Streetsblog USA

The movement to end seasonal time changes may be gaining momentum — but what would it mean for the safety of vulnerable road users?

The perennial debate over whether or not to roll back the clocks on the first Sunday in November hit a milestone this summer when the House of Representatives passed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would get rid of the fall and winter’s “standard time” hours and adopt spring and summer’s “daylight savings time” hours year-round.

That would effectively mean that Americans with nine-to-five work schedules would leave for their jobs in darker conditions on the shortest days of the year, in exchange for up to an extra hour of sunshine after work — with accompanying tradeoffs for U.S. travel patterns.

The bill has since stalled in the Senate transportation committee, but its proponents — which include nothing less than President Trump himself — claim that it still deserves serious consideration for its potential to encourage outdoor recreation in the evenings, and to narrow the likely window for nighttime crime.

Its potential to reduce traffic crashes, though, has been hotly debated for years, particularly among people who advocate for the safety of people outside cars.

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Since the concept of “standard time” arrived in 1883, North America’s transportation landscape has profoundly shaped our country’s approach to setting our clocks.

That’s because prior to the proliferation of railroads, U.S. residents observed a staggering 144 different local times that needed to be at least somewhat standardized into four standard mainland “zones” once communities were linked together by trains — at least until Daylight Savings Time came along and confused matters more.

Originally intended as an effort to conserve some of the energy used for indoor lighting at night during the first and second world wars, DST stubbornly hung on in some (but not all) U.S. states after the conflicts ended. That created an inconsistent map of varying temporal rules that still persists in part today, despite efforts to bring order to the chaos with the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Hawaii, Arizona, and US territories around the world still refuse to change their clocks, despite the fact that the other 48 states all do it.

Recommended Research: Permanent Daylight Savings Time Could Save Human and Animal Lives on Our Roads Kea Wilson November 9, 2022

Now, most U.S. residents say they’d prefer to skip the hassle of resetting their microwaves twice a year — though they split on which of the two seasonal adjustments they’d prefer to give up.

And the research isn’t clear on which one would be better for safety, either.

A 2022 study on which this website reported, for instance, found that not rolling clocks back in the winter could save at least 33 human lives and 36,550 deer in car-on-cervidae collisions every year, since drivers would get back a little more daylight for their evening commutes before nocturnal ungulates began crossing highways as part of their evening migration patterns.

Meanwhile, a 2025 study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety suggested that change could have an even more dramatic safety benefit for drivers, since “fatal crashes among motor-vehicle occupants decreased in the 5 weeks after the fall time change (-7.1%) and increased in the 5 weeks after the springtime change (+12%).”  

Disturbingly, though, the opposite was true for fatal crashes among pedestrians and bicyclists. Their death tolls surged 13 percent after clocks fell back in the fall — and dipped 24 percent after they sprang forward in the spring.

Recommended Dusk and Dawn Are Deadly for Walkers — But Traffic Pros Don’t Know the Full Extent of It Kea Wilson May 11, 2022

IIHS researcher Amber Woods said no single variable fully explained that contradiction, though “for bicyclists and pedestrians, the biggest factor appears to be the changing light conditions during key driving periods.”

Drivers, by contrast, may get more drowsy in the springtime when they lose an hour of sleep to the time change, and may drive better in the fall when they abruptly gain one; they also might be less inclined to speed on sometimes-icy late fall roads than they are to hit the gas on dry spring streets when they slept through an alarm.

Data isn’t yet available on how this past weekend’s change impacted roadway death totals,  — though considering that it gave Halloween revelers an extra hour to party on a Saturday night, the news isn’t expected to be good, particularly given the holiday’s association with increased drunk driving and phone distraction. And there’s no telling how many other confounding factors may complicate the picture of what time changes more broadly might mean for road safety.

“These findings won’t end the debate about daylight saving time,” IIHS President David Harkey said in a release. “The benefits for bicyclists and pedestrians are important because that’s where the fatality numbers have increased the most over the past decade. However, they’re largely offset by an increase in crashes in which vehicle occupants were killed.”

Recommended The Other Reason American Pedestrian Deaths are Rising After Dark Kea Wilson December 11, 2023

Of course, Vision Zero advocates argue that since all road deaths are preventable, it’s not enough to just pick the time change that nets out to the fewest casualties overall — and certainly not to offer people outside cars as sacrificial lambs. Rather, we must reckon with the fact that three quarters of pedestrian deaths happen in the dark no matter what number appears on the clock — and take an aggressive, systemic approach to saving those lives.

That means we have to do the obvious things, like installing streetlights, HAWK signals, and other infrastructure to make pedestrians and bicyclists more visible after sunset. Redesigning roads and cars to slow motorists to less-deadly speeds when they do crash is essential, too, as is doing more to limit the functionality of distracting cell phone features when drivers are behind the wheel — particularly when time changes coincide with major holidays that tempt motorists to text about their party plans.

But it also means thinking more expansively about how our national street safety epidemic and our national epidemic of car dependency reinforce one another — particularly after nightfall.

And that means addressing the suburbanization of poverty that has late-shift workers schelpping home along busy arterials after the bus stops running. It means dismantling an unsustainable work culture where drivers have to rush to punch a clock even when they’re too exhausted from a time change to drive, and where few have the freedom to leave their jobs to travel home at a safer daylight hour. It means taking dedicated action to stop hit-and-runs, which spike after dark and disproportionately injure people outside of automobiles.

And it certainly means providing more mobility alternatives, like increased nighttime transit service, if only to halt the cycle of unwalkability that leaves so many vulnerable road users traveling alone at night.

However we do it, it’s time to shine a light on the unique dangers of walking and biking after dark — and stop pretending that ditching seasonal time changes will make a significant difference if we don’t.

Streetsblog reported this summer  that Waymo robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer police-reportable crashes than human drivers, according to an independent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study. That is meaningful progress. The same article also made the limitation of crash statistics clear: they do not capture problems such as vehicles blocking bike lanes or emergency responders, passing school buses, or creating other street-level hazards.

That gap matters now. In July, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warned that it had identified a pattern of driverless vehicles interfering with law enforcement and other first responders. Later that month, NHTSA said it was accelerating development of the first federal performance standards for automated vehicles.

But those standards should cover more than whether a robotaxi can drive well in ordinary conditions. They should also make automakers spell out what the vehicle is allowed to do when the street stops behaving like the test course.

‘Safer on average’ — but not at every moment

A robotaxi can be safer than a human driver overall and still create a serious problem in an unusual situation.

An ambulance may need it to clear an intersection. A police officer may wave traffic through in a way that conflicts with the usual signal. A construction worker may direct cars around an obstruction. A cyclist may have to move around a vehicle stopped where it should not be.

These situations involve driving skill, but they also involve limits. The vehicle needs rules for when it can act on its own, when it must slow or stop, and when a person with legitimate authority can override its normal behavior.

Those rules should be part of the safety test.

Regulators do not need access to every line of software. They need evidence that the vehicle recognizes situations outside its normal playbook, takes a safe default action, and gives authorized people a reliable way to intervene.

