Streetsblog USA

• Buildings come and go, but streets last forever. That’s why cities should start with their street grid and work from there, rather than emphasizing land use over transportation. (CNU Public Square)
• Transit and law enforcement leaders met with White House officials to emphasize the importance of federal funding to safety and security. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Consumer Affairs ranks the Bay Area, New York, Washington, Seattle and Salt Lake City are the cities with the best transit systems, based on safety, reliability and customer service.
• Lyft agreed to pay California drivers $272 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the company of wage theft. (Reuters)
• Maryland’s proposed budget gives Baltimore transit short shrift in favor of the D.C. suburbs. (Banner)
• President Trump could wipe out bike lanes along the East Potomac loop. (Axios)
• Traffic deaths are falling in Phoenix, but not fast enough to reach Vision Zero by 2050. (WOWT)
• New Orleans is offering rebates to low-income residents who buy e-bikes. (Times-Picayune)
• Crime has dropped on Charlotte Area Rapid Transit, but fare enforcement remains a problem. (Carolina Public Press)
• Elon Musk announced he’s building a hyperloop tunnel between San Antonio and Austin, which was news to leaders in both cities. (San Antonio Current)
• Louisville cyclists want safe biking infrastructure in more neighborhoods. (WBRD)
• Richmond has plans to make safety improvements at more than 700 intersections by the end of next year. (WTVR)
• Omaha is considering getting rid of minimum parking requirements for residential developments. (Nebraska Public Media)
• High-speed rail between Calgary and Edmonton is moving forward. (CBC)
• Canadian Cycling Magazine praises Montreal bikeshare BIXI.
• Biking is the best way to enjoy the architecture as a tourist abroad. (Architect)

How should planners identify and emulate success? 

The best advice on this topic dates back to 1932, when Louis Brandeis described U.S. states as laboratories of democracy. The Supreme Court Justice meant that America’s unique brand of federalism helped its citizens identify and understand how to best organize every level of government. The country’s huge number of smaller democracies — 50 states, 3,000 counties and more than 19,000 cities, towns and villages — offered real-world feedback on how Americans might rule themselves.

In a recent report published by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research, I decided to take Brandeis’s advice and compare state and metropolitan area performance over the last quarter-century on a series of metrics: sprawl, driving activity and public transit use, among others. 

To do so, I constructed a set of statistical models that linked various state and community characteristics to specific performance outcomes. I then closely examined communities that performed better than the models predicted. Some results were expected; others surprised me.

Take excessive urban land consumption, also known as sprawl. I measured this as the amount of farm, forest and range acreage that communities converted to urban uses in each state between 2000 and 2024, divided by the state’s population growth during the same period. Smaller ratios indicate that less land is needed to accommodate a given amount of population growth; larger ratios mean that more land is needed. 

Maryland stood out as one of the states that minimized excess urban land consumption more than my model expected. The Old Line State saw each of its more than 1 million new residents since 2000 consume just 0.11 acres of previously undeveloped land. 

Maryland boasts a long history of successful leadership in managing growth. In 1992, the state legislature enacted the Economic Growth, Resource Protection and Planning Act, which required every local government to incorporate anti-sprawl goals into its comprehensive plan. Five years later, Annapolis passed an even more ambitious growth initiative that directed state infrastructure funds to cities whose plans and development policies expressly favored infill over greenfield development. 

California, by contrast, performed worse than expected. Although the Golden State does a decent job of containing sprawl overall, the California Environmental Quality Act has armed opponents of infill construction with several legal strategies to block development. This dynamic has shifted newer housing from denser, central neighborhoods to outlying suburbs that require a car to navigate.

I also found significant differences between metro areas within the same state. Consider transportation in Florida. The Sunshine State’s four largest metro areas — Miami, Tampa, Orlando and Jacksonville — record very different amounts of average daily vehicle miles traveled, a reliable measure of private automobile usage known as ADVMT. 

Jacksonville and the surrounding Duval County have neglected to create a viable transit system, despite enjoying a consolidated city-county government that makes it easier to do so. In 2024, the area recorded a 2024 ADVMT of 20.2 miles per capita. Tampa was a similar story: After a pronounced effort in the 1990s to build highways, the area saw its ADVMT per capita rise by 17 percent since 2000.

The greater Miami area, by contrast, has capitalized on its elevated residential densities and spatial arrangement — all of its major cities mostly fall within a single, straight line — to promote investments in rail and bus transit. This development strategy has driven down household auto ownership rates. In 2024, the metro area posted an ADVMT of just 17.3 miles per capita, the lowest of the state’s four largest metro areas. Orlando followed the same pattern: The area grew by more than 50 percent since 2000, but its ADVMT fell by two percent.

I found another success story on the West Coast in San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit System. Only one other transit network — New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority — recorded better-than-expected ridership performance between 2000 and 2019 and between 2020 and 2024. How did the MTS cope with the loss of ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic? It carefully controlled capital costs, focused on service reliability and safety, met the service needs of key market niches, and sited new housing developments near light-rail stations. 

The states and metro areas that most exceeded their expected performance share a few common characteristics. All of them routinely monitor how their policies work in practice and modify them if they fail to work as intended. They use material incentives to reward good behavior and discourage bad behavior. They enthusiastically promote the expertise and competence of government agencies. And they emphasize public-private partnerships and intergovernmental cooperation.

Our dysfunctional federal government has given up on promoting sustainable urban development, leaving a vacuum for states, counties and cities to fill. These governments demonstrate the wisdom and foresight of Justice Brandeis’s profound affection for America’s smaller democracies. We ought to pay closer attention to their results.

Well, it finally happened: South Park did an episode about e-bikes. Or more accurately, the deadly, super-fast e-motos that every media outlet in the country keeps calling e-bikes, even though they’re totally different things. (Spoiler: Kenny dies in a battery fire.)

YouTuber Berm Peak argues, though, that Trey Parker and Matt Stone actually deliver one of the more thoughtful satirical examinations of the e-moto problem in popular culture … even if they get a few things wrong for narrative effect, like casting lycra-clad “bike dads” as the enemies of the real e-bike revolution. In the real world, car-brained policymakers are the more likely culprits, alongside shady manufacturers who exploit import loopholes to sell lightning-fast vehicles as “bikes” with vestigial pedals.

He breaks it all down in this week’s video; head on down to YouTube and have yourself a time, or watch below.

This week, we’re joined by Blaine Brownell, the director of UNC Charlotte’s School of Architecture to talk about the role architecture plays in population decline, the need for permeability in walkable neighborhoods, and a revolution in building materials.

Here’s how we work it at Talking Headways:

• You can read the full transcript, but you’ll have to bear with some of Intern Claude’s typos, by clicking here.
• You could scroll below the audio player for an excerpt of our riving conversation.
• Or you could just hit play on the player below.

Here’s the edited section:  

Jeff Wood: I’ve seen a number of your pieces in Architect Magazine that talk about subjects that not a lot of people want to touch. First, I wonder how architects respond to your prodding in those articles, like population collapse. I feel like the pronatalism has gotten kinda weird in some circles. But you have what I think is a really smart take on it, which is that if people want to have families, we need to address that paradox of quality-of-life improvements versus slow population growth, and kind of the, the mix and match between that.

It’s really an interesting topic to cover because it gets kinda weird when people try to push it from certain political angles. But from a built environment angle, there are very clear ways of addressing it or figuring out what needs to happen in order to change the trajectory.

Blaine Brownell: Yeah, that’s well said. I felt compelled to draw attention to the inherent contradiction in creating better designed places, that inherently become more desirable and less-economically accessible. I’ve been thinking about how in different arenas that have to do with design and lived experience, there are these analogies that kind of revolve around, like, tripartite interdependent qualities. That’s a very convoluted way of saying, for example, for building construction, a common phrase would be, “Good, fast, cheap — you can pick two.”

You’re not going to get all three. If you want good quality and fast, then it’s going to be expensive, right? That kind of thing. Similarly, in a very different arena, in a restaurant people talk about how you can have, “Price, quality, and atmosphere or something — pick two.”

You can’t have all three. And of course this is a super generalization, right? But in the built environment in terms of where people live, we could kind of distill it to a model like this and say, “It’s the cost, it’s the amount of space, and it’s the quality.”

So the quality in this case would be quality of design, but it’s also quality of the experience. It’s walkability score. You know, it’s the number and diversity of different types of services that you have access to, and opportunities, right?

So quality gets a lot of things lumped together. But this is inherently what individuals or families are faced with whether or not they’re explicitly thinking about these three as levers, as soon as they move one, the other two adjust, right? When they’re thinking about moving somewhere or buying a house somewhere, it’s implicit thinking.

It seems almost strange to say it out loud because it’s so obvious to us. But we bring a lot of assumptions that are very well-informed, such as, “Well, if we want to be closer to that exciting area, we’re going to have to sacrifice space and affordability, right?”

But the point, I think, related to the neo-natalism and concern about population decline is that those two factors, having adequate space and affordability, weigh so heavily into people’s decisions.

It affects them subconsciously as much as consciously about having children. What intrigues me with cities today is that disconnect of these three levers has become so exaggerated — where even for a low- to moderate quality, you’re going to have to pay a lot and you won’t have much space.

