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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)

Forget Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee; it’s time for Urbanists on Bakfiets Talking Cities.

We love this new YouTube series from Urban Mobility Explained and host Lior Steinberg, which is, well, exactly what it sounds like: short interviews-on-wheels with some of the most interesting people in the movement to make cities better … with the subject riding shotgun in the bucket of an Urban Arrow cargo bike.

The first episode doubles as a rolling travelogue through Ljubljana, Slovenia, and it features none other than one of the godfathers of tactical urbanism, Mike Lydon — and they even ride by a temporary “school street” that his famous methodology may have influenced. Come for the e-bike and vacation envy, stay for the fascinating insights into how inexpensive, reversible design interventions can help transform your streets.

Watch this video on YouTube here.

• A review of more than 100 studies found that increasing access to bicycles, particularly e-bikes, is the best way to get people to ride one. “Access” can mean a lot of things, though, from promoting safe biking routes to cash to buy a bike. Addressing these practical concerns is more effective than education or PR campaigns. (Momentum)
• Subway construction in English-speaking countries is even more expensive than previously thought, compared to the rest of the world. (The Transit Brief)
• Here’s how to turn an aging strip mall into a walkable neighborhood. (Building Better Places)
• The only reason Sean Duffy is secretary of transportation is that Donald Trump had already given out all the other jobs in his administration. (Jalopnik)
• If you’re a rising star athlete like the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Oneil Cruz, you can kill three people with your car and hire a fixer to make it go away. (Propublica)
• San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Miami, Oakland, Philadelphia, Seattle and Long Beach have the highest walk scores in the U.S. (Quartz)
• Why is it so hard to build transit in Austin but so easy to widen a freeway? (Planetizen)
• A business community that favors suburban sprawl is keeping Charlotte from realizing its full potential. (Ledger)
• Upstate New York cities like Buffalo, Albany, Rochester and Syracuse are investing in better bike infrastructure. (Focus)
• An Amazon-backed driverless car company called Zoox is challenging Waymo’s supremacy in San Francisco. (New York Times)
• Minneapolis is considering a law requiring human drivers in autonomous vehicles. (Minnesota Public Radio)
• Michigan is testing a road usage charge to fund transportation. (WILX)
• Phoenix has installed 200 miles of “cool pavement” that reduces the urban heat island effect. (Smart Cities World)
• Seattle will install speed cameras on four high-risk corridors. (Capitol Hill Seattle Blog)
• Pittsburgh bikeshare POGOH is searching for a new sponsor. (WESA)
• The mayor of Mobile is obsessed with streetcars. (AL.com)
• Time Out ranked the 20 best cities for biking in the world.
• Japan cut speed limits in half on narrow city streets, from 60 kilometers per hour, or 37 mph, to 30 kph. (The Guardian)

A version of this article originally appeared on Urbanism Speakeasy and is republished with permission.

Corporate media outlets have found a new click-bait genre: the terrifying e-bike. A teenager on a sidewalk or a delivery rider weaving through a crosswalk on a machine that blasts through city streets like a rocket. Social media warriors and neighborhood busybodies are all in a tizzy.

In the US, the standard e-bike is a pedal-assist bicycle that tops out around 20 mph. These have become wildly popular because they have just enough juice to flatten hills and make it easier to carry heavy bags (or kids) without breaking a sweat.

A large share of the panic is a labeling problem. The machines doing the most alarming things on sidewalks and in intersections are electric motorcycles. Without moving your feet, you can soar up to 60 mph.

Even though there is a percentage of the population doing dumb things on e-motos, the traffic safety moment is wasted if we let the fearmongers frame e-bikes as something that deserves immediate political intervention. Instead, we have a chance to put the hierarchy of safety controls back on the table.