Make the limits a part of the test

Believe it or not, NHTSA can build exceptional situations into the performance standards already under development.

First, manufacturers must identify high-risk road conditions in which ordinary driving rules may conflict with emergency directions, temporary street conditions, or the safety of people outside the vehicle. Next, they should demonstrate what the vehicle will do in each case — and what happens when its confidence drops.

Remote assistance also needs clear limits. A remote operator who helps a stuck vehicle should have defined powers rather than an open-ended ability to make anything happen. Regulators should know what actions a remote helper can authorize, how those actions are logged, and how quickly the authority can be withdrawn if something goes wrong.

This idea has a broader foundation in AI research. A peer reviweed analysis of explainable artificial intelligence by Plamen Angelov and colleagues highlights “knowledge limits” as a core principle: a system should identify situations it was not designed to handle reliably.

The transportation version is one of the more concrete samples. A robotaxi should know when the situation has moved beyond ordinary driving — and follow a tested procedure for what comes next.

Give road users a visible safety contract

The public does not need a technical manual. Cities, regulators, and road users need a plain-language safety contract that explains how robotaxis behave around first responders, temporary traffic control, blocked lanes, school buses, cyclists, pedestrians, and other predictable exceptions.

That would strengthen the case for automated driving rather than weaken it. Better crash performance deserves recognition. Clear limits make that performance more trustworthy because people can see what happens when averages stop being useful and the street presents the system with an exception.

The next generation of AV safety standards should therefore test two things together: how well the vehicle drives, and how safely it behaves when ordinary rules no longer tell the whole story.

• The Trump administration’s announced policy tying transit grants to marriage and birth rates will only serve to hold up projects even further, and to funnel more money to rural counties that need it less than denser areas. (Transportation for America)
• One reason why U.S. cities have too much parking is that people feel like there’s never enough even when plenty is available, according to Paul Supawanich. And of course, all that parking is never free, even if the big-box store doesn’t charge customers directly.
• On the eve of Election Day, Smart Growth America highlights past ballot victories for complete streets.
• Whether California can set its own emissions standards could hinge on the outcome of tomorrow’s elections. (Politico)
• Prop 319 would ban traffic enforcement cameras in Arizona. (KTAR)
• An ICE agent was charged with aggravated assault in Houston for using his SUV to run over a man fleeing on foot. (Jezebel)
• Fort Worth and TEXRail officials broke ground on a light rail extension to the city’s medical district. (Report)
• CityNerd examines how you go about fixing sprawl in a city like Las Vegas that barely existed until the automobile era.
• Jacksonville has not always been using gas tax revenue set aside for bike and pedestrian projects for its intended purpose. (First Coast News)
• Four-minute peak frequencies are driving ridership on Seattle’s busiest light rail segment. (The Urbanist)
• London Mayor Sadiq Khan is calling for a cap on robotaxis. (The Guardian)
• Dozens of people in Toronto spent their Halloween protesting the Ontario government removing bike lanes. (CBC)

Few U.S. neighborhoods are living up to their full Halloween potential — but they could with a few long-term urban planning tricks and short-term community activation treats.

Check out the latest from City Beautiful, which breaks down how to make communities not just more walkable for spooky season, but more connected and neighborly year-round. And it’s not just about giant Home Depot skeletons and full-sized candy bars … though that certainly doesn’t hurt.

It’s essential viewing as we enter into the one night of the year that transforms everyone into a pedestrian.

• Halloween is one of the most dangerous nights for pedestrians. In the absence of safe streets for walking, Quartz has tips for reducing the odds that your child will be run over, or that you kill a child while behind the wheel.
• The World Cup showed that ramping up transit for major events can have positive lasting effects for residents when the surge is over. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Housing and transportation policy must be mixed to make each more affordable, according to Yonah Freemark. (Urban Institute)
• A Florida referendum on reducing property taxes would cost Miami-Dade transit $29 million in revenue, forcing cuts to routes and hours. (CBS News)
• Caltrain’s ridership grew by more than 50 percent last year, thanks to electrification. (Metro Magazine)
• Future California Gov. Xavier Becerra is likely to fire the head of California’s high-speed rail project, and is open to vehicle-miles-driven tax. (KCRA)
• Chicago passed an ordinance banning car-centric businesses like drive-throughs and gas stations near transit-oriented developments. (CNU Public Square)
• Utah is adopting the Michigan left, where drivers turn right and then make a U-turn. (Salt Lake Tribune)
• The South Carolina DOT is spending $300 million to make sure Columbia drivers don’t have to wait on trains. (WLTX)
• The Dallas city council approved $2.8 million in streetcar funding while still questioning the return on investment. (Observer)
• Omaha has spent more than $400 million acquiring downtown parking garages, about the same amount as it’s spending to build a streetcar. (Flatwater Free Press)
• Boise chip manufacturer Micron promises that a $50 billion investment will benefit transit and housing. (Boise Dev)
• There is some vague reason behind Detroit bikeshare MoGo suspending service, other than not socializing. (Axios)
• A high-speed train collision in Spain killed almost 70 people. (ABC News)
• If the Canadian province of Alberta forces Edmonton to rip out bike lanes, it would cost at least $150 million. (CBC)

Look out! L.A. City turned on its new automated speed enforcement cameras this week. Learn all about the program at the L.A. City Transportation Department (LADOT) program website, earlier Streetsblog coverage, or at KTLA, NBC4, LA Times, Reddit or LAist.

Click here to donate to Streetsblog, or just scroll down for how to hack city speed cameras.

1 – Only Speed up to 10 Miles Over the Posted Limit

The cameras don’t really ticket all speeders. They only ticket you if you drive 11 miles or more over the posted speed limit. So, as long as you want to wherever you want to, but keep within ten miles of the speed limit.

Even if you get a ticket, the less you speed the cheaper the ticket is. If you go 11 to 15 miles over the limit, it’s only a $50 ticket. It’s way more if you go like 150 miles over the speed limit!

Hack: if you speed just a little, you can’t get a ticket! And you’ll never get a $500 ticket if you don’t go 100 mph over the limit. 2 – Only Speed Now, But Not in 2027

Even though the city wants you to believe that the cameras are live right now, they’re not! Well, sort of. For the first 60 days, the automated cameras only give warnings, which the city mails to you, then you can just throw away.

Speed all you like for the next 60 days – get it out of your system! – and then, make a new year’s resolution to not speed in 2027, and stick to it, and you’ll be just fine.

3 – Only Speed Once

Even after the first 60 day warning period, there’s a simple get-out-of-speed-jail card you can play. The city speed camera program never tickets first-offenders!

Even if you go 100 miles per hour (not recommended), the first automatic ticket that the city sends you is just one of those silly warnings, that we already told you you can throw away.

4 – Only Speed in Certain Cities

According to state law, automated speed camera programs are only permitted in certain cities. As long as you don’t speed in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, or Malibu (and Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose – but really who drives there?) you’ll never get an automated speeding ticket!

