Streetsblog USA

Look at the worst, most barrier-choked places for wheelchair users in your community, and you’ll likely find that they have something in common: they were all planned by 100-percent able-bodied teams, who don’t understand the real needs of people with mobility challenges. 

It’s not just about the disability realm. Planning history is littered with top-down, failed projects, where the majority imposed what it thought was best for the minority. And even if that majority was well-meaning, they got it wrong. 

That’s why experts like Charles T. Brown argue that planning teams must be led by firms that understand the unique and nuanced requirements of placemaking for all — or at least include key sub-consultants on their teams. And in an era when the very concepts of “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” are under fire in Washington and beyond, they say diverse hiring is even more important.

“Diverse firms often bring lived experiences, deep community relationship, and unique ways of seeing a problem,” added Brown, who is the Founder & CEO of the urban planning, public policy and research firm, Horizon 54, formerly called Equitable Cities. “Often, that leads us to ask questions or identify impacts that others may overlook.” 

Recommended ‘Whether They See It Or Not’: How the ‘Arrested Mobility’ of Black Americans Harms Everyone Kea Wilson May 28, 2025

Still, Brown and the other experts we interviewed for this story acknowledged that minority-owned firms face uniquely steep barriers today. Affirmative action programs were a required part of federal contracting for a half century, but President Trump signed an executive order revoking it as one of his first acts in office. The Trump administration also has banned federal contractors, subcontractors, and grant recipients from operating diversity, equity and inclusion programs of their own. 

The Ending Discrimination in Government Contracting Act introduced this April would enshrine that order into law, among other provisions to “stop federal agencies from violating the Constitution by awarding contracts based on recipients’ race or sex,” co-sponsor Sen. Glen Grothman (R – Wisc.) wrote. And several states are already undoing longstanding race- and gender-based set asides and requirements, even though the bill has yet to pass.

Minority industry leaders, though, emphasize that their community does bring unique value and results — no matter what Washington says. 

“It is not that large firms cannot do good work, because they often do,” Brown continued. “It is that perspective matters. Diverse firms do not just bring different faces to the table. We often bring different questions, experiences, and ways of understanding the people affected by the work.” 

“Why? Because we believe those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” Brown continued.  

Planning 101 = Planning for Everyone

Experts Charnelle Hicks note that minority communities help foot the bill for public projects — even though hiring minority-led firms is the exception to rule. And that imbalance leads to unfair outcomes for travelers on the ground.

“In the public sector, taxes are paid by everyone – so you would think the plan would be for everyone, but we all know it doesn’t always turn out that way,” said Hicks, who serves as principal at Philadelphia-based CHPlanning.

Charnelle Hicks

If different people with different backgrounds are not considered from the beginning of the planning process, Hicks argues that projects will fail. 

“Whether the community is Amish or Muslim, unique perspectives exist,” she added. “You must think about [questions like,] ‘What are the things they care about?,’ and ask, ‘What are their priorities?’ At some point, we all will have disabilities. So we must design for accessibility.”

Hicks cited a plan for the Central Ohio Transit Authority that looked at sustainability not just in terms of the environment, but also in terms of how the transit system of greater Columbus, Ohio could be more inclusive.

The resulting plan didn’t simply look at sourcing environmentally friendly materials as part of the transit authority’s resilience effort. It also charted ways of sustaining economic justice by ensuring small, diverse businesses could become contractors for the transit agency, balancing social impact with economic growth. 

“Our only shareholders are the community,” she added. “[If the plan lacks an element of diversity, we need] to ask the question: ‘So you’re good with not including this consideration for the community?’” 

Nurturing home-grown growth

Cecilia V. Estolano has been working on redevelopment and economic development issues for over three decades. Her experience leading the Los Angeles-based Estolano Advisors has made her skeptical of strategies that call for luring large firms into a community with big subsidies and tax breaks without asking much in return.

Estolano said most consistent growth comes from home-grown small businesses. 

Cecilia V. Estolano

“This is how we build wealth in this country, particularly when so many folks are locked out of home ownership in high cost cities,” she added. “We need to invest in infrastructure because it is the foundation for our quality of life and for business growth. And we have to work directly with businesses to design workforce training programs tailored to their needs, but only if they can deliver jobs and careers that pay enough to support a family.”

To generate incremental, sustainable development, Estolano said cities often have to overcome cynicism and mistrust in working class communities of color — because those communities have been misled, disappointed and underestimated in past failed planning processes.

“We work closely with communities on changing the things that result from poor planning and poor policy,” she added. 

Estolano’s firm is currently leading the planning process for the future of a state-owned site in LA’s Crenshaw district that’s been shuttered for more than a decade. Served by light rail, it could be redeveloped with housing, job training and other community services.

“Our approach is, ‘how do you help people take back their power?’” she said. “How do you help communities to become places where they can actualize all their abilities? Diversity as a perspective makes our profession better.” 

When it comes to sustainability, Estolano emphasized that firms owned by people of color can frame issues of climate justice, pollution, the clean energy transition, and water quality in terms that reflect the direct experience of the communities that have been most impacted.

“We had our neighborhoods bulldozed to build freeways that caused more air pollution that seared our lungs,” she added. “We understand what it means to live within the evacuation zone of an oil refinery and can appreciate what clean cars and renewable energy can mean for our kids and their kids.”

Delivering healing to collective trauma — not just lip service

As Chief Executive Officer of the Los Angeles-based Thrivance Group, Dr. Destiny Thomas says equitable planning is about actions — not just words. Even when reports are couched in diverse language, she questions whether conventional planning is truly addressing the desires and needs of diverse people and communities.

“When I think about what sets so-called minority [firms] apart from others, I think about the process,” she added. “I think about opening the process, so diverse opinions are not just gathered but are a part of the plan and policy.” 

Thomas has developed what she calls “The Geography of Memory” framework, which examines how collective trauma becomes embedded in physical places and continues to shape mobility, public trust, redevelopment outcomes, and community interaction with the built environment. 

Dr. Destiny Thomas

The framework encourages agencies to map the location of police violence, highways that displaced neighborhoods, forced housing relocation, and neglected public infrastructure, among other public sites of trauma. She said when those areas are plotted and acknowledged, cities avoid “making investments that unintentionally reinforce harm.” 

Moreover, recognizing sites with negative history in a marginalized neighborhoods can help communities to move forward while shaping local trust in mobility, redevelopment and infrastructure projects.

“When you visit the street where Mike Brown was killed [in Ferguson, Missouri, or] when you visit the intersection where George Floyd was killed [in Minneapolis] – the places where their blood spilled out — it is very clear there is no process, tool, or policy that deals with the need to heal the land,” she said. 

Diversity in decision-making

Despite the current political climate, Brown emphasizes that his minority-owned firm is growing — and others can too. Because even if the rules change, his clients recognize the benefits of both his expertise and his lived experience. 

“There is a big difference between being on the team and having influence over the work,” said Brown, an award-winning transportation professional. “Too often, the minority firm is one of eight or nine subs, has a small scope, and has little say over the budget, methodology, or final recommendations. 

“Diversity at the bottom of the organizational chart is not the same as diversity in decision-making,” Brown continued. “Giving qualified, diverse firms opportunities to lead means they help shape the project from the beginning rather than simply being brought in to check a box.”

Transgender transit riders experience harassment far more often than their cisgender peers, according to a recent report. And that means public transit may be a major focal point of a larger anti-trans crisis — and that without intervention, ridership could take a hit.

Of the more than 350 trans and nonbinary riders surveyed by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, nearly 60 percent reported at least one instance of being targeted on a bus or train.

Even compared to other vulnerable groups, the rate is alarmingly high. A staggering one in four cisgender women who ride transit have experienced harassment onboard, but that’s still less than half the rate of their transgender peers.

Even so, the crisis is hardly noticed at all.

“We still know very little about the mobility experiences, challenges, and associated harassment faced by transgender people,” lead researcher Tam J. Guy wrote in the report.

Previous studies on gender-based harassment have exposed the treatment of women onboard transit, but fail to explore the unique experiences of trans and non-binary passengers.

Unsurprisingly, many of the survey’s respondents reported taking public transportation less than they wanted to — and fear of harassment played a major role in that decision. Nearly one in four respondents named it a primary reason, and slightly more said that fearing violence onboard altered their travel behaviors, even if doing so limited their mobility.

The researchers were careful to note that safety concerns weren’t the biggest reason why respondents shifted their travel behaviors. The lack of frequent, fast trains and buses often played a bigger role in motivating trans riders to take car trips instead.

Sometimes, though, slow service made experiences of harassment worse.

“Nothing makes you feel more like a sitting duck for harassment like being at the stop for 15 minutes waiting,” said Cedar, one of the trans respondents in the study.

Not all transgender riders are treated equal: the report notes that Black and women transgender individuals may be particularly vulnerable, due to the heightened levels of harassment against other groups that they identify with.

Guy emphasized that more research is necessary to draw definitive conclusions about the extent of the trans rider harassment crisis, the types of harassment experienced and what factors may heighten one’s risk of being targeted. That begins with changing how the issue is studied.

“Researchers need to change our approach to using gender assumptions,” they say in the report.

The alarming findings come as federal policymakers wage a war on minority Americans and transit.

Since the start of President Trump’s second term last January, the White House has pillaged federal funding for any research it says supports diversity, equity, and inclusion. One non-profit, the National Science Foundation, had more than 10,000 of its grants flagged for review, according to Nature. Any grant that includes a wide-range of common keywords — not limited to “gender”, “LGBT”, and “women” — appears to be flagged for cancellation.

Recommended San Francisco Advocates Document Harassment on Public Transit Indigo Rosenberg August 17, 2026

Even without federal support, public transit agencies and their riders can do more to promote safety for trans riders onboard.

Participants in the study named improved lighting at transit stops, real-time service information, and non-police station attendants amongst potentially helpful interventions. More than half of respondents stated that increasing police presence would not increase their feeling of safety.

“I can tell you that the answer is not more police,” said Nandina, one of the respondents.