Learn how to rank hazards if you really want to prevent the most injuries

The hierarchy of safety controls is a ranked list of ways to deal with a hazard. You start at the top and only move down when a stronger option is not available. The most effective are at the top, and the least effective at the bottom. (Since humans are feeling creatures who sometimes think, it’s not surprising that the least effective safety treatments are the ones that get the most attention.)

• Elimination. Get rid of the hazard. The dangerous thing is no longer there, so it can’t hurt anyone. Unplug and remove a machine, stop using a toxic chemical, etc.
• Substitution. Change the source of harm. Use a safer chemical instead of a toxic one, use a lower-voltage tool, replace a process that can crush a hand with one that can’t, etc.
• Engineering controls. Leave the hazard in place, but build something that keeps people away from it or limits how bad contact can be. Guards, ventilation, barriers, etc.
• Administrative controls. Change how people work. Training, procedures, warning signs, schedules that limit exposure, “only trained staff may enter,” checklists. These help, but they also fail when someone is rushed, tired, untrained, or unsupervised.
• PPE (personal protective equipment). Put protection on the person who is still exposed. Gloves, goggles, helmets, respirators, earplugs. This is last because it does not remove the hazard and does not separate people from it. It only reduces harm if the gear is the right kind, worn correctly, and still working when something goes wrong.

The further down the pyramid you go, the more you’re asking of people when the system itself should have done more.

The public conversation about e-bikes and e-motos lives almost entirely at the bottom two rungs. Meanwhile, the hazard that actually fills trauma centers and morgues is motor vehicle crashes.

Recommended What If Drivers Had to Follow Scooter Laws? Kea Wilson August 31, 2021

In 2023, the United States recorded about 6.14 million police-reported traffic crashes. Of those, 71.7 percent were property-damage-only, 27.6 percent involved injury, and 0.6 percent were fatal. That same year, 40,901 people were killed and an estimated 2.44 million were injured. The CDC separately counted about 2.8 million ER visits for car crash injuries.

Medical expenses from car crashes cost a whopping $31 billion in 2019. CDC put the 2023 cost of crash deaths alone at more than $457 billion, counting medical care and the value of lives lost. The public pays a share of that bill whether or not it wants to. Taxpayers subsidize about 9% of all economic crash costs.

Cars are associated with roughly 40,000 deaths and 2.4 to 2.8 million injured or ER-treated people every year. E-bike deaths were 91 in 2023 and 97 in 2024, with a total of 310 from 2017 through 2024. Rising e-bike injuries are real. That’s because, thankfully, so many more people are now using e-bikes for many of the short trips that used to be car trips.

If we took the top of the pyramid seriously, we would direct policy energy and advocacy resources at the hazard that has such a high share of the blame for traffic violence.

Recommended Why ‘Safe Systems’ Are Not Enough to End Road Violence Kea Wilson February 26, 2024

None of this requires pretending e-motos are harmless. High-power machines on sidewalks are a genuine nuisance and, in some cities, a genuine injury problem. What is not worth doing is treating every battery-assisted bicycle like it’s anywhere near the threat of motor vehicles.

Should we focus at all on e-bikes? Sure. On the topic of traffic safety, I propose 0.2% of our attention focus on e-bikes and 99.8% of our attention focus on cars. That aligns nicely with the real world situation we’re currently faced with.

This week, we’re joined by Sofia Navas and James Nix of the NGO Transport & Environment to talk about their recent report, “Ever Bigger? Car Size at a Crossroads.” Why, why why are car sizes continuing to grow? It’s so clear that safety is directly linked to vehicle size — not to mention the toll big cars take on traffic and public space.

They literally bloat our lives, but you can find out more with the normal Talking Headways lineup:

• Read an excerpt of our exhilarating conversation below.
• Read the entire text (with some transcription typos) here.
• Put on some headphones and click “play” in the player below:

Here’s the excerpt:

Jeff Wood: We talk about “geometry” all the time when it comes to the space in cities — like how much space vehicles take up, how much space people as individuals, bikes take up, especially in terms of street design. But the fact that you guys came up with the numbers that show that larger cars mean less parking. Yes, we all want to move that direction where cities have less parking, but we don’t want it to be because the cars get bigger because that means there’s less space for every other use that you would want to have on a street, including bike lanes, public space, whatever else it might be.