Look for the PHOTO ENFORCED sign – they only ticket you after you pass this sign!

If you drive outside these city limits – like say in Santa Monica or Pasadena or Palmdale – they won’t be using fancy AI gizmos to ticket you for speeding!

And, pro-tip, even if you’re driving in those speed-trap cities, they only automatically issue tickets in locations where there’s a sign that shows the speed limit, and says “PHOTO ENFORCED.” If you have quick reflexes, you can speed in places like L.A., then when you see that sign, slam on the brakes before you pass the sign, and you won’t get the automatic citation.

5 – Carpool, Bike, Walk, or Take Transit

And, yes, you’re reading this at a pro-bike/walk/transit website, so it’s all pretty tongue-in-cheek, no?

You know you won’t get a speeding ticket ever when you walk, carpool, or ride the bus or the train. And you have to bike really fast, usually downhill, to get a bike speeding ticket.

Speed cameras save lives. Slow down so everyone can get where they’re going safely.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Naama Blonder to talk about the book she wrote (with Misha Bereznyak), “Building Charm: A Hyper Practical Guide to Developing Outstanding New Neighborhoods.” We chat about the book’s focus on human scale and how it radically rethinks street design.

This is not for the faint of heart.

Now, you know the Talking Headways drill:

• Listen to the podcast by clicking on the player below.
• Read the full transcript by clicking here.
• Or read an edited excerpt below the player to get the gist.

Edited segment:

Jeff Wood: This is a transportation book, and this is a radical book, and you guys buried the lede with the book cover and the title being about “charm.”

But really it’s about rethinking the functional classification system of roads and basically the street hierarchies to form a place that is more people-oriented. And this blew my mind because I’ve been in this space for 20 years. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about transit-oriented development over many, many years. And I’ve just never quite put my finger on, like you have, why the neighborhoods that we are building now can’t quite match up to the places that everybody loves. And your thinking about buildings and stuff is great.

But it comes down to the basic foundations of the street, and I found that fascinating. I was kinda yelling at the book, “This is amazing. This is something different. This is something we don’t hear about a lot.”

Naama Blonder: OK, here’s the truth. First of all, it’s our first book. Not a day goes by with me not thinking, “Was it the right title?” …. We wanted to make this book bigger and greater and we wanted the title of the book to be the prize.

What is the prize of the book? We first named the book, “Dense and Charming.” I did English as my second language, and I didn’t know that “dense” means an idiot or stupid. And then someone told us, “Uh, I don’t think that’s a good title.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? That’s a great title, ‘Dense and Charming.'” And he’s like, “No, ‘dense’ means ‘stupid.'” And I was like, “Oh, OK. So maybe I do need to change the title.” We wanted the title to be the prize with it, with this, like the outcome, a, a positive result.

And when you say it’s about streets, I agree with you, because at the end of the day, I also need to translate this to clients. What does it actually mean? And it means that I need to go to your municipal team and tell them that their engineering standards need to be revised. And today’s standards are that the most intimate residential street is 20 meters wide. That’s very wide. We don’t need that width for our most-intimate residential streets.

So a lot of it comes down to that. It’s not just about streets, but it is how we overly accommodated car convenience over people. And I think we have five decades that we need to correct now because we inherited that, and we have not questioned the status quo.

Jeff Wood: I didn’t mean to like rag on the book because I do think there is something to be said about the wording that you can get into more people’s heads. But if you’re thinking at it from my perspective — deep in the weeds — there’s something to be said about how this is a radical transportation book. Ultimately what you’re doing is breaking down what “human scale” means in a building format, and putting that into a plan.

But it is going to be hard because of all the things that you mentioned: Service access, car access, the size of streets, etc. One of the interesting things that you talked about in here is, like, trying to get pedestrian-oriented streets, and then saying, “Well, maybe you don’t have to have them on all streets. You could just say that they’re the open space, and then make them the walkable street that you want them to be because then you don’t have to deal with all the standards.”

So you’re pushing back against something that’s very deeply ingrained, but it needs to be pushed back against because we can’t just focus on these two-ton vehicles that take up 250 square feet of space for one person. A people-orientation is what makes these neighborhoods charming. It’s what makes you love going to old parts of a city. I live in San Francisco in the center part of the city. My house was built in 1892. It was before cars even existed. And I love it. It’s amazing, and it creates those social ties that you talk about in the book.

I know my shopkeepers. I know the people around me. I know all of my neighbors. I know goes on on my street, and I think that’s kind of the thing that we, as a profession, are missing out of our designs is, like, creating that people-oriented center, and it starts with the street grid or the street network as you all have imagined it.

Naama Blonder: Thank you. Was there a question?

Jeff Wood: This is a conversation

Naama Blonder: I’m kidding, but, you know, I did receive one email that says, “Your book is wonderful, each and every part of it, but the transportation part of it where you are not radical enough.” Listen, we call this hyper-practical — not practical, but the hyper-practical. We wanted this to be something implementable. We’re not talking about the day when we live car-free or self-driving cars will be around. No, we want you to have a tool to design with it.

In the book, we are proposing a system of streets, the service streets and the people streets, and we’re saying right now we’re treating a new development. There’s this term complete streets, which is another term for let’s have everything under one street, the car, and the parking, and the bike lane, and the transit, and the sidewalk.

And here, you end up with just something between 38 and 45 meter right of way, which is again 135 feet, right? Let’s just put or load everything that we need on every street. And let’s have a hierarchy of streets. In our plans, we use the through street, the mews or the car-light street, and the pedestrian street.

And even the car-light street we design it much narrower than most standards require. And yes, I have only positive experience with municipalities when I approach them. Did I work with every municipality in North America? No, but the ones that I have worked with were very positively accepting what we are trying to do, and agree to work with us, because the standards are a recommendation.

They’re a starting point. They’re not the zoning necessarily that you need to change. With that, we are trying to offer a menu of streets. Yes, we accommodating the car. Yes, there are services. Yes, you need an Amazon delivery. Yes, you need fire safety, and you need emergency, and you need, here, not in San Francisco, you need snowplowing machines and we, we accommodate all of that.

But right now, we are overly accommodating that with, a lot of asphalt. And, uh, going back to why focusing on charm, when we are spending so much land on asphalt, we’re not using the land for the things that we need, which is more housing right now.