Of course, transit is only one extension of the broader societal issue of anti-trans discrimination — even if transit reform can be the part of the solution, the report authors argue. Agencies can implement systemwide anti-harassment and education campaigns and train employees to intervene. Members of the public can challenge discriminatory treatment where they see it, too.

For public transit to become a safe, desirable alternative nationwide, the US needs a “general shift in the perception of trans people,” added Mahogany, a survey respondent. “The transit is fine. It’s the social aspect that’s scary.”

Like the interstate system before it, a network of massive, hyper-scale AI data centers is cropping up across America. And much like highways, they’re spewing air, water, and noise pollution across our communities, unleashing more surveillance tech and police on our sidewalks, and erasing the climate gains of every bike or a bus trip we take — all for the supposed “benefit” of communities that many advocates doubt. 

Today, The Brake is back from hiatus with Saul Levin, veteran transit advocate and host of one of our favorite new podcasts, The Hum, where he interviews the leading voices in the data center resistance movement. And along the way, he helps us understand not just why these two types of fossil fuel infrastructure have so much in common, but how the same playbook can help defeat them both — especially if we band together. 

For a transcript of this conversation with AI typos (yes, we recognize the irony): click here.

The following is an adapted excerpt from The Peach: A Memoir of Trauma, Survival, and Forgiveness. It explores the author’s experience as a survivor of an infamous 2003 crash which claimed the lives of ten people.

I glance at my wristwatch. It’s 1:43 p.m. The Santa Monica Farmers’ Market closes at two. People scurry past me in search of the last berries, tomatoes, artisan cheeses, and tropical fruits. 

Through the crowd of shoppers and maze of reds, greens, and purples, I spot a pyramid of peaches that makes my mouth water. Summertime gifts you with at least one juicy peach that rewards you with peach sweetness. I walk to the other side of Arizona Avenue and carefully pick up a perfect one. I roll it in my hand, its downy fuzz tickling my fingers. I bring the peach to my nose. It smells like orchard sugar. I anticipate the first bite – the squirt, the pulp, the tang. 

I hear a pop. The peach flies out of my hand.

I do not remember a Buick sedan heading toward me as its eighty-six-year-old driver pressed his foot to the accelerator, believing he is pressing the brake. 

It would take me years to begin to trust the world enough to cross an intersection again. It would take years before I could see an older driver behind the wheel of a car and not shudder.

Our deepest fears can rule our lives. But sometimes we choose to study our fear, to examine its causes and learn how to protect ourselves and others from getting hurt. 

Eventually, I’d become a student of the little-understood phenomenon known as “pedal error,” an oddly sanitized and trivializing label for something that begins with a moment of confusion yet ends with blood on concrete. I learned that what had happened to me had happened to so many others, and would continue happening, because little was being done to tackle the root causes or prevent its recurrence.

The coming decades would be marred by a global vehicle-ramming epidemic. Vehicle-ramming incidents have become a disturbing worldwide trend. If you type in “vehicle-ramming” you’ll find a Wikipedia entry listing one attack after the next: Charlottesville, New York City, Ohio State University, Ontario, London and Berlin.

How easy it is, despite intention, age, or experience of the driver, for a vehicle to become a lethal weapon – a means of inflicting mass casualties. “The city is safe,” the Toronto police chief said in response to the deadliest rampage involving a vehicle in Canada in April 2018. Ten people were killed, mostly women, and another sixteen injured. A troubled loner deliberately drove a rental Ryder van along Toronto’s main artery for one-and-a-half miles during a busy lunch hour. The driver – Alek Minassian – intentionally struck one pedestrian after the other, tossing people into the street, crushing others in crosswalks, pinning a woman beneath the van. 

How does such pure madness, a gross act of outrage, affect the safety and well-being of Toronto residents? Does the bystander who rushed to help a pedestrian struck while crossing the street feel safe? And what about the injured, or the families of the dead? 

Recommended What is ‘Traffic Violence’ and Why Do We Need To Talk About It? Streetsblog May 3, 2021

I knew they would never feel safe again. Some will forever mistrust walk signals, traffic lights, all cars, all drivers. I imagine their feet coming to a cold stop at the edge of a curb, refusing to move into the crosswalk each time they see a white Ryder van waiting for a traffic light to turn green. Just as my feet freeze solid whenever I see a Buick Le Sabre idling at a stop light.

The escalation of vehicle-ramming attacks forced cities large and small to wake-up to the threat of out-of-control cars, and to consider solutions in the form of strategically placed barriers that would allow pedestrians to go about their business, free from this new threat. 

In 2018, the San Luis Obispo Farmers’ Market in California fast-tracked their pedestrian safety project; they approved $1.3 million to erect removable steel bollards. The concern for pedestrian safety gained urgency in New York City after a driver, high on PCP, sped three blocks on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk, followed by the vehicle-ramming attack along the Hudson River.

Recommended Commentary: Why do Leaders Only React to Traffic Violence When it Comes from Terrorists? Roger Rudick January 7, 2025

In the wake of these incidents, the city allocated $50 million for better, secure high-risk public spaces. Fifteen hundred metal bollards were installed at locations most visited by tourists. Some might gasp at the price tag attached to these barriers, but compare those figures to the collective medical expenses incurred by all sixty-three injured in the Farmers’ Market crash, plus medical damages incurred by the injured in New York City, Charlottesville, Toronto, Berlin, Nice …. Now that’s sticker-shock. 

The city of Barcelona has taken the lead and gone beyond erecting bollards to create long-term planning that reimagines the urban future as one in which cars are relegated to the fringes, and pedestrians move freely and safely in an urban landscape that is quieter, greener, and safer. In a big and bold move to stop prioritizing cars, Barcelona is constructing so-called “superblocks.” Traffic will be restricted to a few, large collector arteries, while secondary streets are being converted into citizen spaces designated for cultural activities, community gatherings, and leisure. This ambitious citywide plan will transform Barcelona, and may save thousands of lives.

Other cities should consider similar strategies — and start treating all traffic violence as preventable.

• Enforcing traffic laws is all well and good, but when cities rely on ticket revenue to fill the government’s coffers, it erodes trust in police and takes away resources from preventing or solving other crimes. (Governing)
• A rail consultant says that a national railroad infrastructure bank could bring together federal, state and private sector resources to build high-speed rail. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Planner Mark R. Brown argues that most public hearings about transportation are unnecessary or even downright counterproductive — a relic of bad decisions in the 1960s that now allow a vocal minority to kill good projects. (Car Free America)
• One upside of robotaxis is that they would make it a lot easier to implement congestion pricing. (Government Technology)
• Oregon is nowhere near meeting its goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, mostly due to the Trump administration’s transportation policies and uncertain funding at the state level. (Capital Chronicle)
• WTSP pinpointed Tampa’s 10 deadliest roads.
• Jacksonville’s Skyway monorail is nearing the end of its useful life. What should replace it? (The Jaxson)
• Complete Streets improvements to Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. Drive both reduced crashes and improved travel times. (NACTO)
• Crime dropped by two-thirds and revenue rose by $10 million a year after Bay Area Rapid Transit upgraded fare gates at train stations. (Mass Transit)
• Pittsburgh has started turning downtown’s Smithfield Street into a pedestrian-friendly corridor. (Post-Gazette)
• WUGA interviewed Athens, Georgia’s Vision Zero coordinator about the city’s new safety action plan.
• The Kansas City streetcar will turn into a rolling platform for live music, poetry and public art on Wednesday. (KCTV)
• The Doobie Brothers’ 1974 hit “Black Water” was written on a New Orleans streetcar. (Yahoo)
  
  

Are “fast, free buses” a pie-in-the-sky New York City campaign promise, or an urgent policy prerogative for cities across America?

Results are still pending on now-mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to free NYC transit riders from gridlock and the farebox. Advocates at the Climate and Community Institute argued last spring, though, that other cities can and should aspire to the same goal — even in an era of sharp federal transit cuts that have only escalated since their report was initially released.

“When we zoomed out from New York — which to many people seems like an outlier in the United States — we started finding so many examples of smaller cities that were implementing these kinds of changes, both to speed buses up and to reduce or eliminate fares,” said John Stehlin, a professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro and co-author of the report. “Sometimes, [they’re even doing both] at the same time. It seemed like way more of a national story, despite the fact that New York was getting the biggest headlines.”

Why fast and free?

Stehlin notes that transit agencies across the country are already working to speed up routes or zero out the price of a ride — even if most do neither, and few have done both.

On the “fast” side of the equation, Pittsburgh has been building dedicated bus corridors since the 1970s; meanwhile, true bus rapid transit has been operational in places like Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Eugene, Oregon, since the late 2000s. Countless others have explored lower-lift strategies, too, like giving buses first priority at traffic signals.

When it comes to free transit, dozens of cities have gone zero-fare on at least a few of their routes for decades, especially in downtown business districts or tourist areas. Many small communities like ski towns have even stopped collecting cash system-wide — and more could probably afford to, since US transit agencies recovered just 13 percent of their operating expenses on average from ticket sales in 2024.

In some communities like Olympia, Washington, agencies found that enforcing fare collection actually cost them more than the amount their riders were paying.

“A lot of places looked at the cost of collecting fares and found that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” added Stehlin.

And the societal payoff for giving folks a free ride could be huge. One study cited by the researchers found that ridership shoots up an average of 56 percent after fares are eliminated.

When policies that make buses fast and free are implemented together, though, Stehlin says both priorities are often easier to achieve.

Eliminating fares, for instance, can get buses out of the stop and back on the road faster, since drivers don’t have to wait extra time for passengers to fumble with fare cards and loose change.

Speeding up routes, meanwhile, can attract new riders, which helps make whole systems more efficient – and helps make the case for what Stehlin calls “collecting fares on the societal level.” He encourages skeptics to think of it like the taxes and bonds communities currently collect to fund public libraries, where we’d never think of charging for books per check-out.