Sofia Navas: Yeah, we basically looked at the parking situation in Berlin as one example city. Right now, the width, the bonnet [hood] height and length has been increasing over the past 25 years at a steady rate across Europe.

And so we extrapolated this trend to 2040 and asked what happens with our public space in the scenario where we just continue with this linear trend in all of these dimensions? We found that compared to the parking situation today, European cities are set to lose 8.5 to 14 percent of car parking space.

City planners are constantly fighting if they want to, as Paris, make a city more livable with planting more greenery or making just more space for pedestrians and the people that live in the city. It’s always a huge fight.

But then if we look at the loss of public space that we’re currently seeing, the car fleet is quietly eating our public space away. Decisions about our public space are not being made at City Hall, but in car showrooms around the world. We believe should stop this by going back to dimensions that we call reasonable, and this is our right-sizing scenario which we advocate for.

James Nix: It’s not really discussed, but this is probably one of the greatest privatizations of public space that we’ve ever seen. And just because it’s incremental, that doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential.

Each new year is 1.2 centimeters longer than the previous year. And again, the average width also increasing, and that’s increasing by half a centimeter, so each new year of sales is on average half a centimeter wider than the previous year of sales.

Other times, the next generation model is six or seven centimeters wider than the previous generation.

I just wanted to emphasize the privatization-of-public-space point because we would never allow, you know, millions of football pitches that we never talk about.

Waymo’s rollout of driverless taxis in Nevada must be halted because the company has violated state law by not lining up alternatives for disabled passengers, an emergency petition to state authorities claims.

Kelsey Maurine Brickl, who uses a powered wheelchair, filed her appeal in August, just days after the Nevada Transportation Agency permitted the autonomous taxi company to deploy 1,000 driverless vehicles in the Las Vegas area.

Kelsey Maurine Brickl

“We can’t [allow] this shiny new piece of convenient tech … to chip away at the rights of disabled people,” said Brickl, who initially founded Ghostlight Access to promote disability rights in theater. She is also a stockholder in Waymo’s parent company Google.

Nevada law requires driverless car companies to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles for passengers upon request, but few companies have such capacity, so most merely contract with human-driven taxi companies, such as Uber and Lyft, to fulfill trip requests.

But for now, Waymo has no such contract in Nevada, likely because it has not had time to finalize such an arrangements, which one source told Streetsblog, is complicated. For now, all that Waymo would say on the record is that it intends to follow state law to provide wheelchair-accessible trips.

“We will comply with applicable Nevada accessibility requirements,” said Ethan Teicher, a spokesperson for Waymo. “We are committed to working with manufacturers, researchers, and the accessibility community toward a future where our fully autonomous vehicles can accommodate the diverse needs of all riders.”

Waymo is far from the only company that has been accused of failing disabled riders. Two other companies — Tesla and Uber’s Aviari — were permitted for driverless passenger service in Nevada in August, but it is unclear if either is providing wheelchair-accessible rides.

Recommended Report: Waymo Surpasses The Way-Too-Low Human Driver Safety Bar Ren Zaro Fitzgerald July 24, 2026

Brickl says that she directed her petition at Waymo because of Tesla’s recent announcement that it is developing compliant vehicles, and Uber’s relatively small share of the driverless car market. She says she has contacted Tesla for a timeline on the release of its new vehicles, but has not heard back.

Waymo is Brickl’s immediate target, but the problem of this basic civil rights violation is industry-wide, Brickl said, citing loopholes in Nevada, other states’, and federal law that allow taxi companies to provide alternative services instead of making fleets accessible. Even if providers do contract out an accessible operator, these rides can cost more and come with a longer-than-average wait, she added.