• President Trump announced that the EPA is “terminating” the Biden administration’s limits on methane produced by oil and gas drilling — the largest source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. (Associated Press)
• From makeup and appliances to highways and subdivisions, the fossil fuel industry in the mid-20th century used advertising and PR campaigns to create demand for its products. It’s an outdated vision of the American Dream that the Trump administration still shares today. (Grist)
• Noah Kaufmann says that economists are being shortsighted by recommending policies that cut greenhouse gas emissions the most cheaply. Such incremental changes achieve diminishing returns, even when added up, and ignore long-term effects. (The Argument)
• Billy Cooney dismantles Randal O’Toole’s argument that public transit should not be subsidized because people prefer to drive by pointing out that people probably wouldn’t prefer to drive if driving weren’t so massively subsidized. (Flaneurbanist)
• ClimatePlan put together a playbook for California’s next governor to boost funding for transit and encourage more walkable, bikeable communities.
• The Detroit city council’s Green Task Force is advocating for complete streets. (Bridge Detroit)
• The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority started construction on its first “arterial rapid transit” line, which the agency is touting as being faster and cheaper to build than bus rapid transit, utilizing signal priority rather than dedicated lanes. (Urbanize Atlanta)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit is considering allowing dogs on buses and trains. (KING)
• New interactive kiosks at Philadelphia bikeshare docks will help users navigate the city. (NBC 10)
• Before the advent of automobiles, Houston prioritized sidewalks over carriageways. (What Are Streets For?)
• Bloomberg Originals produced a video explaining how Hong Kong transit turns a profit using land-value capture.

A proposed federal surveillance ban may threaten speed and red light camera programs across the country, which some advocates say would force cities to pick between privacy and street safety.

Following months of rumors, The Flock-Off Act was officially introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in September, with promises to withdraw all federal funds from any municipality that contracts with a surveillance camera operator. And that’s not just limited to the notorious technology company for which the bill is named, which has deployed an estimated 116,000 motion-triggered cameras in neighborhoods across the US.

Massie claims that his bill prohibits the surveillance of “law-abiding citizens”, not drivers running red lights or speeding. But some advocates fear that the bill’s wide-reaching language about automatic cameras intended to facilitate the “recording of a motor vehicle” would effectively ban all automated traffic enforcement nationwide.

I’ll soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law abiding citizens. pic.twitter.com/FGzE69psxS

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 25, 2026

Of course, many street safety advocates do want lawmakers to do more to confront Flock — even if they don’t agree with sweeping bans on other, less-intrusive camera technology.

Since its founding in 2017, the company has faced criticism for offering a near-constant stream of motion-activated footage to law enforcement, tracking every car it sees using the vehicle’s license plate, model, and even characteristics like paint scratches or dents. And people outside cars aren’t immune from its gaze, either.

“A pedestrian, bicyclist, or animal who happens to be caught in the frame of a Flock camera can be swept up in the vast and unregulated Flock surveillance network,” wrote the Oregon ACLU.

Speed and red light cameras, by contrast, are only triggered to record when drivers speed, run red lights, or otherwise break roadway laws. In San Francisco, excessive speeding is down 84 percent where cameras are installed.

Even where collisions do still occur, those lower speeds translate into much better outcomes for victims. Pedestrians struck at 40 miles per hour have an 85 percent chance of dying, but at 20 miles per hour, the probability decreases to five percent.

Automated red light enforcement has a similarly positive impact. Cameras are shown to decrease red-light running overall, and reduce injury crashes by 20 percent.

Advocates like McKenzie Ortiz, who creates content about street safety under the Instagram account @pedestrianpride, say it’d be a shame if Massie’s bill makes those types of programs illegal.

“I feel like the red light and speed cameras caught a stray,” she said.

Dr. Kelcie Ralph, a researcher at Rutgers University who studies traffic enforcement, was also disappointed by the bill’s conflation of two vastly different types of camera programs.

“It’s such a same,” she said. “[Automated traffic enforcement] is so … different than what’s happening with [Flock].”

Recommended S.F. Advocates Mark One Year of Speed Cameras Roger Rudick April 29, 2026

Some advocates suspect that the benefits of automated enforcement can extend even farther for Black Americans — and that Massie’s bill would be doubly harmful for their communities.

Police are more likely to use force against Black drivers during traffic stops. Ortiz, a Black woman herself, supports using speed and red light cameras as a substitute for road patrols.

“We already feel the effects of over-policing,” she said. “If it meant less police officers on our streets … but still the level of enforcement that could encourage people to drive more safely, that would be a sacrifice that I would be willing to make.”

Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Ca.), a co-sponsor of the Flock-Off Act, acknowledged how automated traffic enforcement differs from Flock.

“I’m for speed and red light cameras,” he said in an interview with Streetsblog. “You don’t have speed and red light cameras being abused by police officers.”

Recommended Street Safety and Police Reform Are Two Sides of the Same Coin Kea Wilson May 18, 2026

Khanna did not clarify what, if any, steps he was taking to exempt street safety programs from the bill. He did suggest that he viewed the legislation as a temporary measure to address Flock in the immediate term.

“What we’re saying is to shut off that federal funding until we get some privacy regulation,” he added.

If the Flock-Off Act is indeed a pause, its sponsors are not alone in wanting one.

Kelsey Huse, is a Memphis, Tennessee-based organizer behind the Instagram account @MemphisUrbanism. She generally supports automated traffic enforcement, but feels that a moratorium on camera surveillance is necessary to address the Flock problem.

“It’s just a messy topic right now,” she said.

Recommended Is Automated Enforcement Making U.S. Cities Safer or Just Raising Revenue? Kea Wilson March 20, 2024

Huse’s concerns aren’t limited to Flock, either, since speed and red light cameras have room to grow, too. For starters, cities must address the financial incentives driving how programs are managed.

Despite Rep. Khanna’s contention that police don’t “abuse” automated enforcement, reports show that some police departments do site cameras on speed-inducing roads specifically to raise the traffic fine revenues on which their budgets over-rely. A 2024 Fines and Fees Justice Center analysis even argued that “the expansion of automated traffic enforcement simply creates a new and more effective way to fine exponentially more people.”

Huse has the same concern.

“Is our goal to reduce traffic violence events, or is our goal to make money off of tickets?” she added.

Ralph, who led a 2022 study on improving automated enforcement programs, says that the concern is valid — and has implications for safety outcomes, too. Amongst them is a scenario in which a speed camera operator, receiving a share of the revenue of each ticket issued, places cameras where they are likely to catch a maximum number of violations, not where they are most needed.

“When a speed limit shifts from 35 to 25 [miles per hour], you post up there, you get a lot of drivers in the transition — but maybe there are no crashes there,” she said.

Recommended UIC Study: Speed cams save lives, but drivers from POC communities get more tickets John Greenfield January 11, 2022

Some advocates also cite the potential for racial discrimination as a key drawback of automated systems. A 2022 study found that automated enforcement cameras in Chicago issued a disproportionate number of tickets in the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods.

Though the study could not identify the race of the drivers themselves, the findings raise significant concerns about a technology touted as a fair alternative to traditional enforcement.

The Flock-Off Act, though, doesn’t attempt to address any of those concerns, instead banning them outright.

Ralph says that’s a shame, considering how many levers cities have available to them to ensure cameras are used fairly. For example cities could invest ticket money back into infrastructure to improve street safety — preferably close to the camera’s location, so no one gets hurt there again.

“How you spend the [revenue from tickets] matters a ton,” she said.

Recommended Four Ways To Build A Better Automated Enforcement Program Kea Wilson December 14, 2022

Ralph also encouraged cities and towns to reconsider how they use monetary fines as a punishment.