And it’s come to the point where my own kids, they’re in their 20s now, they just… And I think that generation generally seems to have the mindset like, “Oh, we’ll never be able to afford a house.” And I, I hate to be a downer here, but, I mean, this is serious.

So what do designers do?

They think, “Well, okay. We’ll have these micro units, because then we can shift the affordability lever and maintain the quality,” but you sacrifice a ton of space. And so I’m not against micro units at all. But it’s important to factor that into this larger question about people having kids.

And why wouldn’t you want to be in a culturally vibrant place with a high walkability score and great access to all these things and many different forms of transit while also having a lot of space and a big garden and quiet? I’ve even heard people joke about this, like, “I want all of these things.”

Well, you can’t. So this is a big question for design, and I, what I would like to see with design and planning is maybe a more kind of explicit look at, at these factors and their interdependencies, and how can we not just jump to something like micro units as the solution, which it might be for many, and probably should be, but, you know, take into account these other parameters and factors.

A city in Washington state is taking rapid action to calm streets almost immediately after people are killed in crashes — debuting a novel new approach to traffic violence response that they think other cities should try, too.

In what its creators say is the first real-world deployment of the “Emergency Streets” concept — which calls on communities to implement temporary traffic calming measures within 72 hours of a fatal crash — the city of Spokane, Washington recently closed a lane at the site where 18-year-old motorcyclist Kiril Herlazhyi was killed in a single-vehicle collision just a few days prior.

In many communities, transportation authorities might have treated Herlazhyi’s death as an unavoidable “accident” for which the teenager himself was to blame, since he lost control of his vehicle at a high rate of speed and crashed into a pole. The city of Spokane, though, chose to treat the tragedy as part of a systemic traffic violence emergency, and take action to compel everyone to hit the brakes along a road where going too fast is all too common — thanks in part to road design that encourages speed.

“I’m hoping this opens up a community conversation, where we don’t focus exclusively on what happened and who’s to blame,” Snyder said. “It’s more like: okay, this is preventable. What can we do to prevent it? Because whatever happened, somebody died … There’s always something that could have been done.”

Recommended Talking Headways Podcast: ‘Normal’ is Not Correct, Someone Died Here Jeff Wood May 8, 2025

The experiment is part of Spokane’s first-in-the-nation “Emergency Streets” pilot, which will provide the city with grant funding for six post-crash deployments between now and June. But Snyder says the program was initially sparked by local advocates at Spokane Reimagined, who installed roadside “Ghost Bikes” at the sites where cyclists lost their lives.

That effort, Snyder says, helped humanize the cost of the traffic violence crisis, and memorialize its victims long after all other evidence of the crash had been swept away to keep the flow of traffic moving.

Over time, though, Spokane Reimagined found they wanted to do more than just remember victims: they wanted real infrastructure to keep drivers from creating new ones. And they didn’t want to wait the months or years it often takes for permanent traffic calming plans to be debated, approved, and installed — particularly along high injury networks where crashes happen over and over again.

“They came to me [to ask]: ‘Can we do something more?'” Snyder added. “‘How can we treat those fatality sites [differently]?”

Recommended What If We Treated Car Crash Sites Like Disaster Zones? Streetsblog August 6, 2024

Snyder found his answer at a presentation by Kevin Krizek to Spokane’s “Cooper Jones Bicyclist Safety Advisory Council,” the name of which itself memorializes a 13 year-old boy who was killed by a driver while riding. An environmental design professor, Krizek co-created of the Emergency Streets framework with advocate Tila Duhaime and went on to launch an organization of the same name.

Snyder says Krizek led a design class that helped hammer out the nuts and bolts of how Spokane’s program would work, down to the (MUTCD-compliant) pink traffic cones and door hangers for surrounding residences with QR links to a survey. He and his collaborator, though, credit the Washington city with having the courage to actually use those tools to test a bold and unfamiliar idea.

“Spokane’s leadership deserves high praise for this initiative, which speaks to a fundamental truth: having community members hurt or killed on their own streets is unacceptable,” said Duhaime in a statement to Streetsblog. “The victims cannot go back to their regular lives, so an appropriate civic response must stress the urgency of using our roads differently.”

Despite months of community outreach, though, Snyder was surprised by how many neighbors were still caught off guard by the city’s first Emergency Streets installation — and how resistant to even temporary change some of them could be.

Prior to the installation, they’d warned Spokanites that “Emergency Streets” were coming soon with notices on streaming services, utility bills, emails and more. Less than a week after the lane first closed, they’d already received more than 300 responses to their survey — which ranged from appreciative to outraged.

“It’s really sad to me to see how callous some people can be,” Snyder added. “Even if [the victim] made a bad choice, most of us probably made bad choices when we were 18. We just were fortunate enough to not make ones that had fatal consequences.”

Snyder looks forward to answering those responses with data, which Spokane is collecting as part of the pilot. At the time of his interview with Streetsblog, he says the lane closure hadn’t resulted in increased crashes, as some neighbors feared; even slowdowns had been minimal, according to comparisons of anonymized cell phone data to comparable periods.

“The inconvenience is so small it’s hard to measure,” he said. “We’re just pinching off the lane for a series of blocks, and then it opens back up again … We’re talking seconds, not even minutes. [But] for some people, that’s just too much.”

Of course, one of the beauties of the Emergency Streets initiative is that the road design changes it creates aren’t permanent — at least for now. And in some ways, the pilot may help the city develop skills to better weather driver backlash, and bring communities more meaningfully into the design process as they seek solutions to save lives.

Snyder argues, though, that grumbling motorists can no longer be an excuse for total inaction — especially when people are dying.

“How much driver discomfort are we willing to absorb in order to do something positive that could have an impact on lower than fatalities and serious injuries?” Snyder asked. “I’m constantly shocked by how much we consign these deaths to acceptable collateral.”

“[Crashes] also act as a kind of terrorism against everyone who uses our transportation system,” he continued. “Even if you are not experiencing one of these crashes [personally], you may pull yourself back from walking, from biking, from taking the bus, or maybe even just driving a smaller car — all because you feel so concerned about safety.”

Snyder hopes that other cities can learn from their efforts and launch Emergency Streets pilots of their own, especially as his program continues to share lessons on how to use the strategy to the best effect. On the other hand, though, he’d be just as happy if Spokane didn’t have any lessons to share — because traffic deaths had stopped, and the Emergency Streets program was no longer necessary.

“I hope we don’t have to do any at all,” he said.

When a fatal crash occurs, we tend to focus immediately on the individual: What was the driver doing? What did the cyclist or pedestrian do? Who made the mistake? 

Emergency Streets aims to shift that framing. A fatal crash is also a failure of the surface transport system. And often it is a failure that, at some level, was predictable. For aviation or rail sectors, thorough review protocol are enacted upon to reveal systemic failures. Why not for streets? 

Those of us who study streets know that certain priorities have become deeply embedded in transport planning in the United States. Speed and vehicle movement are institutionalized through turning radii, lane widths, multiple travel lanes, sight distances, signal timing, slip lanes, pedestrian crossing times, and measures such as automobile Level of Service.

No single one of these practices created our safety problem. Collectively, however, they have shaped the system we have today—and what we expect.

The problem is that when the system fails, our normal response is often to clean up the crash, restore the street, investigate what happened, perhaps conduct a traffic study — and eventually, return the system to normal. But what if the crash itself became a reason not to return immediately to normal?

Recommended Steal This Idea: ‘Emergency Streets’ Strategy Gets First Real-World Pilot Kea Wilson October 1, 2026

That question led us to develop Emergency Streets. The idea is straightforward: following a fatal crash, temporarily change the street in ways that meaningfully reduce kinetic energy. Make the intervention visible. Explain to the community why it is happening. Use the event not only to respond to one crash, but to ask what the crash reveals about the larger surface transport system. And, how to prevent such crashes in the future — including how money flows and how future practices are prioritized.

The underlying proposition is that we already know a great deal. We know the relationship between speed and crash severity. We know that accessibility, particularly local accessibility, does not necessarily require maximizing vehicle speed. And we increasingly have new ways to provide access, from e-bikes and smaller mobility devices to changing patterns of connectivity and travel. 

So the question becomes: Can a fatal crash become a catalyst for doing something differently?

Spokane: The Real-World Test

That idea has now moved from a theoretical idea, to an academic proposition, to a municipal practice. Spokane, Washington, has adopted an Emergency Streets pilot protocol and recently deployed its first intervention following a fatal motorcycle crash. 

The significance isn’t simply the cones or temporary street treatment. Spokane has created an institutional response: following a qualifying crash, the city must develop and implement a temporary traffic-management plan. That means the crash triggers action, rather than simply analysis.

The intervention is deliberately temporary because part of its purpose is learning. It is temporary to shortcut/circumvent traffic engineers’ long habits to over-engineer and study stuff, to provide decision-makers cover from public pressure for making uncomfortable changes to the street, to use swift timing to tie the error with the correction, to allow drivers to practice more careful driving for a non-trivial but non-disruptive period of time, etc. 

Recommended Talking Headways Podcast: ‘Normal’ is Not Correct, Someone Died Here Jeff Wood May 8, 2025

At the end of the treatment period, the city must decide what happens next: extend the intervention, return the street to its previous condition, or meaningfully move toward a more longer-lasting change.