Truly equal access, in which fleets are accessible by default, is several years away at minimum. Currently, no cars meet Waymo’s specifications and are wheelchair accessible. Other brands face similar challenges, particularly as companies switch to fully electric vehicles, whose bulky, floor-stored batteries interfere with necessary loading ramps. For its Zoox fleet, Amazon opted to manufacture a bespoke car model – but it cannot accommodate wheelchairs.

The proliferation of driverless cars has threatened more-accessible forms of transportation. Multiple independent studies have confirmed that taxi companies, such as Waymo and Uber, are replacing sustainable modes in about half of trips. And many of those trips would have been on public transit, which is accessible. Those lost public transit trips mean that fare revenue is being shifted away from cash-strapped agencies, which will be less able to provide fully accessible service (not to mention that the added congestion of more cars on the road slows down the service).

“[Driverless cars are] taking something away, potentially damaging something that’s already there,” Brickl said.

The Nevada Transportation Authority claimed in an email to Streetsblog that it is not required to respond to petitions after a decision is made, but Nevada state law clearly allows petitions for a reversal within 15 days of decision — in this case, a clock that began ticking on Aug. 20. Brickl filed on Aug. 26, well within the appeal window. The Authority did not clarify why it considers itself exempt from state law.

In Brickl’s view, Waymo must be compelled to follow the law, or see its expansion put on hold.

“Disabled people already have civil rights, we just need them enforced,” she said. “If the rollout of Waymo is going to take those existing civil rights away, then it needs to be halted.”

I am a 12-year-old cyclist in New York City. I’m constantly wondering if I’ll make it to 13.

My mom and I ride all the time, but even though I’m allowed by law to ride on the sidewalk (well, maybe I am — more on that later), I ride on the same streets as she does. So every time we go anywhere on my bike, I review my hand signals, especially the ones I use to go around a car parked in a painted bike lane, and take a deep breath.

Nine times out of 10, there is a car or truck parked in a painted bike lane. Trucks are the worst because they have huge blind spots. Typically, my mom and I have a strategy discussion about going around these scofflaws, though sometimes we just pull over when we don’t feel safe. That’s not cycling. That’s walking with a bike between your legs.

Car-filled unprotected bike lanes are a problem for all cyclists, but especially for someone my age. In theory, I should just be riding on the sidewalk, as riders under 14 are allowed to do) — except that I’ve also seen rules that say that I must bike in the roadway because my wheels are 26 inches in diameter. That rule (that 12-year-olds and under can only bike on the sidewalk if their wheels are less than 26 inches) is quoted a lot in all sorts of places — summaries of bike rules, legal code — but the city Administrative code says that as a 12-year-old, I can bike on the sidewalk. So it may just depend on the cop — which then may subject the biker to police bias.

Even the cops are confused.

In any event, many kids stop biking once they graduate to an adult-sized frame. After all, the streets are a mess, and pedestrians frankly resent seeing middle-schoolers biking on the sidewalk. (As Streetsblog once reported, roads with schools are much more dangerous than roads without, so students have an especially unsafe biking experience.)

Many more middle-schoolers would bike if they had safe routes to school. And that can’t merely mean painted, car-filled bike lanes because if we want more tweens biking, we have to make the roadway safe for people who are still just learning to bike in the city. 

Of course, politicians don’t care because people like me can’t vote until we’re 18. That means that for six more years, I don’t have much of a say in the policymaking that could determine whether I get killed or seriously injured by a car driver. And it’s not just the driver’s fault — it’s the fault of a system that allows cars to dominate all the streets; menace cyclists, pedestrians, and air quality; and push kids to the curb.

Recommended



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Jesse Coburn

May 24, 2022

I once attended a “biking class” (about traffic patterns, signals, that sort of stuff), and everyone besides me was an adult. The class emphasized avoiding crashes while staying on the good side of the law — and treated illegal, crash-causing car behavior as a fact of life. Who decided that crashes are normal? Other forms of murder certainly aren’t.