Still, he acknowledges that some “free” transit programs haven’t translated into steep ridership increases, while cannibalizing scarce revenues that agencies sorely need to speed buses up. But he says that’s all the more reason to think of the two policies as two sides of the same positive feedback loop — and fund both robustly.

“This is evidence that we should really look at implementing fast and free together, because if you have a bus system that’s not working well enough for people and meeting their needs, then making it free is not going to attract a lot of people,” added Emmett Hopkins, Stehlin’s co-author and the Transportation Policy Manager for the Institute. “But if we can do both together, then it can.”

Perhaps the best reason to do fast and free together, the authors argue, is simply how many lives it would make better.

“We found stories of specific people [whose] buses had been made faster or free, and those people were just better able to stay connected to the things that they needed in their lives — whether it be housing, health care, school, work, groceries, recreation, or their loved ones,” said Hopkins.

Recommended Why Arguments Against ‘Free Transit’ Are Missing the Point Streetsblog August 23, 2022

As Washington aims for steep federal transit cuts and transit agencies across the country follow suit, both Hopkins and Stehlin acknowledge that achieving the dream of fast and free buses nationwide won’t be easy. Still, they say it is possible — with a few ambitious policies.

First, both co-authors emphasize that forward-thinking state DOTs already have the ability to “flex” capital dollars away from highways and towards transit agencies, freeing up funds to plan and build faster infrastructure like bus rapid transit.

Advocates, meanwhile, can fight for funding explicitly to support fare-free operations, like Virginia already did to eliminate fares in its capital city of Richmond — at the cost of just $5 million, or 0.4 percent of the DOT’s annual budget.

State legislatures can clear the way by abolishing outdated “minimum farebox recovery” mandates that effectively require agencies to charge for a ride, and let localities pass local bond measures, raise taxes, and pursue other revenue streams to amp up transit investment of all kinds.

And if full-scale bus rapid transit redesigns and system-wide fare abolition aren’t in the cards, agencies can always start small with interventions like changing signal priority to benefit buses, or making key downtown routes free.

“States and cities have the opportunity to give people those better options on a pretty short time scale,” added Hopkins. “That could happen in a matter of months or within a year — or, in some cases, almost immediately.”

Stehlin adds that there’s hope for faster, free buses even in communities not known for being progressive on transit — because many of them are already doing it, at least at small scale. Perhaps the best example is Birmingham, Alabama, which saw ridership rise sharply after its free, 10-mile rapid transit project, Birmingham Xpress, opened in 2022.

“One of the things that we noticed when we did the research for this report was that we’re already seeing a lot of success in these kinds of initiatives in relatively conservative states,” Stehlin said. “There are aspects of this that are more popular than a car-only agenda.”

An earlier version of this story misstated how much it cost for Virginia to fund free buses in Arlington. It was 0.4 percent, not 0.07 percent.

Let’s imagine a city that wants more visitors to explore its downtown on foot. The photographs on the city’s website show a pedestrian paradise: broad sidewalks, outdoor tables, even a trail along the water. A family arrives by bus, follows the map the city provided … and discovers that to reach the trail entrance, they have to cross a busy road. Those last few hundred feet might ruin the whole afternoon. 

Let’s take another example: a public plaza has been open for years, but its restrooms close before evening programming begins. Or imagine a visitor’s district which promises a car-free day out, yet the last return bus leaves before the advertised evening activities finish. 

In each example, an attractive public promise meets a practical challenge that the whole trip depends on — and it fails the test. 

These are different problems with different owners. But they all share the same planning question: has anyone tested the whole journey that people are being invited to make, from beginning to end? 

Whether we’re talking about streetscapes, trails, transit connections, or public spaces, the usefulness of our local investments often depends on what happens beyond a construction boundary or departmental responsibility. A bike path can be finished while the connection to the larger bike network remains unresolved; an event can be staffed while the route home is overlooked. A map can describe a continuous experience for which no single organization is responsible, so it doesn’t deliver on its promise. 

The framework I call “Visitor Readiness” offers a way to examine those dependencies, through five questions: What is being promised? Who has the capacity to deliver it? What conditions must exist? How will delivery work? What will actual use teach us?

Visitor readiness in practice  

Despite the name, Visitor Readiness applies to residents as well as tourists. Someone crossing town for a shift, accompanying a child, or visiting an unfamiliar neighborhood should not need insider knowledge to make a public space work. Residents also have knowledge that a promotional itinerary can miss; their experience should help define readiness from the beginning.

Start with a specific promise. The vague desire for a “A connected waterfront” is difficult to meet. But a community canguarantee that “a person arriving at this bus stop can reach the waterfront on a continuous, usable route and return after the event.” Specificity gives a team something to examine. It also makes clear where transportation, parks, event operations, and communications have to coordinate.

Then, follow that journey with the people who depend on it. Include disabled residents, transit riders, nearby workers, and caregivers. Compensate participation where possible. A lunchtime walkthrough by project staff cannot establish what happens after dark, during a busy event, or when a usual route is closed. Ask who is missing from the test and what their absence leaves unknown.

For planners and advocates, the practical questions are straightforward: Can someone find and complete the trip without a car, a smartphone, or prior local knowledge? Do opening hours and transportation schedules actually support the activity being promoted? Where can someone rest, find a restroom, or get help? Who corrects conflicting information? When a connection fails, who has the authority and budget to fix it?

Record the answers in ordinary language. Separate what has been observed from what is assumed. Assign each unresolved question to someone who can answer it, and pick a date to check on their progress. “Coordinate with partners” is insufficient when everyone believes another organization owns the problem.

How quickly you respond to those questions should correspond to how urgent the problem is. Correcting an outdated map could happen immediately. Extending restroom hours requires staffing and an operating budget, and that needs to be sorted out soon. A dangerous crossing needs a substantive safety response; better directions cannot compensate for unsafe access. When not all problems can be immediately solved, communicate the limitation clearly and specify the work needed to finish the job. 

An evolving process 

Visitor Readiness must also remain open to revision. An established trail or plaza can become unusable when service hours change, a nearby connection closes, or maintenance falls behind. Teams should revisit the journey after significant changes and use complaints, staff observations, and conversations with people who stopped coming to identify what might have been missed. 

In addition to capital funding, advocates can and should ask for the operational resources they need to do this work: an operating owner, maintenance and access, a test of the full journey, and a public review after use begins. That makes readiness part of delivering an improvement, rather than another indefinite hurdle to be surmounted in the quest to build safer streets.

Promoting a public place creates expectations about how it will work. The useful test is whether someone can actually do what that space invites them to do, under the conditions they will actually encounter. Public investment earns its value in those ordinary trips — including the last few hundred feet.

• Rural communities that only have bare-bones transit service as it is will feel the brunt of congressional Republicans’ cuts to federal transit funding. The proposed BUILD America 250 Act provides only $103 billion for transit over five years, compared to $120 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed by President Biden in 2021. (Grist)
• Meanwhile, the stopgap transportation funding law signed by President Trump three weeks ago cuts funding for three rail grant programs from $9 billion to just $200 million. (Railway Supply)
• Several rail and transit funding referendums are scheduled for November, and with federal support flagging, losses at the ballot box could be catastrophic. (Governing)
• Probably the largest of those is a Bay Area vote to help the region’s four struggling transit agencies (San Jose Mercury News). Oakland residents gathered at city hall recently to push for passing the $14 billion measure (Oaklandside).
• A set of key votes on Austin light rail are scheduled for today (KXAN).
• In addition, the Atlanta city council will vote on a resolution in support of light rail along the Beltline (CBS News).
• The California High-Speed Rail Authority reimbursed $600,000 in unallowable expenses like Uber rides and bar tabs, according to an investigator general’s report. (CalMatters)
• The Federal Transit Administration has closed a years-long review of safety on Boston transit. (WGBH)
• The Miami-Dade government shifted $5 million to its already flush tourism bureau at a time when transit is struggling. (WLRN)
• Both U.S. Senate candidates in Michigan favor suspending state and federal gas taxes (Michigan Public), even though that doesn’t save drivers much money and hampers transportation projects.
• North Carolina started an initiative making it easier for Raleigh-to-Charlotte intercity rail passengers to connect to local transit. (ABC 11)
• San Antonio is starting a pilot program to help late-shift service industry workers get home. (KSAT)
• A bus rapid transit project in Bloomington is on hold as the city awaits federal grant approval. (Bloomingtonian)
• Quartz ranked Cambridge, UK as the most bike-friendly city in the world, with Marrakech, Warsaw and some other surprises landing in the top 10 along with the usual Northern European suspects.

Believe it or not, the United States used to be the cycling capital of the world. So how did we end up in the hellscape we’re in today?

In the most hotly anticipated crossover event since the Avengers joined forces with the Marvel Cinematic Universe — at least to niche urbanist YouTube nerds! — beloved content creators Climate Town and Not Just Bikes have finally teamed up.

With their powers combined, the two channels created the ultimate 30-minute explainer on how so much of America spiraled not just into car dependency, but into out-and-out hostility towards people on two wheels and any infrastructure that supports them.

But the story isn’t just about how our nation “morphed into a series of car countries with a country problem,” as Williams puts it. It’s also about anti-bike lane bias from some cyclists themselves, bizarre backlash from neighbors who literally compare new lanes to 9/11 and (gasp!) even a little hope for the future.

As always, bonus points if you spot the Streetsblog USA cameo.

Watch this video on YouTube.