That creates an unusual opportunity. Emergency Streets isn’t simply a traffic-calming intervention. It’s intended to become a way of asking whether a disruption to normal practice can change the trajectory of future transportation decision-making.

So what should we measure, and how? There are at least three dimensions.

First, physical and behavioral change, largely tied to kinetic energy. Did speeds decline? Was hard-braking reduced? Did vehicle behavior change around the intervention? Did the kinetic energy around the crash site lessen? These are relatively tangible questions and can be measured using speed observations, GIS and mobility data (including vehicle characteristics), and other behavioral indicators.

Second, institutional change. Did professional understandings change? Did organizational routines change? Did departments begin working together differently? Did the intervention influence subsequent funding, design standards, or decisions about how accessibility should be provided? 

An institutional trace is evidence that something generated through Emergency Streets persists beyond the physical removal of the temporary intervention. This trace may not be immediate or tangible. It might be visible in changed professional understandings; altered organizational routines; new relationships between departments or agencies; different expectations about how fatal crashes should be treated; changes to approval, design or decision-making processes; the use of evidence generated during deployments; subsequent temporary interventions; proposed capital works; allocation of funding; or permanent physical changes to the street.

Recommended What If We Treated Car Crash Sites Like Disaster Zones? Streetsblog August 6, 2024

The institutional part of the evaluation therefore distinguishes between temporary effects and institutional consequences, without assuming that institutional change must result in permanent infrastructure at the crash site. Rather than simply asking “does Emergency Streets reduce vehicle speeds?”, this study asks whether temporarily refusing to restore a fatal-crash site immediately to “normal” can interrupt the routines, assumptions and institutional relationships through which unsafe street conditions are reproduced.

More specifically, a thorough evaluation can reveal:

• What, institutionally, is different from when the trial began?
• How did Emergency Streets contribute to those changes?
• What mechanisms appear to have enabled change?
• What institutional structures or countervailing mechanisms constrained or prevented change?
• What disappeared when the cones disappeared, and what remained?

A null or uneven outcome can reveal organizational, legal, procedural or resource barriers that prevent rapid-response approaches from influencing longer-term infrastructure decisions. The broader theoretical contribution is to understand whether deliberately disrupting the normal institutional response to road death can create conditions for institutional change.

Third, public expectations. Did people begin thinking differently about what a street is for, what constitutes an acceptable level of risk, or what should happen after someone is killed? Did the intervention create public discussion about what could be done differently to provide for accessibility?

And that leads to the larger research question: To what extent can Emergency Streets empower municipalities to adopt meaningfully different transportation-planning practices?

The cones eventually disappear. The more important question is what remains after they are gone. 

If professional practices, institutional relationships, public expectations, investment decisions, or street designs begin to change, then Emergency Streets has accomplished something much larger than temporarily slowing traffic at one location. It has used a specific failure as an opportunity for the system to learn from itself — and change. 

• The Trump administration’s war on electric vehicles continues, as the U.S. DOT rolled back average mileage standards from 50 miles per gallon by 2031 under President Biden to 35, which will further increase the amount of greenhouse gases vehicles are pumping into the air (New York Times). The decision will cement this country’s reliance on fossil fuels for years to come (Heatmap). Not only that, it will cost the average driver up to $1,600 a year, thanks to Trump’s war with Iran driving up gas prices — far outpacing the $1,300 the administration claims consumers will save when buying a vehicle (Autoblog).
• Meanwhile, we’re falling behind the rest of the world. China has developed a charger than can refuel an EV to 70 percent in five minutes (Ars Technica). And in Europe, driving an EV is now only half as expensive as a diesel-powered vehicle (Transport and Environment).
• Politicans who call for suspending gas taxes are just pandering to voters. It has a minimal effect on gas prices, but blows a big hole in transportation budgets (Politico). A better way to reduce household costs is to invest in transit so that people don’t have to drive so much (Urban Institute).
• Federal transit funding from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expired at midnight, meaning steep cuts are coming for passenger rail and local transit. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Jalopnik explains how a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule meant to protect car drivers and passengers from rollovers resulted in thick A-pillars around windshields that put cyclists and pedestrians in blind spots.
• Philadelphia is creating green corridors to connect an increasingly dense and walkable city. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
• Some Philly bikeshare users who want exercise are frustrated that 70 percent of Indego’s offerings are electric. (Billy Penn)
• Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law giving the California High-Speed Rail Authority eminent domain power. (Railway News)
• The Federal Transit Administration is only giving the Utah Frontrunner double-tracking project half the money it requested. (Railway Supply)
• Cyclists took over Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. to emphasize the need for better bike infrastructure. (WUSA)
• A debate is brewing in Houston over whether Metro funding would be better spent on infrastructure or improving service. (Fox 26)
• Ontario health care providers denounced Premier Doug Ford’s plan to rip up Toronto bike lanes, citing the lives they save. (CBC)
• Aukland leaders hope the city’s first subway line will erase its reputation as a cultural backwater. (Monocle)

Same-day delivery? More like Hell on Wheels.

Amazon delivery drivers have spent the last five years racking up thousands of serious traffic violations, including speeding through school zones, blocking bus and bike lanes and parking next to fire hydrants, according city data collected by an organization looking to reform the logistics giant’s hiring practices.

A new interactive tool from the labor-aligned Alliance for a Greater New York details the many thousands of traffic infractions drivers for Amazon collected between July 2021 and June 2025. The interactive map, called Amazon Delivers Dangers, shows that Amazon-associated delivery vans drew 14,290 tickets from cameras and traffic enforcement agents over the five-year period.

The map sorts the tickets into the following categories:

• 3,602 citations for blocking bus lanes, bus stops, or other public-transit access
• 2,689 citations for obstructing curb access
• 2,366 citations involving traffic and intersection safety
• 2,162 citations for speeding in school zones
• 2,051 citations for obstructing emergency-response access
• 1,340 citations for blocking pedestrian or cyclist space.

Between 2019 and 2024, the number of packages delivered in New York City jumped by nearly 40 percent, from 1.8 million per day to 2.5 million per day. That trend has driven many more delivery vans onto city streets.

An illegally parked van in the Grand Street bike lane.

The map shows that Amazon delivery drivers’ dangerous habits are not limited to a single corner of the city or a few bad-apple drivers. The company’s drivers have received tickets in every last one of the city’s 51 City Council districts, and the 10 plates with the most combined citations accounted for only 904 of the 14,920 tickets.

The map is the latest lob in the fight between labor organizers and Amazon over the Delivery Protection Act, a bill proposed by Council Member Tiffany Caban (D-Queens). That bill requires the operators of “last-mile” warehouses to directly hire anyone doing deliveries out of that warehouse, which would effectively require Amazon to directly hire the delivery drivers who work for the company dropping off packages around the city.

Currently, Amazon relies on subcontracting its deliveries out to companies known as Delivery Service Partners, which are local independent logistics companies that lease Amazon trucks and uniforms from the online retail giant. By hiring DSPs as subcontractors that pick up deliveries from its warehouses around the city, critics say Amazon is able to skirt any regulations or responsibility for how those drivers behave on the road, despite the fact that Amazon is the company that tracks delivery times and sets routes for drivers.

Every dot is a traffic ticket collected by an Amazon-linked delivery van.

Caban’s bill would also mandate safety training for drivers and ensure that Amazon proper — and not an ever-changing roster of DSPs — is liable for the traffic violations by delivery drivers.

“Amazon’s business model is built on the routine violation of traffic laws,” Matt Multari, a former Amazon delivery driver, said in a press release announcing the new mapping tool. “Amazon surveils you and tracks you to the minute, forcing you to go faster. You don’t have time to look for parking. If Amazon’s AI notices that you are going slower than what they expect, you can get penalized, or eventually terminated.”

A majority of the City Council supports Caban’s bill. Amazon has spent $5 million lobbying against the legislation, and warned supportive Council Members that the company would stop using electric cargo bikes to deliver packages if it becomes law. It is unclear why Amazon would abandon its micromobility practices if the city required it to directly hire the people who ride company-branded cargo bikes.

“Companies like Amazon are using subcontractors to shield themselves from their responsibility to keep workers and New Yorkers writ large safe,” Caban said in a press release. “That’s why I’m proud to be the lead sponsor of the Delivery Protection Act, which would create a licensing system for last-mile deliveries, force companies to take responsibility for their drivers, protect against unfair retaliation and firing of workers, and require real training for workers.”

A spokesperson for Amazon claimed the company’s violations are a “tiny fraction” of its total deliveries, which “does not suggest a systemic issue” — and pointed to the company’s e-cargo bikes as evidence of Amazon trying to address the issue.

“Safe and responsible delivery practices are always a top priority. Delivery Service Partners are local, independent businesses, responsible for their own operations and for following the traffic and parking laws in the communities where they operate, including addressing any citations,” the rep, Leigh Ann Gullett, said in a statement.

“We work closely with them to promote safe delivery practices, from hands-on driver training to in-vehicle safety technology, and we continue to invest in solutions like our e-cargo bike and on-foot delivery programs that reduce the need for vehicles on city streets and help us be a good neighbor in the communities we serve.”

