Streetsblog USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cities are underestimating VMTs

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

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

The usual playbook won’t work

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

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

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

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

The opportunity hiding inside the problem

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

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

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

Cities most automate the curb (AI for AI)

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

That means three things:

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

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

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

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

Airports are a testing ground

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

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

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

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

The window is closing quickly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is ATIIP So Critical? Photo: Allison Abruscato

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

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

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

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

Powerful Benefits for Communities Photo: City of Missoula

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

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

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

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

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

This approach has already been proven to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snow problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

Physical and social harm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning for the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we got here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How a broken insurance market is getting worse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What to do — and why to do it now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ride the bus — and get your steps in.

Transit agencies don’t do enough to remind policy makers, and even their own customers, of the connection between good public transportation and good public health, argues a new report that asserts that better messaging can strengthen the agencies’ funding and impact.

There is obviously already a consensus around transit’s physical and mental health benefits, but report, prepared for the Transportation Research Board, calls for agencies to communicate it better.

“Transit agencies [should] acknowledge the health benefits and use it to help get resources,” said Andrew Dannenberg, an affiliate professor at the University of Washington. “It’d be great if they’re saying, ‘Take transit, it’s good for your health,’ when they’re talking to legislators trying to get funding to build, maintain, and expand transit.”

The authors identified seven healthy outcomes directly linked to public transit — such as basic physical activity, cleaner air, fewer crashes and expanding social networks — but Danneberg emphasized that transit officials shouldn’t merely recite the list, but create messaging.

For instance, he said, “A quarter of people reach their recommended daily physical activity just by walking to and from transit. That is not a trivial amount.”

Case studies demonstrate the success of good health messaging in transit funding. In Boston a decade ago, a health assessment that identified the negative consequences that service cuts would have on community health and economic well-being led to those cuts as well as fare hikes to be pared back.

“The [assessment] fed directly into the decision-makers’ process towards coming up with a solution for the budget gap,” the report said. “By presenting monetized impacts in a succinct report, it appears the results were able to gain traction, and broaden the discourse to include consideration of health impacts.”

Transit funding is so often on the chopping block to close year-over-year budgets, but policy makers must be compelled to see the long-term budgetary implications of good transit towards people’s health. A case study from rural New Mexico recalled how a bus service saved Dona Ana County more than $600,000 annually by reducing hypertension and connecting people to preventative care. And two studies in Portland found that people living near transit have lower health-care costs — not a small finding in a nation that spent $5.3 trillion, or roughly $16,000 per person, on health care in 2024.

Yet health-care savings created by transit aren’t often plowed back into transit.

“The cost that you might save in health by having people more physically active are good for society overall,” says Dannenberg. “But they don’t translate into, ‘Good, now we got extra money that we can put into the transit systems.’”

Thus, some recommendations: First, transit agencies need to know their impact on community health. As the report notes, health benefits are complex, making it challenging at times to quantify. However, the report identifies research partnerships as key to doing so. For example, Boston’s health impact assessment was conducted by its regional planning agency in collaboration with researchers from Harvard and Boston University.

Second, communicating transit’s health benefits is just as important. The dense nature of scientific research tends to limit its audience to specialists. But the Boston example demonstrates that making findings generalizable also helps transit’s case. Broadening their audience, as well as who benefits from transit (hint: everyone!), is a key pivot.

“Benefits can also be realized by people who do not use transit,” the report stresses. “This is an important distinction when communicating the value of public transportation to decision-makers and the public.”

It’s unfair to expect transit officials — who are often in a desperate struggle for funding and must spend almost all of their time simply running their systems — to create health messaging. Instead, groups like the American Public Transportation Association must reframe transit for everyone’s well being, Dannenberg said.

“If you look at what’s on [the APTA] website about why transit’s good for you, health is kind of buried in there,” Dannenberg said. “But why not make that one of the stronger messages?”