Nonetheless, I’ve stuck with biking because, I suppose, I’m just a contrarian: I want to spite the cars. I want to defend the environment from today’s politicians. And biking is fun.

But it’s not so fun to navigate around wheeled boxes of death on a regular basis, thinking something along the lines of, “Am I going to die today?”

The Mamdani administration is implementing Sammy’s Law through a patchwork of short, disconnected stretches, some as short as about 100 feet.@NYC_SafeStreets is calling on the mayor to think bigger and lower speed limits across entire neighborhoods to save lives. pic.twitter.com/HZra34RRRm

— Transportation Alternatives (@TransAlt) September 8, 2026

• Cleaner air equals smarter children. That was the result of a Columbia University study that found that a reduction in tailpipe pollution, among other sources, in New York City improved toddlers’ cognitive development by 26 percent. Other studies have also shown respiratory benefits when measures like low-emissions zones are implemented. (NY Times)
• Jake Boyles provides hard proof that interstates are homogenizing the country, at least when it comes to the businesses that lie just beyond them. (Strong Towns)
• Robotaxis would be much more useful in rural areas that lack transit than in big cities. (Bloomberg CityLab; paywall)
• Human backup drivers in robotaxis might not be worth much if they lose their skills while observing most of the time. (The Conversation)
• Electrek lays out how it’s possible to replace a second car with an e-cargo bike.
• Lyft was able to convince California voters to classify rideshare drivers as independent contractors, and now CEO Logan Green wants to take Prop 22 nationwide. (Mashable)
• Chicago’s new regional transportation authority overseeing the CTA, Metra and Pace is up and running. (Eno Center for Transportation)
• How many bike-riding children have to die before Michigan stops designing roads solely for drivers? (WLNS)
• At least one Atlanta city council member is onboard with a new plan for light rail along the 22-mile Beltline. (CBS News)
• Cincinnati’s Connector streetcar has not quite lived up to early expectations, but it’s still carried 7.5 million riders in 10 years, and the numbers are trending up. (Axios)
• In addition to cutting bus routes and early morning service, Miami-Dade could start charging for the Metromover. (Miami Times)
• Japanese architects are going to great lengths to provide parking for single-family homes with limited space. (Design Boom)
• Clearly Ottawa mayoral candidate Alex Lawson hasn’t read “The High Cost of Free Parking.” (CBC)
• Montreal, too, is in danger of backsliding as Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada puts bike projects under renewed scrutiny. (Momentum)

• Plug-in hybrids emit six times the amount of greenhouse gases than official testing suggests, according to a new European Union study. The auto industry is opposed to regulations that would bring those figures into line with reality. (Transport & Environment)
• Density makes cities more productive, but traffic congestion eats up a lot of those benefits. (Brookings)
• West Coast states are leading the way in exploring new sources of transportation funding to account for more fuel-efficient vehicles and declining gas tax revenue. (Government Technology)
• House Republicans’ proposed five-year transportation funding bill could result in 25 percent cuts for Milwaukee County transit. (Urban Milwaukee)
• In response to outrage from transit advocates, the Houston Metro cut jobs and restructured debt rather than cutting rail and bus service as previously planned. (Chronicle; paywall)
• A new design for Boston’s Blue Hill Avenue keeps a controversial center bus lane while adding more parking, more trees, new sidewalks and a bike path. (WBUR)
• A Montreal study says that investing in transit brings greater economic development benefits than investing in car infrastructure. (Global News)
• A small group of Seattle property owners is out to stop a monorail project by disingenuously asking for expensive “improvements” that drive up the cost and demanding more studies. (The Stranger)
• Amtrak will suspend Virginia-to-D.C. service next month to make critical track upgrades. (Mercury)
• Fort Worth Report lists the most dangerous intersections in the city.
• Drivers killed two pedestrians in Wilmington last week, prompting renewed interest in Vision Zero. (WWAY)
• Darrell Owens delves into the drama over a bike lane in Berkeley that’s been a hot topic on Bluesky. (The Discourse Lounge)
• If you’re in Toronto and want to gawk at some celebs this week, take the King Street streetcar. It’s being rerouted effective Thursday to pass by an international film festival. (blogTO)