• The latest version of Transportation for America’s “Deadly by Design” report ranks congressional districts by pedestrian deaths, with the highest by far being the Arizona 3rd in Phoenix. Congress distributes billions of dollars in transportation funding to cities and states each year, but steadfastly refuses to hold those state and local agencies accountable for safety improvements.
• Almost half of parents report that their child has experienced a close call from dangerous drivers at a school bus stop or near a school, according to a survey by the Governors Office of Highway Safety. (Jalopnik)
• AAA says the average annual cost of owning an operating a new vehicle has risen more than $1,000 since last year, to nearly $13,000.
• Traffic congestion should be viewed as something motorists impose on themselves and other road users, as opposed to casting drivers as the victims. (Planetizen)
• Why do more Philadelphians die in car crashes than in comparable cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C.? (The Conversation)
• Private passenger rail company Brightline cut a deal with investors on a $490 million lifeline to save it from bankruptcy (Miami Herald). Brightline demonstrated the appeal of high(ish)-speed rail in South Florida, but its financial problems once again beg the question, who will pay for the infrastructure? After all, airlines don’t pay for airports (Grist).
• Orange County, Florida is seriously considering an ambitious citizen-led plan for an Orlando mass transit system combining light and heavy rail with bus rapid transit. (Central Florida Public Broadcasting)
• Both Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy and Republican challenger Mike Minogue want to suspend the state gas tax, which may be popular, but it only saves drivers a few bucks and sends the wrong message about transportation priorities. (Commonwealth Beacon)
• Dallas leaders believe the city needs a grand strategy tying together planning, transportation and infrastructure to keep up its economic momentum. (Morning News; paywall)
• Sacramento opened a new light rail station four months early. (ABC 10)
• Police have started ticketing violators in Pittsburgh’s new Oakland bus-only lanes. (TribLive)
• The Charlotte Area Transit System is implementing the first of improvements called for by last year’s transit funding referendum. (Queen City News)
• China opened four new high-speed rail lines with a combined length of about 700 miles on Monday alone. (China Daily)
• Spacing obtained the actual request for proposals Ontario issued for a construction company to physically tear up Toronto bike lanes, and it looks like retrofitting those streets for even more cars will be extremely disruptive and cost a lot of money.
• Meanwhile, cyclists in Alberta are pushing back on a similar policy, showering lawmakers with postcards. (Cycling Magazine)

The Trump Administration’s takeover of East Potomac Park is devastating for the residents of DC. East Potomac Park is home to some of the city’s best green space. Trump wants to redevelop the entirety of East Potomac into a single, PGA-caliber golf course, likely to be financially inaccessible to the majority of the course’s current demographic.

Trump’s approach reinforces elitism and promotes poor land use — the exact opposite of what an urbanist approach to green space should be.

As an urbanist, one of the most ironic qualities about me is I love golf. There’s nothing like the feeling of spending your weekend mornings outside and chasing the high of hitting a perfect shot. Yet at the same time, I often struggle with the moral conundrum of whether golf is fundamentally antithetical to the urbanist mission. There’s a world in which golf and urbanism can coexist, and DC is the best example of it, making Trump’s takeover uniquely problematic. 

Recommended A Lot of Golf Courses Should Probably Be Parks Roger Rudick April 28, 2020

Golf is a prime target for urbanists due to inefficient land-use. Other critics argue that golf courses serve a niche population who are typically older, wealthy white men.

While that may be true of many private country clubs in the suburbs, municipal golf looks quite different. It serves a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and age groups. People of color and women are amongst the fastest growing groups of golfers, and the game has been shifting towards younger age groups. Cities also need green spaces, and those parks should come in a variety of shapes and sizes, whether they are traditional parks, gardens, a soccer field, or a golf course.

This shift is only possible when courses aim to grow the game and commit to accessible, affordable golf. The National Links Trust (NLT), a non-profit, 501c3 organization achieves this goal through its mission of “positively impacting our community and changing lives through affordable and accessible municipal golf.” NLT prioritizes sustainability and biodiversity in its core missions, focusing on reducing energy and water usage and ensuring that a variety of species can thrive in its golf courses.  NLT currently manages Rock Creek Golf Course, Langston Golf Course, and, for now, East Potomac Golf Links in DC.

The Langston Golf Course in DC is a historic course celebrated as a beacon of African American golf heritage. Today, the course offers free lessons and a caddie internship program for high schoolers to increase access to golf at minimal costs. Langston keeps green fees at an affordable rate.

The East Potomac Golf Course offers a similar blueprint for accessible recreation, with three affordable courses, 36 holes of golf, a driving range, several practice areas, and a mini golf course. The park surrounding the golf course is also filled with cyclists, runners, and fishers, while neighboring West Potomac Park hosts numerous recreational sports such as softball.

Cities need to prioritize these types of courses — easy access, low cost environments where people of all backgrounds can gather together.

Recommended How Rethinking the Golf Course Could Help Seniors Age in Place Tanya Snyder January 9, 2013

Yet in December, the Trump Administration terminated the lease agreement between the National Links Trust and National Parks Service for lease violations, leaving the future of East Potomac in limbo. After several months of uncertainty, NLT reached an agreement with the Department of Interior for new long-term leases at Langston and Rock Creek. NLT will temporarily manage East Potomac until the Trump Administration redevelops it.

Trump’s takeover does not shrink the game of golf. But it does capture publicly-owned land and privatizes it for use by an elite population. A park that serves thousands of DMV residents on a single day will now serve a few hundred, on a good day. On top of that, the reconstruction could cost between $20 and $49 million. Taxpayer money is quite literally subsidizing land-use for the wealthy. 

This discrepancy becomes more evident when evaluating the price of a round of golf. Right now, green fees for an 18-hole round at Langston or East Potomac cost anywhere between $34-48, depending on the day of the week. By contrast, green fees for some of the more ‘affordable’ PGA Tour courses start around $80-150 a round, while the most expensive courses can cost over a thousand dollars.

It is extremely likely that Trump’s new course will price out the average East Potomac golfer, at least if the President’s other courses are any indication. Trump’s Los Angeles golf course costs somewhere between $95-$575 a round. Using an average of $335 green fees as a benchmark for Trump’s course, and the high-end of $48 for an NLT course, a golfer would need to spend almost 600% more on green fees alone. This does not account for membership fees, caddy fees, or other expenses typical with private courses. 

What the game of golf needs, in DC and around the country, is more organizations like NLT to expand and grow the game. There should be an emphasis on sustainability and affordability, rather than exclusivity.

Within this framework, golf can thrive in an urban environment rather than be a competitor. Pairing this with access to high-quality public transportation options, such as bus routes terminating at course entrances, makes golf an urban amenity that will attract more residents to a city.

Upzoning the land around golf courses can encourage housing and businesses to open, too. The ease of access to a green space will in turn promote social and economic activity, rather than isolating golf from it. None of this is where East Potomac is headed.

The irony is not that an urbanist like me cares about preserving golf. It is that golf is not in competition with cities. The biggest threat to the game is exclusivity — which is all the Trump administration cares for. 

“Unprecedented” reductions to federal transit and rail dollars in the latest stopgap bill could offer a taste of even steeper cuts to come, advocates fear — unless Americans demand stable funding for the shared transportation options we deserve, and on which our economy depends.

More than a hundred members of the American Public Transportation Association descended on Washington earlier this month to protest Congress’s decision to let billions of dollars for multimodal transportation lapse under a recent stopgap spending bill to fund the nation’s surface transportation programs until December 11.

That “fly-in” brought agencies, transit equipment manufacturers and more face-to-face with well over 100 lawmakers, who were forced to pass that extension because they’d failed to negotiate a bill to replace the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA. The IIJA had previously been set to expire September 30.

Rather than simply copying and pasting that law for a few more months, though, Congress opted to exclude programs subject to the wonky funding mechanism known as “advanced appropriations.” That category disproportionately includes programs that benefit shared modes, while leaving most highway dollars untouched.

APTA — which represents agencies as well as private-sector interests that benefit from transit — estimates that public transit funding will take a 20 percent hit under the measure, and passenger rail will lose a staggering 81 percent of its formerly-guaranteed funding. And if the bill that replaces the IIJA or a subsequent extension mirrors it, the resulting loss of funding could devastate our collective transportation future.

“We’ve never seen an authorization act that has cut funding,” said Ward McCarragher, APTA’s vice president of government affairs. “This is a first.”

Recommended What You Missed in the Transportation Reauthorization This Summer Kea Wilson September 16, 2026

McCarragher explained that, while advocates have lauded the IIJA for making historic investments into mobility options besides driving, billions of those dollars were only guaranteed through the original five-year duration of the law. That left the door open for Congress to cut them now.

That’s because Congress funded a lot of discretionary programs using “advanced appropriations,” a novel funding strategy that critics argue is intended only for emergency situations where non-recurring programs need a chunk of guaranteed money for a few years, after which they’re expected to lapse.

But transit advocates argue that between sky-high traffic deaths, an escalating affordability crisis, a climate catastrophe and more, America is experiencing an ongoing transportation emergency — and as long as that emergency still rages, Congress must extend advanced appropriations for programs that could help address it.

“There have been some transit critics who said that this was intended as only a one-time investment, that this is not the way we’ve ever managed the transportation programs,” McCarragher added. “[But] you can’t address decades of underinvestment in public transit with a one-time, five-year investment — not when we’ve spent the last 50 years under-investing in the program.”