• We’ve written a lot about how Tesla’s self-proclaimed “self-driving mode” still requires human attention. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now questioning how a human driver can take control of a Cybercab with no pedals and no steering wheel. (Wall Street Journal)
• Transit officials are calling on Congress to restore transit funding that was cut by the recent continuing resolution for transportation. (Passenger Transport)
• The Trump administration is letting truckers drive 16 hours per day instead of the previous limit of 14. (Reuters)
• In big cities like Chicago and San Francisco, micromobility ridership is coming close to matching transit’s. (Government Technology)
• San Francisco residents who vote against a ballot initiative to slightly raise property taxes to fund Muni would likely see their property values drop as a result. (New York Post)
• A arbitrator awarded $40 million to the family of a woman who was run over and killed after being forced out of an Uber on a Los Angeles freeway. (ABC News)
• An Omaha pizzeria’s walk-in cooler broke, but the owner chose to blame its closure on streetcar construction. (WOWT)
• A dozen Pittsburgh bus routes will be detoured during construction of improvements to Smithfield Street. (Trib Live)
• Dallas is considering whether to let sidewalks be painted any which color, or combination thereof, in the face of a state directive banning “political signage” like rainbows. (KERA)
• If you like listening to baseball on the radio, as God intended, you’re in luck — Congress passed a bill to prevent automakers from removing AM radios from new vehicles (Jalopnik; Radio World). In all seriousness, though, AM radio remains essential for older people and those in rural areas with poor cellphone reception and internet access to hear about emergencies.
• Twenty years later, Seattle residents still fondly remember the original acronym for the light rail line that didn’t become the South Lake Union Trolley. (Axios)

A version of this article appeared on Street Stack and is republished with permission.

Recently, a righteous anger has been building inside me.

Longtime readers know I spent 8 years working in advertising before I became an urban planner. Turns out a liberal arts degree in cultural anthropology is suitable training for discovering what makes people tick, and exploiting it. For about one of those years, I aspired to be the sort of ad man who could sell ice in the winter and fire in hell. For the next seven, I increasingly felt that I was working grueling hours doing something dirty.

Today, I hate ads. I think they contribute nothing to society. I think the marketing industry has convinced a large swath of often quite smart, and occasionally genuinely creative people to grease the wheels of capital.

Let me make my bias clear from the start. I hate ads on TV; I hate them on my phone. But I really hate them in public places.

At the beginning of summer, I decided to use my AirPods and phone less during commutes. I try to be phone down, head up, ears and eyes open, to be more present in public spaces. For the first half of my commute, the results have been transformative. Bird chirps and snippets of conversation flow into my still-waking-up brain. I notice more without a podcast or song in my ear, and sometimes I create fully formed thoughts (gasp).

But then, I step into the subway, and it all goes to shit. Not because of the noise, or the dirt, or the crazies, but because of stuff like this:

Being somewhat off my phone has made me realize how much the subway is now like being physically inside a phone. I nearly crashed out one day sitting across from an endlessly looping Airbnb ad of a guy dancing across seven screens, aping the social media aesthetic I was explicitly trying to give my brain a break from.

Watch this video on YouTube.

But being forced to look at this slop has also revealed a shift — a shift I wanted to consider in its context.

About 130 years ago, the awkwardly named Associated Bill Posters Association adopted the “billboard” as the industry gold standard, consolidating itinerant flyers, hand-painted signs, and wheatpastes into a well-maintained stand that lived in a specific outdoor location. People have been complaining ever since. In a 1924 issue of Architectural Review, a writer noted that

There is no hour of waking life in which we are not besought, incited, or commanded to buy something of somebody. Our morning paper is full of it; our walk to the nearest car bristles with it; the transfer which we take blazons it … When the shades of night fall, a portentous heraldry of trade leaps in living fire from the darkness, exhorting us to drink Boozer’s Whisky or perish in our shame.

Reading Laura Baker’s excellent brief history of outdoor advertising,one learns that members of the Automobile Club of America organized billboard-removal drives to destroy ads on rural roads and civic groups like the City Club of Chicago lobbied for bans on ads on residential streets.

This ban, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1917, established a city’s right to restrict the location of advertising — but not, as many reformers wanted, the right to regulate the content of ads based on aesthetics. The groundwork was set for outdoor advertising’s explosion in the mid-20th century. From then until recently, advertising reflected and shaped a mass culture of middle-class households with General Electric appliances in the kitchen and Nabisco in the cupboards. 

With a broad audience, advertisers could conceptualize their trade as a sort of public service informing people about better lifestyles and products. This was also when the industry adopted the language of fine art, where ad-men became “art-directors” or “copy-writers” and ad companies segmented themselves into “art” departments and invented awards for “creativity.”

Outdoor advertising became popular art with aesthetic value. The poster was more powerful than the painting because many more people saw it, and in the increasing blankness of the industrial cityscape, it might be the only color and reading material on the average worker’s commute.

The marketers claimed to entertain and inform broad swaths of people. The critics said they were polluting the common spaces of the citizenry and tempting them with cigarettes and gambling.

What unified both proponents and critics of outdoor ads was a concern with “the masses.” Advertisers used to rely on a few, imprecise channels — radio, TV, and most imprecise of all, billboards — that tapped into a strong monoculture.

But today the monoculture is splintered, and we are a collection of niche interests sharing space temporarily in a subway. Ad “campaigns” are all about “targeting” and “precision” (the language of marketing borrows heavily from the language of war). In this era of Instagram ads algorithmically tailored to appeal to a few thousand viewers of a certain nail art channel, an outdoor ad has the precision of a 1000 pound bomb. 

And yet, outdoor ads seem to be multiplying. New York has long subsidized public transit with advertising. The MTA brought in $180 million from ads across its properties in 2025, up from $136 million in 2019. With Outfront, the MTA’s media partner, it has developed and installed a series of new formats, from illuminated billboards to digital displays running looping video.

Many of these formats copy the aesthetic we’ve seen on our phones and feeds for years: Quick cuts, in-your-face visuals, bright colors, scrolling text.

It’s also worth considering not just the format but the content of these ads, which are increasingly about tech or lifestyle products that are aimed at an infinitesimal number of subway riders — engineers at Google, hiring managers at financial institutions, wellness consumers of a specific peptide stack — but are nevertheless seen by thousands of people to whom they have no relevance.

This is a paradigm shift. Ads that were widely seen used to strive for mass appeal. Anyone could fall down at work and need to call Celino & Barnes. Now, ads that may still be seen by thousands are fine being relevant to only a small number of viewers. See if you belong in any of the audience segments Outfront Media promises to reach through its subway advertising. If you don’t, you’ll see the ads anyway. 

Using a subway ad to sell an AI trading agent to an “executive commuter” is like killing an ant with a shotgun. For anyone who’s not the intended target, the sense of disorientation and confusion might be part of the point. I have, after all, gotten so mad that I’ve written an entire post and shared pictures of ads with my subscribers. This is what those in the biz call “organic reach” — a funny term to use for the deeply inorganic process of creating mass marketing.

When I worked in advertising, we used to talk about the “bizarreness effect,” the psychological principle that strange or nonsensical things become distinctive because they present a problem for our brain to solve. A coworker once used this sentence as an example. “Dogs are not like other animals. Compared to tea kettles, they are much more red.”

Many subway ads now have the same effect. They are impossible to understand but somehow also impossible to ignore. How Outfront can claim the below is beyond me. I’m sorry, Cait, but you are a loser.

This is all pitched as a neccecity to maintain good service.

“Ad revenue is an incredibly important source of revenue for the MTA outside our farebox. Revenue sources like this are what help us keep fares low for customers, or those increases low year-over-year,” Mary John, the MTA’s director of commercial ventures, said in an interview with Gothamist. This is not all that different from the original concept of TV or radio ads as something we tolerate because it pays for what we actually want — we bring you the Knicks game or the hard-hitting journalism of Walter Cronkite every night for free, and in exchange you watch the Marlboro Man smoke for thirty seconds.

CBS used to be free, once you got a TV anyway. You paid for it with your attention. Now I pay through the nose to stream the Knicks, and guess what, there are still ads. We’re all paying twice, and when I ride the subway I feel like I’m paying thrice.

I’m an urban planner; I know $3 is far below the true cost of riding, and the MTA desperately needs more money to maintain and upgrade the world’s oldest subway system. And yet I feel cheated. I pay the ever-increasing fares; my taxes fund the MTA, and through my (tiny) 401k and mutual fund holdings, I’ve purchased its bonds. On the rare occasion I take a cab home, I now give it even more money through Congestion Pricing.

All this to an agency that (meaningful strides aside) is still riddled with financial inefficiencies. And yet I have to sit trapped in a subway car that feels built to annoy me.

I’m clearly not alone in my angst. The comedians Harris Alterman and Dave Ross have been pasting parody tech ads across stations. A few of them are almost too subtle. 

A study in Poland actually considered how much Warsaw residents would collectively pay not to see outdoor ads, and found it was between five and nine million euros a year depending on the size of reductions. Recently, I came across a parody(?) video for a “tunnel vision” device that could block out subway ads in your peripheral vision. The video’s creator, Jack Klein, also created a mountable screen that blocks out digital ads in train cars.

But I haven’t seen actions proposed for making any of this more bearable. Like the AI apocalypse or climate change, we seem resigned to a future where the subway rots our brains.

At the very least, I would love the MTA to set limits on motion and brightness in its ads consistent with growing science showing short-form video is harmful to our attention spans and cognitive abilities. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind banning digital displays altogether for anything other than transit info.

But what needs to change most is the idea that advertising is a sacred source of revenue for the MTA. $180 million dollars is a lot of money, but it’s a tiny fraction of the budget for an agency whose projects cost billions.

Smarter people than me have proposed new revenue or cost-saving measures for the agency. We could rely less on outside consultants, sell more air rights over stations, or increase the payroll mobility tax. Space given to ads could be used to expand the MTA’s excellent public art programs, which are increasingly drowned out by slop. 

History is littered with people who hated ads and lost. “In modern life…contemplation is almost a lost faculty.” Wrote the president of the Chicago Art Institute… in 1912.

But never forget: the subway is funded by you and me. A pleasant commute is not too much to ask for. And if nothing happens, I guess I’ll just put my AirPods back in.