• A short-term continuing resolution will keep federal transportation funds flowing for the next three months while Congress considers a new five-year bill, but the CR cuts transit funding by 20 percent and passenger rail funding by 81 percent. (Mass Transit, Metro Magazine)
• The federal government continues to spend billions of dollars on highways even though the interstate system is largely complete. Angie Schmitt wonders, what if that money were spent on sidewalks instead? (Strong Towns)
• Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s proposed budget would eliminate early-morning bus service, as well as a dozen routes. (Herald)
• More than 4 million people a year would ride light rail along the Atlanta Beltline, according to a new study. But it would cost almost $5 billion, and there is currently no funding. (AJC)
• Maryland is removing bus lanes in Bethesda built during Red Line construction instead of making them permanent. (Fox 5)
• The Seattle DOT is in the process of completing 70 safety projects near schools. (KIRO)
• Despite efforts to protect fish, about 2,000 have died around Sound Transit’s new bridge over Lake Washington. (Axios)
• Pete Buttigieg talked about the Cincinnati streetcar during a recent campaign stop to support Ohio Democratic candidates. (Enquirer; paywall)
• San Antonio installed three new flashing beacons and other pedestrian safety improvements on Pleasanton Road. (Kens)
• A Chicago developer is proposing a new White Sox stadium and a hospital at the site of an Amtrak rail yard. (Trains)
• Auckland is considering congestion pricing. (The Conversation)
• A company in Mexico is producing the opposite of gargantuan American pickups — a tiny electric truck that can haul almost 1,500 pounds and costs just $8,400. (Autoblog)

• Intercity buses are back: Since Flix acquired Greyhound five years ago, the company has upgraded its fleet, improved on-time performance and added 37 new lines. Cities are also investing in bus terminals after many shut down. That’s more important than ever in an age of high gas prices and the demise of discount airlines. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Stephanie Nakleh gives you all the ammunition you need to argue about induced demand on the internet. (We Can Have Nice Things)
• Even People picked up on the ridiculous “DEI bike lanes” story.
• Public transportation is one of the few places where people from different backgrounds still mix. (Northeastern Global News)
• Chill out, Bellevue residents, Sound Transit’s Crosslake light rail connection didn’t bring in criminals. (Seattle Times)
• Homeless individuals in Seattle make up 27% of the people killed by drivers, even though they’re just 1.2% of the population. What is the city doing to address that discrepancy? (KIRO)
• Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s bus redesign is threatened by a looming budget deficit in 2028, unless the Pennsylvania government comes up with a long-term funding solution (Public Source). In Philadelphia, SEPTA is facing similar uncertainty despite better-than-expected revenue (Inquirer).
• Los Angeles, which promised a car-free 2028 Summer Olympics, is reserving 369 miles of roadway specifically for athletes, coaches and officials. (CBS)
• Two L.A. cemeteries spent $500,000 to lobby California lawmakers in Sacramento to halt an L.A. bike lane project. (L.A. Times)
• Charlotte sales tax growth is flat, endangering future transit projects. (WFAE)
• The Houston Metro is proposing as-yet-unspecified service hour cuts to deal with a budget shortfall. (Chronicle)
• Denver’s Regional Transportation District launched a new strategic initiative called Building a Better RTD. (Mass Transit)
• Lexington, Kentucky started fining drivers who park in bike lanes. (Herald-Leader)
• New Delhi built a world-class subway system larger than New York City’s for less than the cost of one NYC subway line. (NY Times)
• The Chinese city of Chongqing opened a farmers market next to a subway station. (China Daily)

This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by Joshua Schank to talk about his book, “New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector.” In a broad-ranging discussion about urban dysfunction, Schank talks about the inner workings of LA Metro, the benefits of openness and transparency, and, of course, the importance of strategic planning.