Many highway programs, by contrast, receive guaranteed funds under the IIJA, even though drivers haven’t paid enough in gas taxes and other road user fees to cover their costs for decades. The endless highway spending that followed has failed to deliver the congestion, safety, or affordability benefits that its backers promise.

Recommended ‘Our Roads Are More Than Just Highways’: Democrats Urge U.S. Senate Not to Defund Multimodal Programs Kea Wilson May 14, 2026

Worse, legislators originally designed many of the specific programs slashed by the extension bill to address America’s most urgent transportation needs.

Popular competitive grant programs to make streets safer, eliminate deadly railroad crossings, and give cities direct funds to build multimodal infrastructure have all been at least temporarily chopped, with total cuts amounting to a staggering $36.8 billion, the National League of Cities recently estimated.

To be fair, some car-focused programs, such as the Bridge Formula and Investment Program, ended up in the budgetary crosshairs, too.

But Kevin X. Shen of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that Congress made those cuts “without any measures to prioritize roadway maintenance over expensive expansions,” and that they’re unlikely to achieve the legislative body’s budgetary goals. That’s especially urgent against the backdrop of widespread attacks on shared mobility, which APTA says returns $5 to the economy for every public dollar invested — but whose benefits vanish when the money disappears.

“Regardless of budgetary mechanisms, in the end, a cut is a cut,” Shen continued. “Communities across the country will feel this in the coming months, amid tight budgets, high gas prices, and strained transit services.”

Recommended Good Public Transit + Good Public Funding = Good Public Health Jack Guan May 1, 2026

Despite setbacks this fall, McCarragher and his fellow APTA advocates aren’t giving up on restoring what public transit has lost. After the “fly-in,” many left their meetings with congresspeople feeling optimistic about the future.

“We got broad support for the effort to restore [this funding], and I think there’s going to be a renewed effort to address this issue as we turn to December,” McCarragher said. “I think they recognize the great economic benefit of these investments … beyond just the impact to the riders themselves. Every billion dollars invested [in transit] creates more than 41,000 jobs. [These are] the things that lawmakers have really taken hold of and recognized as important, not only for transit riders but for the broader U.S. economy.”

And even if their message didn’t land this time, advocates will almost certainly get a few more bites at the apple.

Because they’re so difficult to negotiate, federal transportation bills are notorious for needing endless extensions to keep America moving, and some suspect the IIJA will require several more before a replacement bill is finally passed. And in the meantime, the midterms are nigh — which means voters have a unique chance to voice their support for better policies.

“I think the timing is perfect for every citizen to engage with their members of Congress as we head into an election in November,” McCarragher added. “There are many opportunities to get their attention on this issue, and demand that Congress restore these funds in December for public transit and passenger rail … We [need to] create that bridge, so that when we complete the long-term authorization, Congress will have an opportunity then to continue to build upon the success we’ve had and strengthen our economy.”

A version of this article recently appeared on Love of Place. It is republished with permission.

The New York Times recently ran a big expose about how big trucks and SUVs are killing Americans. According to their analysis, these large cars lead to between 200 and 400 extra deaths a year, although they said it was a conservative estimate. Even Trump commented about it, along with GM CEO Mary Barra. 

This did not surprise me. Federal agencies, like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, have known about the increased risk since at least 2015, when they published a research review (though their estimate was higher than the Times.) The Detroit Free Press also found the same thing when they conducted a similar study about a decade ago. 

I wrote a book about all this that was published a good six years ago and have traveled quite extensively speaking about it since. Along the way, other credible agencies, like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and Consumer Reports, have done studies and come to similar conclusions. I don’t think there’s any debate that larger vehicles are killing people on the roads. This finding has been replicated so many times. 

This has been an open secret for a long time. And in fact, when I was working on my book, I found experts that had warned about SUVs and pickups killing pedestrians as far back as the 1990s. But then everyone forgot.

The only reason the New York Times was able to do the kind of study they did, is because a few years back, Consumer Reports took it upon themselves to gather all the data about hood heights for consumer cars and trucks. Prior to that, no one had that data. It just wasn’t tracked because it wasn’t considered a consumer feature.

When I wrote my book, I went around with a tape measure to see how tall grilles of cars were. The Detroit Free Press did the same thing in their analysis and actually theirs was a lot more rigorous than mine. They went to dealerships to do the measurements, in order to assure tire pressure etc. wouldn’t interfere with the results.

One thing that is annoying about this discussion, though, is that whenever I try to bring this up, reactionary people freak out because they think I want to BAN PICKUP TRUCKS.

I basically agree that an idea that extreme is a political nonstarter. However, there are about 1 million intermediary steps we could address short of that could help minimize the risks large consumer vehicles pose to innocent people, without making it impossible for plumbers and landscapers to do their jobs. 

The good news is, just last week for the first time NHTSA unveiled its first ever pedestrian safety rankings for cars. I like to think my work helped contribute to this ridiculously modest reform.

While it’s good that there is finally an acknowledgment of these risks, the new rating is a half measure at best. Instead of making pedestrian impacts part of the well known “five-star” rating system, they way they do in Europe and parts of Asia, NHTSA created this dumb little side measure — a separate category — for pedestrian safety that won’t appear on the hood of cars in the dealership. They’ll just be displayed on NHTSA’s website.

I assume they added a pedestrian safety rating but then hid it away to capitulate to some American auto companies that are heavily invested in pickup trucks, like General Motors. Still, at least they finally did something. 

Nobody’s asking me. I’m just a person with a blog and middling following. But if I were president of the universe, here are the additional half-measures (short of banning pickup trucks I would take:

1. Ban after-market vehicle modifications — or at least regulate them more

It’s one thing that pickup trucks roll off the factory floor with 55-inch grilles; that’s a bad thing. But we allow any rando to buy an after-market lift kit and jack it up even more — enough so that entire standing adults will be invisible at close range.

Not only is lifting a pickup dangerous to everyone, it’s more dangerous to the drivers themselves, because it becomes really top heavy and is more likely to roll over, which is likely to cause a fatality. There’s a reason racing cars have a very low center of gravity. 

Some states do regulate after market vehicle modifications like this, or like “bull bars” which eliminate the crumple zone on cars — no bueno. They also pose additional risks to pedestrians, which is why they are banned in other countries, like the UK. Even the states that do regulate this kinda stuff are very hands off, which I can sort of understand, to be honest.

Rather than making police responsible for this kind of thing, we should just not allow third parties to sell after-market products the threaten public safety. We regulate vehicles for safety and crash impacts; you shouldn’t be able to just undo that with some dumb $150 kit you bought online. It’s dangerous to you and to others. 

Short of that, we should at least stop purchasing these kind of after-market kits for public fleets. I saw bull bars on Portland police cars the last time I was there, which is disappointing because they’re a “Vision Zero” city, which means they ostensibly care about traffic safety.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay extra for vehicle features that make public cars less safe, and which also could put them on the hook for extra damage if someone is struck and the agency is sued — something that happens to police departments a lot.

Some will claim they need them to move a car off the road or something; if so, they could just have them on one vehicle they use for that purpose. Not every vehicle needs them. In my opinion, though, police just use bull bars to make their cars more military/intimidating looking, which is bad for public relations anyway. 

2. Regulate grille heights — or at least require front cameras if not

Many of the best selling pickup trucks in America now have 55-inch grilles. That’s tall enough to obscure the average standing 4th grader, not to mention anyone in a wheelchair. This might not be the hugest deal in the world in like a rural setting or on a highway, but it becomes a big deal in parking lots and cities, and these things are everywhere. 

One option is that we could just require car companies to lower hood heights and make them more sloping, and car like which would be way safer. The shape of the hood alone has a surprisingly large impact on survival. IIHS finds box-y grilles are 45 percent more deadline. 

Car companies are resistant to changing that, though, because it messes with the appearances of the trucks — the “face.” 

The National Association of City Transportation Officials, for example, says there should be a “direct vision” requirement, meaning you should be able to see what’s right in front of your car. Unfortunately, our regulatory agencies are loaded with a bunch of auto industry veterans and political hacks, so that may be too much to ask.

Failing that, we should at least require front cameras instead of having all these people just flying blind with the huge front blind zone.

Some places in Europe are doing more to try to counteract the growth of monster SUVs and pickups. They’ve proposed things like higher license fees for large cars, higher parking prices. I think a few places in the U.S. have discussed this, but I don’t know how far we will get with that. 

3. Don’t buy pick-ups for public fleets (unless they’re seriously needed)

I was driving through Parma, Ohio last week and I noticed a police car that was actually a pickup truck. All I could think was “why?!” The boring answer is that public agencies get “upsold” by car dealers the same way average Joes and Janes do. I swear: every time I see a police department with SUVs or pickup trucks, I make a mental note not to vote for their next levy.

And police departments are just one agency. Parks departments etc, should scrutinize these purchases a little more, too. If they legitimately need an F-250 because they’re hauling logs or something, fine. But if they’re not, maybe it’s overkill, and a golf cart could do the job just as well — or a Kei car.

One thing you might notice about these proposals is they’re all very modest. And still, we don’t seem to be able to muster the political will to do any of it.