• Some House Republicans are pushing to suspend the federal gas tax in hopes of improving their re-election chances, even though it would only save drivers a few pennies per gallon, but so far Speaker Mike Johnson has refused (Politico).
• GOP governors are divided on the issue, too. Gov. Mike Braun suspended Indiana’s gas tax, but has had to pay out $139 million to local communities to make up for the lost revenue (WISH). South Carolina’s Henry McMaster remains opposed (Go Upstate).
• Amtrak has settled a longstanding dispute over crossings with freight company Canadian National. (Trains)
• The new CEO of the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority joined other municipal transit officials in asking Washington for more funding for security and to prevent fare-jumping. (AJC)
• Atlanta’s Downtown Connector is the busiest freeway in the U.S., carrying an average of 405,000 cars a day. (World Atlas)
• Facing drastic budget cuts, the Milwaukee County Transit System is choosing between bus route maps that preserve coverage or preserve service on the most-used routes. (Urban Milwaukee)
• Divvy bikeshare in Chicago had a record 3.5 million users this summer. (Block Club)
• The 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City could provide the impetus to bring Amtrak service back to Boise. (Idaho Statesman)
• Lexington is about to start fining drivers $50 for blocking bike lanes. (Herald-Leader)
• The Mobile city council approved an application for a $1 million federal grant to purchase five trolley-style buses. (Fox 10)
• Ontario is proceeding to tear up 12 miles of Toronto bike lanes. (The Cool Down)
• European bikeshare nextbike saw a 9 percent increase in users last year. (Smart Cities World)

Ask a street safety advocate why we should slow cars down, and you will get a solid answer about reducing crashes. Ask why we should cut traffic volumes on a residential street, and you will get another one about congestion. 

Both answers are right — but both leave out a health effect that has been rampant on those same streets the entire time, and that no federal agency in this country has measured since 1982.

I spent the past year putting a number on it, and the study came out in June. 

Why traffic noise kills — and how big the death toll is 

Road, rail and aircraft noise is linked to about 6,330 premature cardiovascular deaths across the contiguous United States every year. That’s because around 94.5 million Americans, or close to one in three, live in places where transportation noise runs at or above 45 decibels. 

Those deaths tend to come from the louder end of that range — above roughly 50 decibels. But the impact is still staggering. On average, a person who dies of a cardiovascular disease linked to transportation noise will lose 14.5 years from their projected lifespan. Another 13,600 cases of type 2 diabetes a year are attributable to the sounds of cars, trains, and planes, along with 3.3 million people whose sleep is regularly broken.

Recommended THUNDER ROAD: Car Noise Stokes Heart Attacks, Study Finds Eve Kessler May 4, 2022

To understand why these numbers are so high, it’s important to understand that transportation noise does not have to wake you to hurt you. It sets off a stress response, and over years, that shows up as vascular inflammation and cardiac events. Your sleep fragments whether or not you remember it in the morning. 

The World Health Organization built guidelines on noise in 2018, and the method I used to estimate the impact of noise exposure on deaths and disease is the same one WHO already uses for air pollution in more than a hundred countries. Moreover, the studies underlying that methodology adjusted for air pollution, and the noise effect remained.

Put another way: the danger of noise pollution is not just the danger of traffic exhaust wearing a different label. Transportation noise is harmful all on its own. 

Quieter save lives

Here’s the good news: we already know how to reduce traffic noise, and doing it would save siginficant lives.  

If we made every neighborhood in the country five decibels quieter, that one change would spare Americans about 106,500 years of healthy life every year, using a measure researchers call “disability-adjusted life years.” Think of it as a running tally across the whole population: every year someone spends with noise-broken sleep, chronic stress, or a heart condition that noise helped cause counts as part of a healthy year lost, and every year cut from the life of someone who dies early from it counts as a full year lost. Add that up across the millions of people affected and you get the total.

About a third of those 106,500 years comes from those roughly 6,330 early deaths; the rest comes from people living with the harmful health effects of noise pollution. Moreover, just those five decibels would be enough to erase 39 percent of the damage to our collective health caused by our current traffic noise levels.

The share of the total years of healthy life that transportation noise costs the contiguous US each year that a uniform five decibel reduction would remove. Harm covers the seven outcomes assessed, and premature cardiovascular deaths account for about a third of it. Source: Rojas-Rueda 2026, Environmental Research, Section 3.5.

Decreasing traffic noise by five decibels is not out of the question. The levers to accomplish it are the ones already on the agenda of transportation reform advocates: addressing what the road surface is made of, how fast cars travel over it, how many cars there are, and how many trips happen by foot, bike or transit instead. 

Rolling noise rises with speed, and automobile volume matters because noise is energy and energy adds up. A repaving contract, a speed limit, a road diet, a bus lane: each of these is also a noise decision, whether or not anyone at the meeting says the word “noise.”

Recommended Car Noise Pollution is Worse in Redlined Neighborhoods — And Not Just for Humans Kea Wilson December 6, 2023

I should be straight about what my study does not do. It does not tell you which combination of those measures gets a specific corridor to five decibels, or what that would cost. Nobody has done that at city scale in the US, partly because we do not have source-specific noise maps to work from. That work is still waiting.

But we do know that harmful transportation noise is not distributed equally. In the most socially vulnerable fifth of American communities, 1,940 deaths related to it happen each year. In the least vulnerable fifth, 849. 

Exposure drives the gap: 45 percent of residents in the most vulnerable communities live with traffic noise above 45 decibels, compared to 20 percent in the least. The communities enduring the most noise endure more of the disease that noise aggravates.

Who’s listening

None of this appears in your agency’s dashboard because nobody reports it.  

Congress defunded the EPA’s noise office in 1982. The Noise Control Act of 1972 is still law, but it has gone unenforced for four decades. HUD’s noise standards for federally supported housing were written in 1979 and have not been revised since.

The European Union, by contrast, has required its member states to map noise since 2002 and now ranks it among the top three environmental health risks on the continent.

Recommended The Other Type of Car Pollution That Harms Us All Kea Wilson September 14, 2020

Still, it’s important to note that the U.S. is not short on data about transportation noise. Two researchers at the University of Washington built a national transportation noise exposure map from federal data, which is what made my study possible in the first place. What is missing is anyone with a mandate to publish that data on a schedule, and say what it means for health. 

That fix needs no new legislation. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics already holds the inputs. That is the federal ask, and right now, the federal government is slow to answer. 

The nearer-term move is smaller and it belongs to the people who are likely reading this: everyday advocates and policymakers. When you write the memo for a road diet, a pavement specification, a speed limit change or a transit priority project, the crash numbers are already in it. Put the noise numbers in the same paragraph. Every state in the contiguous US has its own figure now.

We have spent forty years treating traffic noise as a complaint to be filed. But it is a health exposure that is killing us — and we can make better decisions now. 

If you took a break or simply lost track of Congress’s efforts to craft America’s massive new federal transportation law this summer … well, so did we. And with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act set to expire in just a few months, it’s more important than ever that advocates rally together to make our next core infrastructure bill the best it can be.

We sat down with Beth Osborne of Transportation for America to catch up on what we missed, and help us all plug back in to the fight for a better reauthorization. Here are the highlights from our conversation.

Recommended Everything You Want to Know About the Next Surface Transportation Reauthorization But Were Afraid To Ask Kea Wilson July 22, 2025 The big picture on where things stand

Back in the spring, a lot of members of congress swore up and down that this was finally the year they would deliver America a shiny new national infrastructure bill on the day the old one expires — despite the fact that no congress has ever reauthorized America’s core national transportation programs on schedule.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee took its first stab at a accomplishing that ambitious goal in late May with the Build America 250 Act … which was roundly panned by advocates as even more expensive, highway-focused, and unlikely to accomplish its goals than the (also car-centric and deficit-fueled) megabill we have now, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Build America 250 would place a new fee on electric vehicles — but organizations like the Bipartisan Policy Center warn it wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to bridge the gulf, especially since the Trump administration is doing everything it can to “end the EV mandate” and get Americans into gas-powered cars.

“There’s not enough money coming in through [funding streams like] the gas tax and diesel tax and tire taxes to cover the cost of maintaining the program where it is,” Osborne said. “In fact, there’s not enough to cover just the highway formula funds. We haven’t even gotten to that part of the conversation yet — and that’s always the most painful part.”

Graphic: Bipartisan Policy Center

Rather than explain to election-year voters why they were burying the country in even deeper debt, Congress was forced to pass a temporary extension of the IIJA until December 11, to keep America’s mobility funding flowing and punt sticky questions about future funding until after the midterms.

That “extension”, though, used some budgetary tricks to work in a 20 percent cut to public transit compared to fiscal year 2026, and a staggering 83 percent cut to passenger rail — and the money for the latter wouldn’t even be guaranteed. Highway programs remained untouched.

Worse, Build America 250 isn’t dead — and the pressure is on from the Trump administration to deliver a bill like it that “prioritizes motor vehicle travel over bicycle lanes” no matter what it costs, as Secretary Sean Duffy wrote in a July letter to Congress.

“Apparently making it safe for a kid to bike to school is somehow weird left-wing propaganda now,” added Osborne. “I thought it was traditional, and something that we all aspired to go back to – but [according to the Trump administration,] apparently not. [They think] bike lanes are horrible. Slowing down traffic to the actual posted speed by using design? That’s horrible [to them], too.”

Recommended The Last Straw: Duffy Asks Senate To ‘Restrict’ Funding For Bike Lanes Dave Colon July 23, 2026 Why extending the IIJA is probably our best bet — even if it sucks

Of course, pushing backwards ideas about bike lanes isn’t the only way that the Trump administration is interfering in our country’s transportation future — or its present.

Osborne notes that the executive branch has strained the limits of the current transportation law by freezing, rescinding, running out the clock on and otherwise slashing money for programs and projects it simply doesn’t like, all because they supposedly “violate” broad executive orders against vaguely-defined concepts like “sustainability” and “equity.” Communities struggling to build things, meanwhile, don’t exactly have the money they need to fight those decisions in court, even if they think they’re illegal.

Congress, though, happily passed a new government funding bill earlier this month without any significant provisions to restore transportation funding to communities that lost it — or any new guardrails to prevent Trump from stomping on the spirit of the IIJA going forward.