Of course, no one gets away easy; we also share frustrations about meetings, transit board structures, and agency fiefdoms.

You know the drill. On Talking Headways you can:

• Read an excerpt of our exhilarating conversation below.
• You can read the entire text (with some transcription typos) here.
• Our you could do the right thing and put on some headphones and click “play” in the player below:

Here’s the edited portion:

Jeff Wood: What was it like when you got to LA Metro? I read the section about the “Board staff,” and I wanted to throw the book at the wall! But I also then thought, “You’re in LA, why don’t we make a ‘Parks and Rec’-type TV show about this group of folks who control, but don’t control, but do control, but don’t control the whole process of creating policy and moving things through the line at LA Metro?”

Joshua Schank: Yeah, it was quite the shock — “Board staff” definitely being one of the examples of a thing that was a big shock to me.

I’d obviously had worked around public agencies my whole life. I started my career at MTA in New York. I knew something about how agencies functioned, but I didn’t quite understand how bad it could be. I imagined in my naive mind that most people working in the agency shared the goals that I had. Like, basic things, like improving public transportation or reducing the number of trips by car — you know, the types of things that you would assume if you’re working at Metro, you care about.

But there’s a whole swath of people working in and around Metro, or any public agency, who just don’t care about those things because that’s not why they got into it.

The person running HR is unlikely to be passionate about transportation. The person running procurement is unlikely to be passionate about transportation. And then the Board staff are the most egregious example, because the Board staff is essentially political people who are now put in a position of dealing with transportation experts at this big agency.

So for those who don’t know, the “Board staff” is essentially support staff for the elected officials who run Metro, who sit on LA Metro’s board. They’re the equivalent of congressional staff (and I was a congressional staffer one time). I understand how that works. The difference is that as a congressional staffer, you get to make really important decisions behind the scenes that lead to legislative change, right, and you help inform your boss about how to vote on those decisions, what amendments to put in, et cetera.

In this case, the people are in the job themselves because the electeds have another job. The elected’s job isn’t to be on the board of Metro. The elected’s job is to be the county supervisor, be the mayor of Los Angeles, be whatever that role is, which also includes sitting on the Metro board. So that you wind up with these staff who have an outsized role and outsized influence, and that’s one thing that makes it unusual.

The second thing is that because of the Brown Act, the Board staff can serve as a proxy sometimes for responding to Metro board items, because the Brown Act says that if you’re going to have all the board together in a discussion, that you have to have it be a public meeting.

You can’t do that behind closed doors, except under a special set of circumstances. So Board staff briefings at Metro were created so that the Board staff could hear Metro items before they go to the board, and give the likely reaction of Metro board members behind closed doors. And those Board staff briefings are where a lot of policy gets made and people hear and discuss what’s going to happen. You essentially have staffers who are 25 or 30 years old, or maybe they’ve been there 40 years, but they’re political people who are reacting to transportation experts who have come up with answers to solutions.

So it becomes a very challenging situation that when I got there, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening.

Jeff Wood: I imagine that’s how it’s like at a number of agencies, and it’s all structure upon structure upon structure upon structure. I mean, you have the Brown Act, you have the requirements of the legislators, you have all this stuff that has to happen, but then it creates this convoluted way of communicating with each other, which then itself doesn’t make sense.

The structures make sense from trying to protect the public, right? But then when you put them all together and mash up, it’s a recipe that doesn’t taste good.

Joshua Schank: That’s right, and I think the fundamental issue is that elected officials serving directly on the board of a regional agency can be very problematic, and it’s problematic because they are primarily serving their constituents, and the agency is a second job.