I wish people would quit yelling at me and acting like I have the power to Ban Pickup Trucks just because I have been trying to raise attention to this overall issue. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have any power to improve the situation short of a full-on ban. In fact, the low hanging fruit is practically on the ground — and we still seem to lack the will to act.

At least the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Bill included a provision that will make Automatic Emergency Braking and Automatic Pedestrian Detection standard on new vehicles. This is not nothing. What people who don’t follow this stuff closely don’t understand is that we actually have a lot of power to shape safety outcomes. It just takes a lot of pretty boring and reasonable little reforms — if we could just muster the courage and interest to do them.

• The Brookings Institute calls for a new paradigm in transportation, one that prioritizes prosperity and public health. This will involve various levels of government working together to address longer and longer commutes, the rising expense of car ownership and traffic death rates that remain far too high.
• Cities can’t keep widening freeways indefinitely, and subways and light rail are too slow to span sprawling megalopolises. That means high-speed rail is the future of regional transportation, according to Jonathan English. (The Transit Brief)
• Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced a bill to spend $300 billion over 10 years on transit-oriented affordable housing. (NJ.com)
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is backing a bill from Sen. Bill Haggerty (R-Tenn.) that ties federal transit funding to crime rates and security infrastructure like cameras and fare gates. (Metro)
• “Smart headlights” that automatically steer blinding beams away from oncoming traffic have been approved for U.S. vehicles. (New York Times)
• Lloyd Alter argues that transportation, housing, energy, etc. should not be in silos, but all fall under the umbrella of the “built environment.” (Carbon Upfront!)
• SEPTA bus ridership has risen by double digits since the Philadelphia transit agency adjusted its routes. (Tribune)
• Massachusetts is providing free transit passes for residents 75 and up who don’t drive. (WBUR)
• The L.A. Metro bought 220 battery-electric buses. (Clean Technica)
• The first section of Denver’s East Colfax bus rapid transit line has opened. (ABC 7)
• A Pierce County, Washington sales tax referendum would increase Tacoma bus service by 50 percent. (The Urbanist)
• Bad drivers in Nevada are costing themselves and everyone else money. (Governing)
• An Aloha State News columnist believes the success of Honolulu’s Skyline should be judged by jobs, not riders.
• Salem, Oregon is lowering the speed limit on residential streets to 20 miles per hour. (Statesman Journal)
• Amtrak’s new Airo trains debut Wednesday on the Cascades line. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• Some European cities are providing tax incentives or even paying people cash to bike to work. (Momentum)
• Barcelona recently joined the ranks of cities that no longer require parking for downtown apartments. (El Pais)
• Singapore is not playing when it comes to inconsiderate transit riders. (CNN)

• The New York Times ran a rather uninquisitive article about problems with electric school buses that doesn’t really explain why they’d need a range longer than 90 miles, other than the occasional field trip, or why electric city buses and freight trucks seem to work just fine. The broader issue for ending long dropoff and pickup lines is that districts are increasingly building schools on huge far-flung tracts that students can’t walk to and buses can’t efficiently serve, all but forcing parents to drive their kids (The Argument).
• Railway Age suggests using technology like enforcement cameras to keep motorists off of train tracks in dangerous situations.
• Micromobility encompasses a range of devices that should be considered differently, especially within the context of how auto-centric the city is. (Vital City)
• Sound Transit could save money by building elevated light rail rather than boring underneath Seattle. (The Urbanist)
• The Austin Transit Partnership scrapped widely panned plans to move into a $47 million new office space. (KUT)
• The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is about to start using bus-mounted cameras to warn or ticket drivers who block bus lanes. (WBUR)
• Bikeshare bikes are dwindling in Baton Rouge. (WBRZ)
• The Oklahoma DOT is spending $25 million to upgrade a freeway interchange for a Buc-ee’s truck stop. (Oklahoman; paywall)
• Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine warned against fellow Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal to suspend the state gas tax. (Signal)
• The Minneapolis Green Line is scheduled to open next June. (Fox 9)
• Chattanooga will resume booting illegally parked cars on Oct. 1 after an amnesty period ends. (Times Free Press)
• Lexington started citing drivers who park in bike lanes on Sunday. (WKYT)
• Even in ancient times, sprawling cities like Angkor were less sustainable than denser ones like Rome. (Planetizen)
• Real estate around a future rail line in Montreal has already gotten so valuable that it could undermine plans for transit-oriented development. (Connect Canada)
• Electrifying Mexican transit could cut the country’s fossil fuel imports by a third. (Mexico Business)

Why is it so hard for Americans to imagine a future where they can live in their city without constantly driving?

That wasn’t exactly the topic of Time’s recent viral essay, but I sure thought about it a lot while reading it.

In “We Have a Climate Imagination Problem,” author and entrepreneur Solitaire Townsend argued that we won’t avert planetary disaster if the fight to do it remains “merely an ad nauseam echo of ‘climate change is real, humans are to blame, and the consequences are catastrophic.'”

Townsend is right, of course, that the “magic” of storytelling is an essential ingredient in any fight for systemic change, not just “the spoonful of sugar to help the scientific medicine go down,” as she put it. But it may be particularly difficult to spark our public imagination about our transportation future — never mind inspiring anyone to demand real change.

In other ways, though, transportation may just be the sector that has the most potential to inspire a new vision for how the world could be — if we just learned how to tell a better story about it.

Recommended Report: Confronting Car Dependence Won’t Just Help With Climate Change; It’s a $6.2 Trillion Opportunity Kea Wilson October 30, 2024

To understand how storytelling could inspire transportation change, though, it’s important to be honest first about why so many advocates struggle to do it.

Perhaps more than any other part of the climate problem — or the affordability problem, or our many intersecting public health problems, or whatever else we may happen to care about — streets feel like something we can’t change. They are literally cast in concrete and steel, at the cost of unfathomable trillions of dollars that most people cannot imagine “wasting” by, say, tearing highways down — even if, with only a fraction of those trillions, we could do just that, and build world-class transit in every major city in America.

Moreover, transportation infrastructure is all around us — unlike, for instance, coal-fired power plants that so few Americans actually see on a daily basis. And because roadways are so ubiquitous, we become emotionally attached to these fixtures of our mobility landscape in a way we don’t to other kinds of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Even a climate denier might not have a visceral reaction to news that an oil field in Texas has quietly shut down. But many drivers will go to absolute war over new bike lanes that remove a single parking space.

Ask even a eco-conscious voter to imagine removing the interstate that they use every day to care for their grandmother, and the outrage can be even more acute.

Recommended This Year’s Park(ing) Day Hopes to Inspire Big Policy Change Kea Wilson September 5, 2024

In some ways, transportation reformers are actually pretty good at navigating this minefield — at least at the neighborhood scale.

A quick Google search is all it takes to find a motherlode of “street redesign porn,” where advocates have documented the transformation of formerly car-dominated places and challenged others to imagine similar renaissances across the country. Sites like the one you’re reading right now are stuffed to the gills with other policy ideas that your community could steal right now, as well as stories of how doing it could make all our lives better — and those stories are backed by quantitative data and emotional experience.

Many advocates go beyond pointing out what other places are doing well, too. In arguably one of the more defensible uses of generative AI, advocates have used tools like Craiyon and Gemini to instantly illustrate how even the worst stroads could be reborn as pedestrian paradises with the right mix of asphalt and new laws (though, to be clear, hiring a human illustrator would result in an even more effective advocacy tool.)

Tactical urbanists have even brought a version of these speculative possibilities to life with events like Park(ing) Day, which temporarily turns curbside spots into cafes, green space, and just about anything else you can imagine besides car storage for a single driver. Open streets, pop-up bike lanes, and other events do the same thing at the scale of an entire block.

Recommended TACTICAL URBANISM: Let’s Make More Plazas Eve Kessler May 28, 2021

When it comes to the big picture and the long term, though, many transportation reformers struggle to paint a vivid picture of how our country could work better without so many damn cars.

The lowest-lift strategy might be to harness those moments when cars are already displaced from the top of our transportation hierarchy, and go the extra mile to challenge our neighbors to notice that the world didn’t end — and maybe even that they’re better off without so much driving.

In major cities, massive events like the World Cup, the Olympics, and Taylor Swift concerts can all become powerful catalysts for mode shift and new — albeit temporary — investment in transit. They’re not always catalysts for deliberate conversation about how sustained transportation changes could reshape our collective lives, but they could be.

What if we papered every subway car with urbanist propaganda on game day, along with links to petition drives to change transport policy?

Recommended How — And More Important, When — To Get Motorists to Ditch The Driving Habit Streetsblog July 13, 2023

In smaller communities without a stadium, tactical urbanist experiments could be expanded to a bigger scale, a longer time frame, or a more ambitious, repeated program that gradually becomes permanent.

There’s no reason why, say, a Park(ing) Day demonstration can’t be done at the scale of a mega-mart lot, or that the regional craft market can’t reclaim that space every Saturday … and Sunday … and eventually, every day of the week, by installing more durable pop-up retail. With enough resources and coordination, the single, sad traffic-cone “bike lane” to your kid’s school could be part of a week-long blitz, sketching out a complete cycling network that makes not driving anywhere an actual option.

Pair it with a strong messaging campaign, and you could launch a whole movement of advocates who have glimpsed the possibility of a different transportation culture and want to make it permanent.