“I think the real issue is the fact that this administration has not only felt comfortable, but has actually been left to implement the last surface transportation program any way it wanted to — whether it was connected to the law or not,” Osborne added. “And in response to that, the House passed a bill giving them more money … Why wouldn’t [Trump] just continue violating the law?”

Recommended Dems Push for Guardrails to Shield Federal Transportation Grants From Trump Meddling David Meyer June 23, 2026

That’s why Osborne says advocates should call on Congress to extend the IIJA for at least a year, until Trump and his ilk prove they can follow the law for any meaningful period of time — even if the IIJA is making our communities worse.

“I mean, if you if you ask me, the IIJA was not a good authorization at all,” Osborne said. “It didn’t make our roads safer. It didn’t focus on bringing our infrastructure into state of repair. It didn’t make it easier for people to get to work or other destinations. It didn’t lower emissions. It accomplished zero of its goals … I wish we lived in a world where someone [in Congress] would engage in that conversation with us.”

Why electing more Democrats probably won’t set America up for a better bill (and what will)

With the mid-terms coming up fast, Osborne knows some advocates might be tempted to think that simply electing more ostensibly climate-focused Democrats is our best bet to pass a better transportation law.

She warns, though, that even the deeply harmful Build America 250 passed the House transportation committee with broad bipartisan support — and getting a better bill across the finish line will take a full court-press on both sides of the aisle.

“If anyone is under the impression that that if Democrats take control of the House that they will get a better bill, let me disabuse you of that now,” she added. “What will happen is the Democrats will take up the bill they negotiated this Congress, point out that it was passed through a committee almost unanimously, and so why wouldn’t we just copy and paste that sucker and move forward? That’s where we are.”

Advocates’ real challenge now, Osborne argues, is a fundamental one: to get elected officials on both sides of the aisle to realize about just how thoroughly auto-centric policies are failing to achieve any of the goals they might have for our transportation system.

And then we have to get them to care about it — and refuse to fund the endless construction of harmful highways just for the sake of notching an easy bipartisan win.

“What often happens is [advocates] get to Capitol Hill, and they are told by their leadership … that [transportation funding] is bipartisan, and anything is good,” Osborne added. “And if there’s a problem with the program, it’s lack of funding — and there is absolutely nothing we need to do on policy, we just need to spend, spend, spend. I think it’s important … to say no: actually, the problem is we have been spending gobs and gobs of money, and not getting the results promised.”

To have an impact, Osborne argues that advocates need to make noise to their legislators about the failings of the IIJA, and why doubling down on the same car-focused strategies in Build America 250 is a terrible bet.

“People in Congress do not understand what is not working in the transportation program,” she added. “Advocates need to speak up and let them know where their concerns are — and how that is different than just pouring more money down the same rabbit hole.”

• Car insurance and gas are both up over 50 percent since 2019, making the annual cost of owning a car nearly $6,000 a year. And that’s on top of payments, which now average $765 a month for new cars and $542 for used. (CNBC)
• Cities should be setting aside money for infrastructure maintenance. (Governing)
• The Federal Transit Administration awarded $233 million in grants for station accessibility (Transportation Today), including $20 million for Green Line station upgrades in Cleveland (Axios).
• New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a new Vision Zero plan that includes lowering speed limits near schools, infrastructure improvements at intersections, speed-limiting devices on city-owned vehicles and potentially higher tolls for oversize vehicles. (NY Times)
• New Jersey is considering building its first true bus rapid transit line. (NJ.com)
• Boston bike advocates are underwhelmed by Mayor Michelle Wu’s track record on bike safety projects. (WCVB)
• Phoenix is starting an on-demand van service and expanding RAPID bus service. (KJZZ)
• Raleigh churches are considering turning their usually empty parking lots into affordable housing. (WUNC)
• Somebody was caught on video in Seattle driving at freeway speeds along a walking and biking trail parallel to I-90. (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Vancouver reopened Granville Street to cars after the World Cup ended, but the successful experiment could lead to pedestrianizing it permanently. (CBC)
• Biking and walking are booming in Limerick. (Independent)

Six hundred more curbside spaces are about to become electric vehicle charging points under a contract that will be announced on Tuesday — a massive expansion of a pilot program but a small down payment on the city’s larger plan to permanently allocate more public space for the automobile.

Pedestrian and street-safety groups have long warned that creating curbside chargers represents a giveaway to the minority of New Yorkers who own cars, but that’s exactly what the Brooklyn-based it’s electric is being hired to do: install the electric posts that opponents say will reduce public space left for wider public benefit such as bike or bus lanes, street seats, curbside dining or even trees.

“Our curb space can be used for so much more than parking,” said Michael Sutherland, senior policy and legislative analyst at Open Plans, which shares a parent organization with Streetsblog. “EV chargers are permanent, expensive infrastructure that permanently lock in public space for cars and make future improvements more difficult.”

The city has been operating 88 charging points from FLO, but is expanding to 600 with it’s electric, a company with the lower-case name … and big ambitions.

“Just as fire hydrants are on every street, our vision is for EV chargers to become that normal,” it’s electric founder Nathan King said in a statement. The company did not address the livable streets issue: cars occupying the curbside lane forever.

The charging points do not only lock in parking, said another advocate.

“It also locks in a contract for a utility company to keep a fueling facility there in that parking space,” said Jon Orcutt, a former DOT policy director. “And we’re essentially turning public streets into the 21st-century gas stations.”

Coming soon.

Mayor Mamdani created the Office of Curb Management at DOT in April, on the premise that the curb has been stuck with one use — car storage — ever since overnight parking was made legal in the 1950s. Its job is to repurpose that space for loading zones, containerized trash, and outdoor dining. And also more spots for EVs to fuel up. (The city announced the expansion last month, but will be announced today that it’s electric won the bid.)

DOT’s 2021 Electrifying New York report called for 10,000 curbside points by 2030, though it’s electric co-founder Tiya Gordon thinks that landmark will be reached “between 2030 and 2040.”

Transportation officials say they will coordinate charger locations with bike, bus, and pedestrian projects to preserve flexibility.

Neighborhoods with high concentrations of taxi drivers, including Soundview, Rego Park, Red Hook, Washington Heights, and Stapleton, are being targeted first because the chargers will help meet the city’s Green Rides rule, which requires all rideshare rides to be zero-emission (or wheelchair-accessible) by 2030.

Passenger vehicles, including those Uber and Lyfts account for 17 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the city’s chief climate officer Louise Yeung. The city wants drivers to switch to electric to reduce that pollution (though obviously the driver of an electric SUV takes up the same curb space, causes the same traffic, blocks the same buses and has the same potential to kill and maim as the driver of a gas-powered car).

The original 88 charging points in the pilot are occupied by an EV more than 70 percent of the time and are delivering energy more than 85 percent of the time they are occupied, according to Con Edison.

But 56.7 percent of New York City households don’t have access to a vehicle at all, according to 2024 census data. And EVs only account for 8.3 percent of new vehicle registrations in the city, DOT said.

Still, advocates are not arguing against charging infrastructure for EVs, but merely where to put it.

“The city should explore publicly accessible, off-street EV charging that utilizes existing car infrastructure like garages and gas stations without hindering future efforts to reclaim public space for people,” Sutherland said.

DOT says it will add 92 fast charging points and 180 Level 2 points at places like city-owned municipal lots and garages, with construction underway or finished. 

Council Majority Leader Shaun Abreu (D-Manhattan), who chairs the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, defended the 600 new charging posts as “being creative with our city’s curb space,” saying it targets neighborhoods with the greatest need. 

Gordon hopes to begin installations in the first quarter of 2027. The department is taking public comment on proposed locations. (Click here to provide feedback by Sept. 30.)

• Americans love driving. So why is it that they also love European cities where people don’t have to drive? (Vox; paywall) It might have something to do with all these cool spaces European architects have reclaimed from cars (The Guardian).
• In Guadalajara, by contrast, it takes four hours to get anywhere.
• Then you have Doug Ford’s efforts to tear up Toronto bike lanes (City News).
• Amtrak is having its moment in the sun, but Congress doesn’t seem very cooperative. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Deficit spending is OK for highways but not for any other modes of transportation. (Bipartisan Policy Center)
• Data centers are a transportation issue, too. (Next City)
• Tacoma is activating new speed cameras. (KOMO)
• Nashville is planning new safety measures on two dangerous roads. (Fox 17)
• A Miami activist is using social media to push for better sidewalks. (Axios)
• The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority received an $80 million federal grant to upgrade three trolley stations. (Philly Voice)
• Raleigh churches are exploring ways to use their mostly unused parking lots for more housing. (WUNC)
• Cue another Trump administration investigation: A man was stabbed on Seattle light rail. (KOMO)
• A Rhode Island town is learning about road diets. (Providence Journal)

Corporate sponsors, a big cast of kids and the war on “woke” all appear in Secretary Sean Duffy’s “Great American Road Trip” reality show. But one important thing goes unmentioned as he and his family make their way across the country — the transportation projects his U.S. DOT has defunded since President Trump returned to the White House last year.

The six-episode series, which premiered on YouTube last week, follows Duffy, his wife (and Fox News personality) Rachel Campos-Duffy as they drive from city to city and state to state. Their nine children come along, though not all at once; even an eight-seat SUV couldn’t fit the whole family, so kids are rotated in and out of the trip. Each episode is packed with confessionals and unscripted family moments, and very little discussion of transportation.

That may be for the best, since every location Duffy visits has been the victim of his war on bike lanes, sidewalks, mass transit and any project that does not adhere to the current administration’s policies on diversity, gender identity and climate.

The Department of Transportation announced last May that it would review all grants made during former President Joe Biden, and proceeded to cut as many as it could. By September, U.S. DOT had canceled at least $77 million worth of federal investments in location infrastructure.

Here’s a rundown of some of those defunded projects, which Duffy does not mention once.