“There’s a real concern that [automated traffic enforcement] is a tool for the … pipeline from poverty to prison,” she said. Rather than creating a flat-rate for fines, she suggests a smaller fee for a first infraction, to mitigate excessive punishment of drivers who are unlikely to be repeat offenders.

On the other hand, some drivers may not be dissuaded by a ticket at all.

After repeat violations, Ralph suggests that governments consider non-monetary punishments like mandatory speed governors. One 2022 study from New Zealand found the devices to be incredibly effective at limiting recurring speeding, providing some hope for the strategy’s viability in the US.

Recommended ANALYSIS: When Speed Cameras Are Racist Kea Wilson January 18, 2022

If nothing else, advocates say the architects of automated enforcement programs need to learn from Flock’s mistakes and warn communities that they’re about to installed – while offering education about their potential to save lives.

Shawn Joseph, a transit advocate and software engineer in Irvine, California, says Flock cameras cropped up in his neighborhood with minimal to no public input.

“People want the technology in their communities to be a choice,” Joseph said.

With proper enforcement, catching dangerous drivers in the act can deter the behavior in the future. But Joseph, Huse, Ortiz and Ralph all emphasized that designing streets for lower speeds can deter bad driving before it happens. Narrowing 10 to 13 foot travel lanes to nine feet, for instance, can reduce crashes on higher-speed roads.

“We should really start with how we’re designing our streets,” Ortiz said. “Make it uncomfortable to speed and uncomfortable to run red lights.”

Preventative design can even mitigate concerns of surveillance by taking punishment out of the equation altogether.

If you are worried about privacy, just drive the speed limit,” Ralph stated.

New York City residents are riding commuter trains at record rates thanks to cheaper tickets that let people pay less to ride between stations inside city limits, MTA officials said on Wednesday.

Ridership on the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad has nearly rebounded to pre-pandemic numbers — largely thanks to disproportionate ridership growth in New York City, whose residents have taken advantage of $5 off-peak and $7 peak “City Tickets” for intracity travel that the MTA expanded from a weekend-only deal in 2022.

Ridership at city stations has grown a flabbergasting 180 percent compared to just four years ago, according to figures revealed at Wednesday’s MTA board member.

Commuter rails have become a popular ride for New Yorkers in the last few years.

“Ridership at stations within New York City is outpacing ridership growth at at non-New York City stations,” said MTA Chief Customer Officer Shanifah Rieara. “That growth has exploded since the expansion of the weekday City Ticket back in 2022.”

LIRR President Rob Free said the agency’s move to attract more riders has paid off handsomely. This year, 29 percent of all ticket sales on the commuter railroads were City Tickets, and ridership has increased by 478 percent at the Laurelton station in Queens and 503 percent at the Melrose station in the Bronx.

“In looking at ways to increase ridership, address transit deserts and provide more affordable travel options for New York City residents, we uncovered a new market for commuter rail service,” Free said on Wednesday. “From 2022 to 2025 [City Ticket] ticket sales grew a whopping 361 percent for the commuter railroads.

The MTA introduced the City Ticket in 2003 as a $4.50 weekend-only discount ride for intracity travel on the LIRR and Metro-North. Advocates and elected officials spent the following years pushing the MTA to make even better use of its commuter rail stations inside the five boroughs, many of which are service neighborhoods with limited or zero subway service. In 2022, the agency began offering a $5 off-peak version of the ticket; in 2023, it introduced a $7 peak option, Gov. Kathy Hochul endorsed the idea as a way to encourage post-pandemic transit ridership.

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Advocates who pushed the MTA to open the city to more potential riders celebrated the good news as proof that giving people options can increase ridership.

“The success of the City Ticket shows that people want to be able to choose their mode of choice or whatever is easiest for them to make their trip shorter, and that riding the railroad is often that that way of travel,” said Lisa Daglian, the executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. “We recommended this dozens of years ago, and are thrilled that it’s going stronger than ever.”

Daglian and the PCAC previously pushed the MTA to more widely adopt a different type of discount commuter rail ride that they called the Freedom Ticket. The proposed arrangement would have paired a weekly City Ticket with a seven-day MetroCard. While the MetroCard has gone the way of the Laserdisc, Daglian still hoped the MTA would explore more ways to take advantage of the clear interest in the City Ticket.

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Transit Advocates Seek Even More ‘Atlantic Ticket’-Style Discounts on Intra-City Commuter Rail
Dave Colon

October 14, 2021

“We continue to encourage the MTA to look at a City Ticket weekly, a City Ticket monthly, a City Ticket with some kind of transfer to transit. Give the people what they want. If it works, make it better. And it works, so we can make it even better. Let’s figure out how to do that, now’s the time,” she said.

MTA leadership wouldn’t commit to adding a subway transfer to the City Ticket, but said they were open to exploring ways to grow the program and introduce even more discounts.

“We will always consider them as part of our consideration of strategies to keep the system affordable,” said MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber. “We’re always looking at new ideas in the appropriate time frame.”

Seattle just passed a pair of bills aimed at giving the city’s theoretical commitment to Vision Zero real teeth— and the pressure is on to pass the third part of the package, which proponents say could really take the Emerald City’s street safety aspirations to the next level.

On Monday, the Seattle City Council unanimously approved two out of three of the policies collectively known as the SAFER Streets package — short for “Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Equitable and Responsive” — which sponsor and transportation committee Chair Rob Saka said could help “move Vision Zero from an aspirational policy into durable law.”

Those approved policies include a push to get city contractors to install “side guards” that prevent pedestrians and bicyclists from being swept under the wheels of trucks, as well as granting the city’s Traffic Engineer the dual title of “Chief Safety Officer” and new powers to install quick-build safety improvements after a crash.

The third policy — whose vote Seattle Bike Blog’s Tom Fucoloro says was punted until “at least November 10” due to concerns about historic districts — would make even more ambitious changes.

Those include requiring “daylighting” treatments every time certain roads are repaved to make it easier for drivers to see oncoming cyclists and walkers; upping the frequency at which the city updates its Vision Zero action plan from every five years to every three; and enhancing data collection and reporting requirements for traffic safety concerns across the board, among other measures.

Taken together, Chair Saka said those initiatives would represent a leap forward in the city’s fight to end traffic deaths and serious injuries, which critics warn may be stalling out. Pedestrian deaths nearly doubled in Seattle between 2024 and 2025, despite a groundswell of demand for more action to stop the bloodshed.

“At least in Seattle, we know the tools that can save lives,” Saka added. “This is about putting those tools into municipal law, empowering people to act faster, and just making safety a part of how Seattle operates every single day.”

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Saka said the SAFER Streets package was directly inspired by Seattle advocates, who demanded policy change following a rash of recent road deaths in the cycling and pedestrian communities.

In particular, he cited the killing of Christian Sayler, 30, who died on June 1 at the hands of a turning garbage truck driver, as well as the death of 76-year-old Maridee Bonadea, who a different truck driver killed in Saka’s district just two weeks later. Some advocates say both riders could have been saved if the vehicles had been equipped with side guards.