Big cities should think bigger about this stuff, too. Why shouldn’t Chicago hold more events like Bike the Drive on its notorious lake-front highway? Moreover, why can’t we treat bike events as a publicly funded demonstration of the future we all deserve, rather than a premium experience that costs $69 each — and that’s not including the price of the commemorative T-shirt?

Recommended Study: COVID-Era Pop-Up Bike Lanes Increase Cycling Trips Up to 48% Kea Wilson January 27, 2022

Let’e be clear: lack of imagination is far from the only reason why so many American cities are ultra-car-dependent hellscapes.

We can could send every mayor in the country on a fact-finding mission to Amsterdam, and they wouldn’t all come home raring to build woonerfs. Not every driver who begrudgingly left his car at home for the Beyoncé concert can be transformed into a transit rider by encouraging him to just open his mind — or even by giving him a discount on his next month of rides.

Systemic reform is primarily about moving power, and it can take a frustratingly long time. Our country looks like an oil executive’s fever dream because those executives, and their allies in Big Auto, spent billions of dollars on lobbyists for a century, not just because they wished upon a star.

Still, it’s urgent that transportation reformers offer our neighbors a better vision for the future, rather than just doom and rage about where we’re headed if we fail to make a change. And to be frank, it isn’t even that hard.

Recommended Bill McKibben Talks How Walking Can Help End the Climate Crisis — And Make Americans Happier Streetsblog October 31, 2023

A city where you don’t have to depend on cars doesn’t mean you can’t visit your sick grandmother across town, because there’s no interstate to take you there and nowhere to park where you arrive. It’s a place where grandma can afford to live around the corner, and you can simply walk to reach her, the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. You can drive if you want to; if you don’t, you aren’t forced to.

When enough people aren’t functionally forced to drive, our cities become more joyful, peaceful, healthy, safe, affordable, child-friendly, accessible to people of all abilities, and fun. And that’s not even the end of the list.

If we fail to tell that story – and so many of us do — then it’s no wonder why so few people believe it’s possible to make it real.

Earlier this year, a string of intense winter storms brought weeks of subzero windchill and 41 inches of snow to the East Coast. The repeated precipitation, combined with persistently low temperatures, prevented melting for several weeks. 

In response, New York City deployed extensive plowing operations, dropped approximately 380,000 tons of salt, requested emergency civilian shoveling support, and deployed snow-melting “hot tubs” across the five boroughs. 

At the same time, the Department of Sanitation repeatedly suspended the city’s “alternate-side parking” rules, which usually require car owners to move their car once a week so that the agency can clean — or plow — one side of the street. With no risk of fines, many owners simply let their cars sit where they had parked them just before the storms. 

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Snow Problem: Can New York City Handle Big Winter Storms Anymore?
Sophia Lebowitz

February 9, 2026

New Yorkers witnessed the result of these conflicting policies. Endless miles of waist-high snowbanks stood for weeks. Ice and slush rendered curb lanes unusable, immobilized vehicles and narrowed sidewalks. Across the entire city, residents struggled to access bus stops, navigate intersections and patronize businesses.

These winter storms suddenly and totally transformed New York’s urban fabric, inviting intense and widespread scrutiny of street infrastructure and exposing systemic weaknesses in roadway design. This transformation was most visible at the curb, where hundreds of thousands of snow-entombed cars stood motionless for weeks on end. 

Even the police have nomobiles.

I like to call these vehicles nomobiles: street-parked cars incapacitated by snow or ice that do not move for an extended period of time. These cars no longer fulfill their central function as instruments of private mobility and instead become static, semi-permanent elements of the public realm.

This temporary metamorphosis provides an unusual opportunity to assess the underlying assumptions of curb management and roadside infrastructure and raises a crucial question: If hundreds of thousands of vehicles went offline for multiple weeks without halting everyday life, what role do privately owned cars actually serve in dense cities, and who ultimately pays for their presence? Nomobiles force us to evaluate the promise of convenience attached to car ownership, the consequences of publicly subsidized vehicle storage, and the labor required to maintain access at all times.

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Video: Another Way The Snow Reveals Our Misallocation of Public Space
Henry Beebe-Center

February 9, 2026

Nomobiles impose both tangible and immeasurable costs on the public. Obstructed curb lanes slow down plowing routes, while obstructed bike lanes require even more resources to clear. The economic value of the curb is not an accident. Recent statements by the Mamdani administration indicate growing interest in treating curb space as a fiscal and administrative resource, by expanding metered parking to generate revenue and practicing more deliberate curb management. 

Recent research shows that “curb parking on New York City streets is worth $12.3 billion annually if drivers paid the market rate for storing their vehicles in the public right of way.” This winter’s storms momentarily suspended the social contract surrounding this public, shared resource, thereby exposing who ultimately pays the cost of the shared space.

Not only does this nomobile raise questions about urban mobility, but it affects other modes, such as cycling.

The storms pointed a spotlight on New Yorkers who own cars, and their justifications for doing so in such a transit-dense city.  The 2022 Citywide Mobility Survey found that the majority of residents who purchased vehicles during and after 2019 did so because they “wanted the flexibility and convenience of having a vehicle.” Many of these drivers found themselves stranded by frozen cars.

The continued provision of free curbside storage reinforces these New Yorker’s expectation of reliable mobility. More than 97 percent of New York City’s three million parking spaces are completely free. This arrangement obscures the true costs of preserving curbside vehicular access.

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FLASHBACK: What Happened To Car-Free ‘Snow Routes’ — And Could They Have Helped City Clear the Streets?
J.K. Trotter

February 6, 2026

“I basically just wrote it off for two weeks,” said one Brooklyn schoolteacher I spoke with. “I was like, alright, I just don’t have a car right now.” The teacher had purchased a vehicle to shorten a long commute to a neighborhood without robust transit options and relied on curbside parking at home. “I hate that I have to own a car … Whatever kind of autonomy I have is illusory and, you know, for suckers.”

During the storms and their aftermath, the teacher spent several hundred dollars on rideshare trips, incurred additional transit fares attempting to connect between networks, and paid more than a thousand dollars in winter-related mechanical repairs while their vehicle was immobilized.

Beyond fiscal expenditures, households also absorb significant amounts of unpaid physical labor: digging vehicles out of compacted snow and ice, walking extended distances to reach alternative transit, and recalculating commutes. 

“The best case scenario is that you get plowed in, you dig yourself out, but you get plowed back in again,” said a St. George resident who purchased a vehicle after years without one to supplement limited borough connectivity. “The worst case scenario, at least on Staten Island, is that you don’t even get plowed in because the plows haven’t gotten to your street yet. So you can dig all you want, but good luck getting anywhere. It’s so obvious that something isn’t working here.”

As the economic burden of car ownership snowballs, those with greater financial flexibility are better positioned to maintain mobility through viable non-automobile options, while those without such resources must supply labor, tolerate prolonged immobility, or rely on more constrained transportation choices. 

This winter reminded New York City that car ownership does not insulate individuals from unreliable systems. Nomobiles disrupted the street as a whole. These vehicles did not generate movement, but they continued to generate work in a layered subsidy structure: public funds provided baseline accessibility, private labor absorbed recovery, and informal makeshift markets monetized the gap between the two. This system persists not because it is efficient, but because its costs are delayed, dispersed, and rarely itemized.

Free curbside parking is central to sustaining this arrangement. It is a publicly subsidized habit that maintains the illusion that private mobility is largely self-contained. Nomobiles highlight the limits of this assumption, revealing the payments we make in our fiscal and political economies to sustain private mobility, even when that mobility becomes obsolete. As climate change produces heavier snowfall and longer freeze periods, the gap between perceived convenience and actual cost is likely to further narrow.

Nomobiles provide a lens to critique and more precisely examine roadside infrastructure. Let them serve as a warning to citizens and planners alike: where habit and preference prevail, function will suffer.

Why don’t cities roll out the red carpet for new greenways — even as they host splashy ribbon-cuttings for the latest car infrastructure?

Miami Beach residents Charles Fischer and Matt Gultanoff asked themselves just that this summer, when local leaders in their home of Miami Beach staged an opening ceremony for a new parking garage. Those same leaders, though, didn’t consider active transportation infrastructure worthy of a photo-op. So the two men opted to host one themselves.

And their neighbors showed up in force. On September 17th, an unofficial ribbon-cutting event they had planned for a new bike lane attracted dozens of people and became a rallying point for safer streets.

“What started off as a little tongue-in-cheek way to poke fun at the city … turned into an actual meet-and-greet [for] neighbors who were passionately in favor of this bike lane,” Fischer said.

A young resident cuts the ribbon as Matt Gultanoff and Charles Fischer cheer on the new bike lane.

With only a Facebook post’s notice the day before the event, Fischer estimates that 35 to 40 neighbors showed up for their “guerrilla” event. Amongst the crowd were families and bike advocates, as well as elected leaders from Miami Beach and the neighboring town of Surfside. One group of cyclists spontaneously joined the party after riding past it from the new path.

Neighbors agree that the protected, two-way bike lane is a much-needed safety improvement, connecting homes along Jefferson Avenue to the rest of the Miami Beach. It’s widely popular, too — averaging nearly 600 daily trips, according to advocates with Better Streets Miami Beach and the Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association. One local mother, Miriam Haskell, even said that the bike lane gives her son the freedom to bike to soccer practice safely on his own.