Philadelphia

Duffy has sparred with Philadelphia officials multiple times since stepping into his role last year, mostly around a series of fires onboard SEPTA, the city’s regional transit agency. On Oct. 1, 2025, U.S. DOT ordered SEPTA to inspect and repair its entire Silverliner IV train fleet before returning the cars to service.

“If changes are not made immediately, it is only a matter of time before SEPTA’s crumbling commuter rail system erupts in flames and kills someone,” Duffy said in a letter last year to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Shapiro pushed back, calling on Duffy to convince Pennsylvania’s Republican-led legislature to approve $167 million in funds for SEPTA repairs. (Duffy declined.)

Recommended Rural and Disabled Pennsylvanians Fighting For Transit As Keystone State Budget Nears Late Deal Ren Zaro Fitzgerald July 6, 2026

The transportation secretary finally announced a $13 million grant for the agency last month — ten months after the initial ask for help. That grant covers less than eight percent of the amount that Shapiro says is needed.

SEPTA’s damaged fleet was the oldest in the nation of its kind. Facing a $10 billion deficit to its maintenance fund, and no substantive federal support in sight, the agency has been forced to defer dozens of infrastructure projects.

Boston

The Duffy family spent their Boston trip far more focused on Harvard University’s liberal politics than the millions of dollars their dad withdrew from Beantown safety projects.

Last September, Duffy’s DOT cancelled $20 million that would have improved three major streets in Roxbury, a neighborhood of Boston. The project included electric car charging stations, which U.S. DOT said went against its “traditional forms of energy and natural resources” in its cancelation notice last year.

“The city won these competitive federal grants to replace sidewalks, improve lighting, upgrade bus stops and plant trees on neighborhood streets,” a city spokesperson told StreetsblogMASS, which covered the funding rescission.

Recommended Breaking: US DOT Pulls Grants For Projects That Aren’t Focused on Cars Kea Wilson September 16, 2025

U.S. DOT also cancelled a smaller $2 million grant for Mattapan Square, just five miles south of Roxbury.

The majority-Black neighborhood was part of the agency’s Reconnecting Communities Pilot, a program to increase access in areas historically segregated by road and rail infrastructure. But because the street redesign would reconfigure some car lanes for other uses, Duffy’s cancelation notice accused it of being “hostile to motor vehicles” and lacking national significance.

Montana

The Duffys’ visit to the Mountain West is a heartwarming family ski trip … straight through areas where he’s frozen several key street safety initiatives.

The Transportation Secretary’s attack on “woke” grants targeted a planned upgrade to Highway 200, which runs through East Missoula, Montana.

“All of our years of planning, we’re now gonna see dirt move. We’re gonna see some construction. And now we’re back to where we were almost a decade ago where nothing’s happening,” East Missoula Community Council member Lisa Thomas said in a July 2025 interview with 8 KPAX, a local news station, after Duffy cut the $24 million grant.

Planned upgrades to the roadway included new bike lanes, bus stops and sidewalks, additional street lighting, a new roundabout and an improved grade-separated railroad crossing. The changes were funded through the same Reconnecting Communities grant as Boston’s disendowed Mattapan Square project.

The canceled grant had unlocked an additional $6 million in state and local funds, which may now be in jeopardy as well.

“We’re almost back to square one,” Thomas told 8 KPAX.

Charleston, South Carolina

In a rare acknowledgement of the kind of transportation infrastructure projects he oversees, the fourth episode of The Great American Road Trip takes Duffy’s family to Charleston, South Carolina for a private tour of Boeing’s local manufacturing facility, showing off the airplane company’s high-tech 787 Dreamliner fleet. (The company’s cameo isn’t particularly surprising; it is a top sponsor of the show.)

Charlotte’s push to build out its mass transit system, though, doesn’t get any airtime at all.

The planned 21-mile “Lowcountry Rapid Transit” bus network would run from Northern Charleston to downtown on a network of dedicated transit lanes. Lined with high-end bus “stations” and priority at stop lights, the system would help a region growing at three times the national average. The federal government hasn’t shown much enthusiasm.

The project is due to receive $374 million from the Department of Transportation through the Capital Investment Grants program, but Duffy hasn’t approved a single new funding agreement for the program since his appointment as Transportation Secretary.

The Department of Transportation’s contribution is expected to cover nearly 60 percent of the project’s total cost — threatening its implementation if Duffy refuses to move the money by January.

A screenshot from The Great American Road Trip lists Boeing, Chevron and Toyota as top sponsors.

“We are concerned by the actions the Department has taken to withhold these funds and delay implementation of critical infrastructure projects across the country,” a group of Democrat Members of Congress wrote in a March 2025 letter to Duffy. U.S. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), one of the letter’s authors, represents a majority of Lowcountry Rapid Transit’s service area.

Texas

The road trip’s penultimate stop left the Duffys loving Texas … but not enough to fund its trains.

Last spring, Secretary Duffy terminated Amtrak’s nearly $64 million grant to build a high-speed passenger rail line between Dallas and Houston.

The project, which is estimated to cost more than $40 billion total, could carry passengers between the two cities in under 90 minutes, proponents say. An estimated 50,000 Texans travel along the corridor every week, signaling major demand for a high-capacity and convenient option. Without federal support, funding the line is more out-of-reach than ever.

“We were a little surprised … I don’t think we were shocked,” said Peter LeCody, the President of Texas Rail Advocates. The organization supports high speed rail in the state through public and private sector coordination, according to its website.

A longstanding vision for high speed rail in Texas is jeopardized by Trump and Duffy’s Department of Transportation.

Now, the public-private partnership may rely entirely on private funding to stay afloat, according to LeCody. The switch could lead to a much faster project timeline, but it needs to close its massive deficit first.

Even with federal support, the project was primarily funded through Texas-based private investors. Duffy nonetheless called it yet another form of government “waste” to be axed by the Trump administration.

Recommended Is Private Capital Up to a Texas-Sized High Speed Rail Challenge Now That the Feds Have Pulled Out? Jim Mathews April 16, 2025

“Underwriting this project is a waste of taxpayer funds and a distraction from Amtrak’s core mission of improving its existing subpar services,” the transportation secretary said in a statement in April 2025. “If the private sector believes this project is feasible, they should carry the pre-construction work forward, rather than relying on Amtrak and the American taxpayer to bail them out.”

It’s an ironic move for a president who named the Texas High Speed Rail project a top priority in 2017, and whose first administration pitched the initial public-private funding model.

Irony doesn’t lay track or build trains, though, and supporters are searching for a backup.

Arizona

The corporate-backed tour wouldn’t be complete without a trip to Arizona, where driverless cars dominate the public road. In the final episode of The Great American Road Trip, several members of the Duffy family take a Waymo for an autonomous test drive. Waymo shares a parent company with Google, which sponsored the show. Still, the reviews were mixed.

“It’s weird … I did not like that,” said Evita Duffy, the secretary’s 26-year-old daughter.

The older Duffy kids were less-than-calm riding in a Waymo driverless car around Phoenix.

The family also met with Suzanne Philion, a representative for Waymo, who touted the company’s better-than-humans safety record. For the first time in the series, Secretary Duffy acknowledged the nearly 40,000 lives lost to traffic violence every year in the US.

“This will be the first time we actually have a huge impact on saving lives on American roads,” he said. It’s a bold statement from the man who has taken nearly $2 billion from lifesaving street improvement projects across the nation.

Recommended Driverless Cars Could Save Tens of Thousands of Lives. But We Must Treat Them Like Aviation — Not Like Cars Marco Conner June 18, 2026

Even Duffy, who quietly removed bike lanes, road diets and speed cameras from the Department of Transportation’s list of street safety measures this year, won’t deny the epidemic of car-induced problems in the US. Yet the only solutions he’s accepted don’t cost his department a penny — and do enrich a private auto interest.

“To love America is to see America,” Duffy says in the kickoff for his reality show. To love America, as it turns out, is also to block any attempt at making it better.

If you’ve been a longtime Streetsblog reader, you may or may not have noticed that I’ve been logging about 5-7 bylines every week for this site since I first started in January of 2020. And you also may or may not have noticed that in June, my name pretty abruptly stopped showing up here. That’s because I took a leave of absence following the death of my father.  

My dad was on a very short list of my favorite humans in the world and the most important people in my life, so I won’t attempt to eulogize him here; what he meant to me goes far beyond what could fit within the mission frame of this website.

But because I count many people who read my work as friends who care about me, I want to share a little bit about where I’ve been, and how the experience of becoming his caregiver has impacted my work. 

Recommended Why the New Mobility Revolution Leaves Seniors Behind Kea Wilson March 1, 2021

Over the course of my career, I’ve written countless articles about disability and mobility, as well as the “silver tsunami” of Baby Boomers who are poised to lose their ability to drive in communities where driving is not optional. I have memorized statistics about the third of U.S. households who can’t or don’t use cars, and the rising share of older Americans with mobility challenges who rank among their number. 

None of that prepared me for what happened to my dad. 

In September of last year my father went, in a matter of days, from being a seemingly healthy, active 73-year-old who had recently driven himself more than 500 miles for a multi-day canoe trip, to a stage IV cancer patient with metastases in his bones. Suddenly, dad was relying on a steady diet of sedating painkillers just to make it through the day; chemo soon stole what was left of his energy, and left him falling asleep mid-sentence at the kitchen table.

Needless to say, getting behind the wheel was suddenly and totally out of the question, and the SUV in his garage became an expensive stone around his neck. 

None of my carefully researched articles about increased road testing for seniors or the need for more walkable multi-generational neighborhoods had equipped me with the tools I needed to navigate this. It completely upended my dad’s life, my life, and the lives of my entire family.

It also taught me that it is not enough for transportation reformers to focus solely on projects like bus lanes and infill development. That might help car-dependent families like mine have more mobility options in a few years, or even decades; it would do nothing to help them tomorrow.

Recommended Report: A Third of Americans Can’t Rely On Cars — And 16 Million Have No Access At All Kea Wilson October 2, 2025

That’s doubly true of seniors in ultra-car dependent areas, which unfortunately included my father. 