“We’re reminded all the time that there’s more work to do,” Saka said. “I’ve personally been to a fair amount of tribute rides and ghost bike memorials, and spoken extensively with impacted families and victims of car violence … Local advocates are demanding immediate changes.”

Seattle may be uniquely primed for those sorts of changes since the election of Mayor Katie Wilson, whose background as a transit organizer helped propel her into office last year. Wilson signed a Vision Zero executive order in August, many measures of which heavily overlap with the SAFER Streets package; it’s also bolstered by an eight-year, $1.55 billion transportation levy enacted in 2024, hundreds of millions of which are specifically earmarked to save lives.

Much of the money could sit on the shelf, however, if the council doesn’t take action to spend it, Saka said. And Wilson’s orders could easily be rolled back if they’re not codified into law before she leaves office.

“The truth of the matter is that personnel change … and elected officials change [too],” he added. “Just because the mayor acts or does not act, that doesn’t absolve me as a lawmaker of my responsibility to keep people safe on our roads and our streets.”

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In addition to truck side guards — which have been a goal for safety advocates across the country for years, and which Boston has required on city-owned at city-contracted vehicles since 2014 — Saka said his package would pave the way for broader change, especially if its stalled elements can find passage. He’s particularly passionate about the bill’s potential to speed the city’s response to installing infrastructure after fatal crashes, which he says often takes far too long.

As the self-proclaimed “unapologetic King of Potholes” — a moniker he even lists on his LinkedIn bio — Saka says he’s proud that his district addresses 80 percent of the reported road defects within 72 hours, and doesn’t accept that the city can’t act with similar urgency when someone dies.

“It could be six-plus months between the time of a fatality and when any actual remediation or safety upgrade is made to address the root causes of that fatality,” he added. “This [bill] puts us on a path to a faster response time.”

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

Even if every component of the SAFER Streets package passes, Saka said there will still be more work to do to ensure Seattle becomes the first large US city to actually achieve Vision Zero. Considering how local historic boards have opposed the kind of daylighting measures the bill proposes in the past, that’s a big “if.”

“There’s no legislation there’s no piece of single piece of legislation — or legislative package, or executive order — that can guarantee no more traffic deaths or serious injuries,” he said. “But I do know that without [this package], we’re going to continue floundering.”

Still, he said that the time is ripe to pick this low-hanging fruit — and hopefully, inspire other US cities to get more aggressive about saving lives, too.

“At least in Seattle, I think Vision Zero is moving beyond an ideological constituency and becoming basic municipal public safety governance,” he added. “That’s a good thing. People win; taxpayers win; the residents and visitors of the city of Seattle win.”

• More than 20 communities in 11 states have transportation referendums on the ballot this November (Smart Cities Dive).
• One is a 0.5 percent sales tax in Seattle to support bus service (Seattle Times; paywall).
• Another is in the Bay Area, where Max Mautner notes that residents pay more in taxes to subsidize highways than they do for transit.
• …and in Florida, an amendment to cut property taxes would devastate transit funding (Tampa Bay Times).
• A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposal would require autonomous vehicles to use cyan lights to indicate there’s no human driver. (The Verge)
• Parking in a garage is much more expensive than parking on the street in most big cities, which is the opposite of the way it should be. (Government Technology)
• Amtrak will have an online public hearing about its restructuring next month. (Trains)
• Chicago’s new transit agencies has broad powers to develop land. (Sun-Times)
• The new Crosslake Connection in Seattle is shifting transit riders from buses to trains, allowing Sound Transit to beef up bus service elsewhere. (Seattle Transit Blog)
• Dallas Area Rapid Transit’s newly hired CEO is under investigation by authorities in Florida, where he previously led Jacksonville’s transit agency. (Dallas Observer)
• Valley Metro is asking for public input on the West Phoenix light rail line’s route. (KJZZ)
• Only one third of New Orleans jobs are accessible by transit, severely limiting opportunities for residents who don’t own cars. (Lens)
• The Birmingham suburb of Clay lacks sidewalks, but Jefferson County has no plans to build any. (ABC 33/40)
• Albuquerque installed a protected bike lane on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. (Journal)
• Seoul started running a self-driving shuttle. (Korea Times)
• London has officially closed shop-filled Oxford Street to vehicular traffic. (The Guardian)

Growing up in San Francisco, the 48 Quintara was my lifeline. It got me across the city to school in the Sunset, to hang out with friends in West Portal, and then back to the Mission for soccer practice.

Whether I sat up front with the seniors and their grocery carts or was crammed in the back, wishing someone would crack the window, 35 cents got me wherever I wanted to go, surrounded by a microcosm of San Francisco’s wonderful people and cultures.

My son is two years old now, and the 29 Sunset is his lifeline. We take it to daycare, the playground, to the pediatrician, and to see his grandparents on the other side of the city. But if the Bay Area fails to pass the two transit measures on the ballot this November, his lifeline will go away.

RTM, the Regional Transit Measure, will add a half-percent sales tax in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, and San Mateo Counties and a 1-percent tax in San Francisco. For transit agencies facing a downward spiral of insufficient funding, RTM is a critical lifeline. BART could close up to 15 stations and cut service by 70 percent. Caltrain would run one train per hour, and Muni could cut one-third of their service. In San Francisco, Measure H also needs to pass to prevent further Muni cuts that could eliminate up to 20 routes, double wait times, and end regular nighttime services.

My organization, Transform, works with low-income communities throughout the Bay Area, providing ‘Know-how-to-go’ travel trainings and signing folks up for transit benefits programs to help them get around easily and affordably. When we ask the people we serve what would happen if their bus line was cut, the answers are harrowing:

“I wouldn’t be able to get my shopping necessities.”

“Seeing a doctor would be difficult.”

“I don’t know…it’s necessary for survival.”

Public transit is essential for everyone in the Bay Area, but it is a lifeline for our most vulnerable residents. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Snapshot Survey, 44 percent of transit riders have a household income under $50,000 a year. For two-thirds of all transit trips, the bus or train is the only way they can get around.

The cost of living in the Bay Area is so high; it’s tough to ask residents to pay new taxes. But the cost of losing transit is much higher. A new SPUR report found that families would pay $3,280 more per year in transportation costs if the Regional Transit Measure fails. For the 30 percent of households that don’t own a car, that cost could skyrocket as high as $20,000. Failing to pass the Regional Transit Measure would also drive up housing costs. To meet our growing housing need, we need to build 441,176 new units by 2031, including 180,000 units at 30-80 percent below market-rate.

California has recently passed numerous laws encouraging housing development near transit for middle- and low-income residents. These include exemptions and streamlined approvals, waiving minimum parking requirements to lower building costs, and loosening zoning restrictions for affordable housing. If the regional measure fails and transit service gets cut, these landmark housing laws will be significantly weakened or rendered ineffective, further increasing the cost of living as housing and transportation costs spike.