Residents of the Flamingo Park neighborhood celebrated the bike lane as a needed alternative to driving.

But behind every smile at the ribbon cutting was a frustration with the city.

“We’re so focused on car and parking and car culture,” Fischer said.

The parking in question is a 300-space garage in the northern part of Miami Beach. In July, city leaders held their own ribbon cutting to celebrate the opening of the first 150 spaces to the public.

“We know how dire the need for parking is for the North Beach neighborhood, and this fills that need with 150 spots,” Mayor Steven Meiner said at the event, according to StreetsWatch, which is operated by Better Streets Miami Beach.

But the city’s own data, along with eyewitness accounts, tell a much less exciting story. One month after the splashy stunt, advocates found only three cars parked in the garage on a Friday afternoon; the following Sunday evening, there were seven.

A new parking garage in north Miami Beach has stayed mostly-empty since its July opening.

That underwhelming usage isn’t because the area is unpopular; the garage is just a five minute walk from a major commercial corridor. But with stops on two major bus lines just one block away — and one of those lines running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as often as every nine minutes — neighbors don’t really need to drive to reach it.

And for those who do, there are already four other lots within a one-block radius of the new garage.

Giving more space to cars simply isn’t a priority for Miami Beach neighbors, local surveys show. Year after year, Fischer says those documents have demonstrated that traffic congestion is the most-pressing issue residents face — a problem that’d be better solved by getting drivers out of their cars and onto bikes and buses.

“You can’t get off this island because there are so many cars,” he adds.

Recommended Study: More Protected Bike Lanes = More Micromobility Users Kea Wilson December 18, 2025

Fischer says city leaders aren’t solving any problems by making it easier to park, particularly when better mobility solutions like transit are already in full effect. Rather than celebrating what hasn’t worked — and what continues to fail — they could take a note from their own constituents.

Luckily, those constituents are making their priorities loud and clear. The advocates behind the ribbon cutting made a point to gather participants’ contact information, so they can alert them about future opportunities to show their support for people-centered infrastructure.

“A lot of people came [to our ribbon-cutting] ready to be activated and to move onto the next one,” Fischer said. “We met a lot of [neighbors] that I didn’t know at all … that felt so passionately about this that they showed up.

“Not only did they want to celebrate this, but they wanted to see what’s next — and they wanted to help make what’s next happen,” he continued.

What would taking a week off of driving cost you — and how much would you gain if your city made living car-free a realistic choice?

Ahead of next week’s Week Without Driving event, check out the latest from Bike Bike Nudge Nudge, where he calculates all the places he can’t go, activities he can’t participate in, wasted time he can’t get back, and rides he has to beg his wife to give him … all because his city is primarily planned around the automobile.

Mark your calendars for October 1 through 8 to take the Week Without Driving challenge yourself — or better yet, tell your elected officials who have never gone a day without getting behind the wheel to do it with you.

Watch this video on YouTube here.

The following article was adapted from The Story of Urban Planning by Ivis García and Jason Holt (Caracara Press, 2026), which tells planning history as one connected narrative rather than a set of disconnected movements. Available in print and ebook.

When states were first deciding where their interstates should go in the years right after the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the Bureau of Public Roads worked from a route-selection standard that more or less came down to this: 

Choose the route that minimizes construction cost, maximizes traffic capacity, and connects the urban core to the suburban ring in the least travel time.

When we read this sentence today, it’s not hard to see where we went wrong. 

At the time, the cheapest land in an American city sat in older, denser, lower-income neighborhoods: the same ones urban renewal was already clearing for the same reason. The path of least political resistance ran through communities with the least capacity to fight a federal program backed by billions of dollars and every state highway department in the country. 

No one had to name a target. The criteria did the selecting, in dozens of unrelated cities, with a consistency no individual decision can explain.

The idea that there’s one “villain” in the story of how the interstates were built is more satisfying, and more comforting, because villains can be defeated and then they are gone. Robert Moses, the unelected official who ran New York’s major public works for more than three decades, routed the Cross Bronx Expressway straight through dense Bronx neighborhoods. He lost his power in 1968 and died in 1981. 

Criteria, by contrast, do not die. They get reauthorized.

That’s not to say Moses didn’t have a harmful impact, or that his specific reasoning isn’t worth reading closely. For the Cross Bronx Expressway he had an alternative, a route slightly south through industrial land that would have taken fewer occupied buildings and displaced fewer families. He knew it existed. He chose the northern route anyway. 

Robert Caro, whose 1974 biography of Moses, “The Power Broker,” remains the standard account of his work, went through that decision in detail and found no tidy explanation. He noted just that Moses did not revisit a route once he had committed to it, and that objections from the people in the path carried little weight with him. Construction ran fifteen years, and estimates of the number of displaced along the seven miles run from forty thousand to sixty thousand people.

What followed was a loop rather than a single catastrophe. The elevated structure made the streets beside it loud, which made them less desirable, which moved out the families who could afford to move, which thinned the tax base, which thinned the services, which made the neighborhood less desirable still. The South Bronx of the 1970s had many authors. The expressway concentrated them in one place and sped them up.

The same arithmetic ran everywhere. In Nashville, Interstate 40 took 650 homes and 27 apartment buildings on the North Side, split a self-sufficient Black commercial district in two, and survived a federal court challenge brought by residents and Fisk University.

Read about the “freeway revolts,” the neighborhood campaigns that fought urban highway routes as soon as they were announced and stopped them outright in cities from San Francisco to Baltimore, and you’ll find people who understood this better than the profession did. 

Their argument was not against highways. It was about criteria: that the traffic benefit was smaller than the models claimed, the damage to the urban fabric never appeared on the ledger at all, and the people in the path held an interest the process had no way to count. Those freeway fighters were right about the models. Urban highways induce the traffic they are built to carry, filling to capacity as the access they provide encourages more driving.

Those criteria have followed us into the present. Houston is the clearest case running today. 

The North Houston Highway Improvement Project will take 168 single-family homes, 1,067 apartment units, 331 businesses employing nearly 25,000 people, four houses of worship, and two schools. Through downtown, the right of way grows from 220 feet to 570 feet. The cost has gone from about seven billion dollars to thirteen billion, with completion now projected around 2040. The engineering is better than anything available in the 1950s. The ledger still has no column for a congregation that loses the building it worships in.

That is what the spine of my book, The Story of Urban Planning, is drawn from. In chapter after chapter, planners identify a real problem, act on it with the best tools and knowledge their era hands them, and solve it. Then the solution becomes the problem which the next generation inherits. 

Which brings me to the part that should trouble everyone reading this, including me. Reforms outlive their moment the same way criteria do. The public review processes built to curb the harms of highways are now the ones used to stop projects that would make cities better. 

The freeway revolts won a real victory in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1962, which required a continuing, comprehensive and cooperative planning process, and in the participation requirements that followed. Those requirements worked. They also became the instrument that now blocks the apartment building, the bus lane, and the infill housing that would take pressure off the fringe. The same tool, pointed at different targets, now protects the status quo instead of the people in the path. 

That is not an argument for taking public participation away. It is an argument that we reformed the process and left the criteria alone, which made it harder to build everything instead of harder to build the wrong thing. Sixty years later, we are still optimizing travel time and still counting displacement as an acquisition cost.

Ask what your region’s decision rule rewards. Then ask what it has no way to count. That second list is where the damage happens. 

• Two of the three most expensive highway projects in the U.S. — the Rose Quarter widening and Interstate Bridge Project — are in Portland. Along with rebuilding the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, they cost more than $2 billion per mile. Others include projects in New Jersey, Louisiana, Washington, California, Wisconsin, Massachusetts and Connecticut. (City Observatory)
• Lifted pickups an rampant speed racing are signs of the MAGA-fication of roadways, (The Guardian).
• About 40 bikeshare trips take the equivalent of one car’s worth of pollution out of the atmosphere, according to a study by Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.
• Andrew Miller says that transit agencies haven’t adjusted to shifting post-COVID travel patterns; they should be adding service for popular weekend events like sports games and concerts, and focusing less on rush-hour commutes, which never came all the way back. (Changing Lanes)
• The Environmental Defense Fund shares lessons from the successful fight for congestion pricing in Manhattan.
• Florida passenger rail company Brightline is preparing to enter bankruptcy. (Bloomberg)
• Facing deficits topping $100 million, San Diego could eliminate a third of its bus routes and cut service on another third. (Union-Tribune)
• After pulling his support for light rail on the Atlanta Beltline, Mayor Andre Dickens now says he’ll release a funding plan by the end of the year. (Saporta Report)
• Charlotte is growing fast, but it’s still not acting like a big city in terms of transportation infrastructure. (Ledger)
• Despite a complete streets project on Park Avenue in Memphis, residents say it’s still too dangerous to walk on. (Fox 13)
• Sound Transit opened a new light rail station five years ahead of schedule. (KIRO)
• Tampa is offering free concerts on the TECO streetcar every fourth Friday through May. (Creative Loafing)
• Ithaca and hundreds of other cities organize “porch fest” music festivals in walkable neighborhoods. (CNU Public Square)