, marking a first-in-California effort to use camera technology mounted on parking enforcement vehicles to keep bike lanes clear.

The new Automated Bike Lane Enforcement program, operated in partnership with Hayden AI, builds on a pilot that identified nearly 1,700 violations in just six weeks—underscoring how frequently bike lanes are blocked and the risks that creates for cyclists.

Under ABLE, front-facing cameras installed on city vehicles will detect and record violations as they occur. For the first 60 days, vehicle owners will receive warning notices by mail, with $93 citations set to begin July 1. City officials say the goal is to change driver behavior and improve safety by preventing situations where cyclists are forced into traffic lanes.

“This initiative will bolster our growing network of bicycling infrastructure, enhance user comfort, and improve compliance with regulations intended to keep everyone safe on our roads,” said Santa Monica Senior Transportation Planner Trevor Thomas.

The effort expands on Santa Monica’s existing automated bus lane enforcement program, which has already reduced violations significantly. Officials report a 67% drop in bus lane violations and a 40% drop at bus stops since that program launched.

Hayden AI CEO Marty Beard emphasized the broader benefits: “Keeping bike lanes clear of illegally parked vehicles not only keeps cyclists safe, but it improves accessibility for people with disabilities who rely on powerchairs and motorized scooters. It also encourages more people to ride bikes – getting cars off the road as a result.”

In its “Take the Friendly Road” newsletter Santa Monica DOT stated that the program represents a major step toward safer, more reliable streets, reinforcing Santa Monica’s commitment to sustainable, multimodal transportation for residents and visitors alike.

Hayden AI and Santa Monica have already been partnering on the city’s Automated Bus Lane and Bus Stop Enforcement (ABLE) program, which uses camera systems mounted on Big Blue Bus vehicles to detect cars illegally blocking bus lanes and stops. Like the bike lane system, the technology automatically captures images of violations—such as vehicles parked in bus lanes or at bus stops—and generates evidence that is reviewed by city staff before citations are issued.

This system was rolled out following pilot programs that documented hundreds of violations, highlighting how frequently parked cars delay buses and create accessibility challenges for riders, especially seniors and people with disabilities.

For more on the ABLE program, see previous coverage at Santa Monica Next and for more on automated bus lane enforcement throughout the state, see earlier Streetsblog L.A. coverage. Beard was also a guest on the StreetSmart podcast.

Hayden AI is an advertiser with Streetsblog Los Angeles and Streetsblog California.

FIFA’s World Cup is coming up fast, and cities across America are making big plans to get soccer fans to the stadiums … and sometimes, making headlines for their astronomical transit prices. But is it a smart way for agencies to cash in on fútbol fever, a necessary evil to recoup the costs of mega-events, or simply price-gouging visitors who are doing cities a favor by choosing shared modes?

We appreciate the latest podcast from Transit Tangents, which breaks down four host cities’ approach to shared transportation during the biggest sporting event in the world, including the infrastructure they built (or didn’t) to accommodate it. And that includes one $35-million station platform extension that’s drawing a lot of scrutiny.