That’s why Transform and our partners have spent almost a decade building a strong coalition of housing, labor, and community organizations to bring the Regional Transit Measure to the ballot. We know transit is often the fastest and most cost-effective way to get where you need to go, and that the Bay Area’s economy, housing, and climate goals depend on it. Public transit is a lifeline for many, but it is also a joy for all. I cherish the smiles when my toddler shimmies up onto an open seat, the honks from friendly bus drivers as we depart, and the sense of belonging that riding the bus brings in our increasingly polarized world. I want a future where my son can enjoy all the people, cultures, and opportunities the Bay Area has to offer. I want him to grow up in a place with enough housing so everyone can afford a home. I want transit to be the lifeline for him that it was for me.

Please vote yes on Measure RTM and Measure H this November.

***

Zack Deutsch-Gross is the Executive Director of Transform, a Bay Area nonprofit that works to reshape housing and transportation decision-making around equity, climate, and community. He lives in Ingleside with his wife and two-year-old son.

The Trump administration is threatening to strip California of its authority to protect its coastline unless state regulators agree to demands that could benefit offshore oil companies and other powerful interests. The move could make it easier to restart dormant oil operations and expand offshore development, while limiting California’s ability to challenge projects that threaten its coast. 

While the state has not publicly discussed legal options should the administration move forward with its threats, there is no legal precedent for the federal government to act in this manner with the dozens of states that have similar deals. It doesn’t take a fortune teller to see this story ending up in court like the administration’s other pro-pollution, anti-California actions.

What Happened

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued draft findings demanding that California’s coastal agencies complete more than a dozen “corrective actions” or risk losing federal approval of the state’s coastal management program. Federal funding for the program has also been suspended pending resolution of the alleged deficiencies. The report is not yet available online, but the Los Angeles Times received a copy through a public records request.

The demands seem more political than anything having to do with protecting the environment. Among them are a requirement the California Coastal Commission must meet with SpaceX, which happens to be owned by Trump ally and GOP mega-donor Elon Musk. The commission must also meet with Sable Offshore Corp., a Texas-based oil company seeking to restart a dormant oil operation off Santa Barbara County. Sable has been under investigation by California’s Senator Adam Schiff for using political donations to influence federal policy. Sable gave $300,000 to a Super PAC supporting Trump’s last campaign. 

“This is a five-alarm warning to every job and industry that relies on our sandy beaches and beautiful bluffs for its livelihood,” Schiff told the Los Angeles Times. “Soon, you too could see your environment for sale to Big Oil, Elon Musk, and any other high bidder that buys its way into the White House ballroom.”

California has participated in the federal Coastal Zone Management Act since 1978. The law gives the state a role in reviewing federally regulated projects that could affect its coast, including development in federal waters. While the administration tries to paint the state and the California Coastal Commission as obstacles to progress, the Commission has approved 96% of the permit applications it receives as submitted. 

A Review With a Predetermined Outcome?

The administration has portrayed its investigation as a response to what it calls California’s “environmental extremism” and alleged political bias against offshore drilling and SpaceX’s launch activities. But an earlier federal review reached a very different conclusion.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a review conducted during the Biden administration found that California was successfully implementing its coastal management program and gave its agencies high marks. The Trump administration nevertheless ordered a new evaluation focused on industries and projects the White House wants to advance.

As part of the legal requirement to complete its review, NOAA was required to hold a public hearing and take written input. Public feedback overwhelmingly favored preserving California’s coastal authority. More than 23,000 written comments were submitted, with approximately 95% supporting the state’s ability to protect its coast, according to the Surfrider Foundation. Hundreds of Californians also spoke at an August public hearing in Santa Monica.

Surfrider says the agency relied on roughly a dozen comments critical of California when developing its proposed corrective actions, even as the draft report acknowledged that parts of the state’s program are excellent.

California’s Coast Is Not a Bargaining Chip

In an October 24 statement published by the Surfrider Foundation, California Policy Associate Director Jennifer Savage argued that the review was designed to benefit companies favored by the White House.

“[The review] was never about coastal management. It was about making it easier to develop controversial projects favored by the White House and which benefit the administration’s allies, including SpaceX and Sable Offshore Corp.,” Savage wrote.

She added: “It’s a demand that a state agency promise outcomes to specific companies before it has seen their applications.”

California’s coastal protections do not automatically prohibit offshore projects. They give regulators a process for evaluating environmental impacts and determining whether development complies with state coastal policies.

What Happens Next?

The California Coastal Commission, State Coastal Conservancy, and San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission have been given until November 16 to respond to the draft findings. The Coastal Commission requested a 15-day extension, according to the Los Angeles Times.

NOAA will then issue its final findings. The federal government can pursue withdrawal of its approval of California’s coastal program if the state fails to address the identified deficiencies, potentially weakening its ability to challenge projects affecting the coastline.

Surfrider is urging NOAA to drop corrective actions unrelated to coastal management and preserve the federal-state partnership that has helped protect California’s coast for nearly 50 years.

Communities that drive less and have more mobility options also have fewer deadly crashes, a new study confirms — so why is reducing car dependency so rarely discussed as a life-saving strategy in its own right?

In a fascinating recent study, researchers found that states whose residents drove more miles on average also reported more crashes on average — at least when states recorded those stats on a per capita basis, rather than the misleading per-mile basis on which many US transportation officials rely.

Wyoming, for instance, recorded both the highest average fatality rate across modes and the highest average driving mileage, while New York reported the lowest on both counts.

That finding might seem intuitive to street safety advocates, or anyone who’s taken a vacation to car-light places like Denmark. But when you think about it, it’s weird how little safety leaders tend to talk about reducing car dependency specifically as a tool to save lives — and how infrequently attacks on funding for transit service are received by the public as acts of premeditated road violence.

“I think Safe Systems is great, and we’ve made a lot of progress on road safety over the last couple decades — but in the U.S., we’ve stagnated a little bit,” said Nick Ferenchak, a professor at University of New Mexico and co-author of the paper. “To me, the elephant in the room is that a lot of our places are pretty auto-dependent … [If we have] more driving, we’re going to get more car crashes, and we really need to have a conversation about that.”

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Ferenchak’s co-author, Todd Litman, explains that many transportation officials are hesitant — likely for political reasons — to acknowledge that cars are the only common denominator in all car crashes, and prefer to focus on stamping out extra-dangerous “outlier” driving behaviors instead.

“The standard transportation engineering narrative is that driving is not inherently dangerous, so traffic safety programs should be targeted [to] youths and drunks and bad actors,” he added. “The unstated assumption is that reducing driving is so onerous that it would be unfair to force responsible [motorists] to reduce their driving just because of the risks [imposed by] an irresponsible minority.”

But those bad apples tend to stay in the barrel if they don’t have any place else to go. Less-deadly drivers, meanwhile, are human beings who make mistakes too — and because a fallible person piloting a multi-ton, ultra-fast hunk of metal is inherently dangerous, those mistakes often cost lives.