In California, almost all the agencies are structured that way. You almost always have elected officials on the board, or sometimes in a couple of cases, they’re elected directly to the board, which I’ve heard is even worse. But if you’re an elected official serving on a board of a transit agency, everything that the transit agency does is going to be put through that hyper-political lens, and it’s gonna be much harder to have the regional perspective.

I would argue, based on my experience at Metro, that strong governance reforms are necessary in California if we’re going to have public transit agencies that are successful.

• Cities first started installing bollards after 9/11. Since then, they’ve been used to stop drivers from using their vehicles to ram into pedestrians on the sidewalk. The New York Times calls them a sign of the militarization of cities that have become just another part of urban life.
• Architecture and urban planning have a role to play in keeping people moving and healthy, rather than just telling everyone to get more exercise (Arch Daily). This has a lot to do with cars, because they take up much more space in limited public right-of-ways than people do (Princeton University Press). Plus, climate change won’t be solved by individual choices, but only by public policy and collective action, according to author Leah C. Stokes (MIT Press Reader).
• Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron has some practical tips for going car-free.
• More U.S. cities, including Seattle and St. Louis, are putting up gates at light rail stations to increase their farebox revenue. (Mass Transit)
• Richmond leaders want the state of Virginia to drop the legal limit for DUI from a 0.08 blood alcohol level to 0.05. Drinking was a factor in 37 percent of the city’s crashes. (Axios)
• The Minneapolis Blue Line is still short $224 million. (Minnesota Public Radio)
• U.S. DOT officials spent two days in Atlanta looking into transit agency MARTA’s safety and security. (AJC)
• Nashville is developing a tool to measure how new development affects traffic. (Fox 17)
• After a recent court ruling in its favor, Doug Ford’s Ontario government is already starting to rip out Toronto bike lanes. (CBC)
• A new report frames high-speed rail between Toronto and Quebec City as essential for Canada’s economic development. (The Whig)
• A German company invented a tire that’s made out of 43 percent recycled materials and allows electric vehicles to get more out of their batteries. (Auto Next)

• About three in 10 U.S. drivers think there’s nothing wrong with speeding, according to a AAA poll. The reality is, there’s plenty wrong with it, like the fact that it kills people. Nearly a third of traffic deaths involve excessive speeds. (Jalopnik)
• Miriam Pinski argues that one reason transit projects take so long and cost so much is because we ask them to do too much — beautify the neighborhood, save the environment, create jobs, etc. — when the most important thing is to create a reliable system people will choose to ride (Works in Progress). Meanwhile, Reece Martin went into even greater depth about the same topic (The Transit Brief).
• The Federal Railway Administration is loosening a lot of train safety regulations. (Trains)
• The California legislature sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a bill cutting red tape for high-speed rail. (EIN Presswire)
• Maryland’s $22 billion, six-year transportation budget includes just $100 million for Red Line planning (Daily Record). Meanwhile, an audit found that the state failed to collect more than $800 million in tolls (Maryland Matters).
• West Virginia groups asked a federal court for an injunction to stop the last phase of the Corridor H freeway project. (WDTV)
• The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy opposes Florida’s plan to use federal funds for EV chargers for flying taxis instead.
• Pittsburgh is replacing its 30-year-old light rail cars. (WTAE)
• Portland is considering offering city government employees free transit passes while Interstate 5 is closed for construction. (Willamette Week)
• Colorado has become a national leader on clean transportation, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
• Governing magazine honored Randy Clarke as one of its public officials of the year for revitalizing the D.C. Metro.
• Riders on Charlotte’s Gold Line now have to request a stop when they want to get off the light rail train. (Queen City News)
• The European Union wants member states to make the default urban speed limit 30 kilometers per hour, or about 20 miles per hour (Euro Cities). Birmingham, England has already beat them to the punch (BBC).
• Piggybacking on the discourse Streetsblog NYC stirred up over bike helmets, Belgium has made them mandatory for scooters that go over 20 kph. (Zag Daily)