Recently widowed following the death of my stepmother just a year before, cancer had left my dad functionally unable to leave the condominium in a planned community in rural Ohio that had been his home for 25 years, at least without someone to drive him. That’s because that “planned community” had been deliberately built without sidewalks, any form of fixed-route transit or even basic streetlights on most roads. There was a grocery store next door; you still had to drive to reach it, or walk on a 45 mile per hour arterial. 

The condo complex also backed up to an interstate, which you could hear roaring every time you cracked the windows. Despite the many articles I sent him about PM 2.5 exposure and its links to adverse health conditions — including the type of cancer he eventually developed — Dad still considered that highway an amenity. It allowed him and my stepmother to live deep in the horse country they both loved, where she worked, and he volunteered, at an equestrian therapy center for people with disabilities nearby. 

I think for many transportation reform advocates, it’s easy to write off people who choose car-dependent neighborhoods as uninformed, in dire need of deprogramming from the cult of “car-brain”, or even as victims of the dwindling supply and surging demand for houses along transit corridors. My father’s experience with cancer reminded me that while that can be true, it is also not that simple. 

My dad knew the many ways that his car dependent neighborhood did not serve him, because he read everything I wrote. He was not stubborn or stupid; he was thinking of downsizing before he got his diagnosis. But he loved his home despite all the driving it forced him to do; he was not quite ready to leave the place he’d shared with a wife he was still grieving. By the time he thought he might be ready, he found out he was dying.

As advocates, we can talk all we want about how “housing policy” is intertwined with transportation policy, and why it would be better if more people had the option of living in places without cars. But that is something very different than talking about our attachment to home, which can be among the powerful, emotional and irrational bonds in our lives.

We cannot argue away that love with statistics and policy briefs, even when the person in the car-dependent rural house knows full well that their home does not meet their needs.  

Recommended Car Dependency Helped Build the Modern Nursing Home Landscape. During COVID-19, It’s Killing our Seniors. Kea Wilson April 30, 2020

So yes: we tried to keep my dad in his home, despite the fact that he could not safely leave it without someone to drive him.

My sister and I lived multiple states away, but for months, we traded off flying hundreds of miles to stay with him, tag-teaming in and out of our new role as volunteer chauffeurs. Needless to say, we also served as volunteer nurses, and housekeepers and cooks, and about a million other roles; if this were a different type of website, I could write a whole other essay about how the medical system over-relies on the unpaid labor of families, and particularly daughters. 

I tried to keep up with my work at Streetsblog during this period. I wrote articles in the middle of the night, or in short bursts between administering meds, checking vitals, running to the pharmacy, juggling calls to insurance and dozens of specialists, and the zillion other tiny acts of caregiving that often got me up at 4 am and often stretched my days past midnight. (If you’re a troll who harassed me on the internet during this period for being an “ableist” because I want more cities to have bike lanes: well, I hope you feel bad now!) 

Getting my dad to the doctor, though, proved to be a uniquely difficult burden — and often, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Recommended Why We Can’t Afford to Ignore the Needs of Non-Drivers With Disabilities Kea Wilson August 30, 2021

From my reporting, I knew about the challenges people with disabilities face finding a ride, at least in the abstract. I knew that home health aides and the deeply underfunded paratransit system in Dad’s neighborhood weren’t a panacea, not least because both required the kind of advance notice that mapped poorly onto the dynamic schedule of a cancer patient with constantly emerging medical needs.

I also knew that Uber and taxi drivers wouldn’t help him down the stairs from his front door — if those drivers didn’t cancel the ride once they saw how far out he lived, which many of them did. 

Later, when my dad finally decided to move into an assisted living in my city, I would learn that even paying out the nose for the “all inclusive” option wouldn’t solve our transportation puzzle, either. Retirement communities with hundreds of residents all seemed to have just a single driver on staff; outgoing rides required at least 72 hours’ notice to book, and the staff couldn’t just wait around to bring a resident home.

That might be fine for retirees with low vision who don’t mind reading in a lobby for an hour after seeing their general practitioner; it was brutal for a guy with chemo fatigue who needed hours of recovery every time he left his room. 

Recommended Interview: Tammy Duckworth Insists Every U.S. Transit Station Must Be Accessible Kea Wilson May 20, 2021

The worst part, though, was the sheer mental burden of filling the gaps in a very sick person’s transportation schedule, and how that burden compounded the challenges of caregiving.  

From his very first treatment, my dad simply did not have the energy to call a dozen friends and family to see who could take him to the doctor. Even when I made those calls for him, most people we tried couldn’t help; they were too busy with their own punishing commutes across a region that functionally required everyone to drive long distances for most trips.

When I asked the social worker about other transportation resources, they kicked me to a byzantine app-based “platform” that connected patients with volunteer drivers who often weren’t available, either. The idea of making my terminally ill, not-particularly tech-savvy, Baby Boomer father navigate that app while on opioids when his millennial daughter could barely manage it was enough to break my brain. 

So a lot of days, I cancelled all my interviews and drove Dad myself. Some days, we put nearly a hundred miles on his SUV, between multiple appointments on far-flung medical campuses, over whose scheduling and locations we were offered zero say. I learned that this is just how doctor’s appointments work when you are very sick in a car dependent place: you go where the MRI queue can fit you in tomorrow, even if it’s on the other side of town, and your family has to figure out how to get you there. 

Recommended What We Can Learn From the 30 Percent of Americans Who Can’t Drive Streetsblog May 21, 2024

Here’s the thing: I am deeply aware that a bike lane would not have made any of this better.  

My dad could barely walk in the last months of his life, never mind ride; moreover, even the best bus driver in the world wouldn’t have accompanied him to and from his stop on days when he was struggling. And before any jerks on the internet swarm my inbox to slam me for the “hypocrisy” of relying on a car to get my dying father to the oncologist: please, just stop, because I am exhausted.

Nothing about the movement to end mass, forced, car dependence in our cities has ever been incompatible with the movement to support truly car-dependent people, which many of us will become as our bodies age or become ill. There was a brief period, before his illness progressed, where my father might have been able to maintain his independence with better paratransit near his home; the fact that this period ended so quickly does not mean that he did not deserve that chance.

And I’d even argue that mass, forced car dependence did make my dad’s life worse, even though he relied heavily on cars in his last months.

I cannot tell you how many times I sat with him in gridlocked traffic on the way to urgent care, desperate to get him care for some symptom that was not quite bad enough for an ambulance, and wondering how many of the able-bodied drivers that choked the road around us could have taken the train. Every time I walked through a hospital parking garage, I wondered if getting him care would have been less of a punishing ordeal if all that space had been used to build offices for his umpteen far-flung specialists instead. 

But there’s also an uncomfortable truth that I had not considered deeply before my dad got sick: that sometimes, when we are very ill, no transportation option really serves us anymore. And that includes cars.

Sometimes, the bike ride to the corner store, the walk to the train station, or even the journey from the living room to the attached garage feels like too much. We become housebound, and then we become bed-bound; our bodies change in ways we never expected. The best we can hope for as this failure progresses is a shorter trip to the doctor, or a visit from a friend that will save us from leaving the house at all.

I wish that more transportation reformers and governments alike would incorporate policies that support people who can’t move much at all into their mobility advocacy, like better home health care access, sustainable delivery options, and massive reform to the caregiving industry, including transportation and strong wages for those desperately-needed workers. It would save so much pain if we did. 

Recommended ‘World Day of Remembrance’: Connecting Grief to Activism Dan Langenkamp November 17, 2023

In the very end, I am grateful my father was spared pain by the amazing staff of a hospice house, who took wonderful care of him in his last days. I am equally grateful that my sister and I could be by his side when he passed, and that we could push his hospital bed outdoors to spend his final moments in the garden at sunset.

As a reporter, I have heard countless stories from people who have lost their loved ones to car crashes, including extremely graphic details about what happened to their bodies in their final moments. I do not share all of those details in my writing, but they do haunt me. l do not take for granted for a moment that my father died in peace rather than agony, in my arms rather than on the side of the road. Every single person we lose to traffic violence deserved the same.

In the end, I think the greatest lesson from this time that I will carry into my work is this: there is enough pain in the world already, even before we build a transportation system that ends so many lives too early, and makes so many others harder than they need to be. I still believe that a world with less pain is possible. My dad would want me to keep working to make it real.  

• President Trump may inadvertently gotten Americans out of the cars by starting a war with Iran. Gas prices have risen by $100 billion, costing motorists an average of almost $800 each (Jalopnik).
• Meanwhile, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted that the best way to drive down gas prices right now is to drive less (Business Insider). But without the transit and bike lanes the administration is defunding, how else are people supposed to get where they need to go?
• The places that will be hurt the most by the Trump administration’s transit cuts are the major cities that provide half the country’s economic output, Howard Chernick writes.
• Even a guy who doesn’t know how to ride a bike things deriding bike lanes as “DEI” is dumb. (The Guardian)
• Members have been arrested, but a Los Angeles group that paints crosswalks where the city won’t is still at it. (NBC Los Angeles)
• San Francisco residents are arguing over whether it’s OK that cyclists get stuck in streetcar tracks and run over by cars. (Standard)
• Baltimore has a plan to reconnect neighborhoods separated by a “highway to nowhere.” (WMAR)
• Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms says she’ll fund Georgia transit for the first time if elected governor. (11Alive)
• The Minnesota Star-Tribune published a guest column in favor of finding the $224 million to continue the Blue Line project.
• The City of Omaha settled with the owner of a building that partially collapsed during streetcar construction. (Nebraska Public Media)
• An SUV driver hit and killed a man in a wheelchair on a stretch of road in Fort Wayne, Indiana that has no sidewalks. (WPTA)
• Common Edge details the mistakes made during Urban Renewal in New Haven — a common tale in many American cities.
• Runners used to be able to beat Seattle’s “Late 8” bus, but not since it got its own bus lane. (The Urbanist)
• The “cab car” revolutionized rail travel by allowing trains to easily reverse directions at the end of a track. (The Autopian)