In car-dominated communities, though, most residents lack a good bus route or bike path to take instead, so they remain firmly behind the wheel. In each of the 20 most dangerous states on the researchers’ list, average annual per capita vehicle miles traveled topped 10,000.

“We have graduated licenses; we have special testing for seniors; we have anti-drunk driving and anti-impaired driving campaigns,” Litman adds. “But if we don’t invest in good alternatives? Those fail.”

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While the researchers hesitate to say that reducing driving outright causes crash deaths to plummet on roads, they do say there’s enough evidence of a strong correlation to empower transportation officials to change how they operate. Because at the end of the day, making driving non-mandatory doesn’t mean banishing all cars from the face of the earth — and it may actually make motoring better.

“New policy should [work] to make more [travel] possible through safe and practical alternatives,” said Abbas Sheykhfard, who also co-authored the study. “These changes may reduce driving exposure across the system while preserving access and other facilities for people who want to continue to drive.”

More to the point, it won’t take many car-limiting policies to get America a lot closer to Vision Zero.

“The travel behavior shifts to improve safety outcomes would be pretty modest,” added Ferenchak. “We’re not talking about turning the entire USA into Utrecht. Just 10 to 15 percent reductions in car-orientation, and our [road safety] outcomes are on par with some of our international peers.”

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The researchers acknowledge that in many US communities, it’d be political suicide to embrace full-on VMT reduction targets – even if evidence suggests that doing so might save lives, at least in the context of shifting public dollars away from highways and towards great multimodal options.

Still, transportation officials could internally score proposed “safety” projects more highly if they also reduce overall driving — or at the very least promote the life-saving potential of projects that shift people onto other modes, even if that’s not why they were initially launched. Litman offers increasing fuel taxes to stabilize budgets and walk-to-school programs to promote student health as two examples of powerful safety strategies that aren’t usually sold as such.

And by contrast, as lawmakers in Washington take aim at federal transit funding and smear anything that even remotely smacks of “green,” he says it’s more important than ever to call out the fact that axing mode shift strategies costs real lives.

“Any politician that calls themselves conservative should support win-win safety strategies because they deliver so much value,” Litman added. “I understand how these issues have become so ideologically weaponized. But if there is a true conservative out there, they should be very interested in this research.”

Donate to the fund to support the Toronto bike lane removal protestors here.

On Tuesday October 13, 2026, at around 8pm, myself and several hundred other people on bikes stood in front of multiple construction vehicles that had been sent to remove lanes in Toronto. After about 45 minutes of Toronto Police officers unsuccessfully trying to cajole cyclists out of the way of the trucks, workers without any animosity advised protestors that if we would allow them to pass, they would go home and not start removing bike lanes that night. 

It was a big win in the first on-street battle for safe streets in Ontario Canada’s ongoing bike lane saga.

“Get home safe! Get home safe!” protestors chanted as the workers in their vehicles were escorted out of the crowd and away from the bike lanes they had come to help remove. We weren’t mocking them with our chant. Rather “Get home safe!” strikes to the core of why we were there putting our lives and liberty on the line: road safety, and the benefits separated cycling infrastructure convey to all road users.

How we got here

In Canada’s largest city, Toronto, our bike lanes have been under attack for nearly two years now by Provincial Premier Doug Ford.

While today he holds an office similar in power to the governor of a state in the US, Ford actually lost a mayoral election years ago that has since spawned into a grudge against the city who rebuffed him. He’s also the less famous brother of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who famously declared there was a “War on Cars” — which resulted in our first and only bike lane removals in 2011, and inspired the name of the famous Brooklyn-based podcast.

Doug Ford presents himself as ‘Captain Canada,’ standing up against Donald Trump’s trade war. But the two officials have a lot in common politically — including their fixation on removing bike lanes. Both are men who know how to divide and conquer voters, or whip up culture wars as a distraction.  

With sagging approval ratings — another similarity with Trump — Doug Ford and his government have distracted the populace from their decline by targeting people on bikes in Toronto. We’ve seen constant threats and media scrums about the congestion caused by bike lanes, all of which are refuted by data and actual evidence. 

For months, local advocacy organization Cycle Toronto has been fighting Premier Ford’s Bill 212, which sets out the provincial power to remove specific bike lanes in Toronto, while practically halting the installation of bike lanes elsewhere in the province. 

The legal battle has been a long roller coaster, and after the tough loss for advocates in August, Ford saw a window to go after a stretch of bike lanes quite literally in his own backyard. With record low approval numbers and a base that needs satisfying, this far west end of our growing cycling network was seen as an easy initial salvo by the premier. 

But advocates haven’t made it easy for him.

A winning formula — and a call to action

In the last weeks, groups of cyclists have shown up to defend their bike lanes from early in the morning to late in the night — even though those lanes are seven miles from the downtown core, which is the traditional hotbed of cycling in Toronto.  

We have blocked construction and peacefully observed bollards, barriers and bus platforms being torn out of the road, all to demonstrate against the taxpayer-funded removal of taxpayer-funded infrastructure. Throughout, the removals have been guarded by taxpayer-funded police forces that have included riot cop battalions, mounted officers, drones, unmarked vehicles, and dozens of cruisers. Protestors have been threatened and charged criminally under draconian terms of release, which we will be fighting in court.

These protests have been large, like the one that shut down work completely on October 13 or slowed it down markedly on October 14, 15, 16, 19 and 20. Smaller groups, meanwhile, have staged “die-ins” or “critical mass”-style rides down the middle of the roadway to demonstrate what sharing the lanes is going to be like once the bike paths are gone. 

The people of Toronto have shown up. And we believe this initial struggle sets the tone for what will be required to remove the remaining proposed 18 kms of bikes lanes, in terms of time, costs, political capital, and police resources.

We hope this community response on the ground — alongside legal and political strategies behind the scenes — will prove to be a winning formula. But even if not, it’s our obligation. 

Bike lanes are a matter of life and death. The people of Toronto are amongst the first to wage this scale of a fight, not just across Canada but also in the U.S. Our response, tactics and community-driven solidarity can and should be mirrored in similar fights. We know people on bikes in Minnesota ride in the thousands in deep winter for their murdered community members, Alex Pretti and Renee Good; pedal power is there. 

We hope to see solidarity rides or displays in U.S. cities — and when your bike lanes come under attack, you can expect the same from us.

• You need a special driver’s license to ride a motorcycle or drive a big rig, so why do we let just anybody tow a boat with a giant truck or get behind the wheel of what is essentially a race car? (Jalopnik)
• NACTO has a new guide out for designing transit-friendly streets.
• The D.C. Metro and L.A. Metro are seeking federal permission to run automated trains, which are common in the rest of the world but rare in the U.S. (Associated Press)
• Two South Florida commuter rail projects cleared state and federal milestones. (Trains)
• The Pacific Northwest has big plans for passenger rail. Now all the region needs is funding. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• A new 1,000-space parking structure has made one of Honolulu’s most dangerous streets for cyclists and pedestrians even worse. (Island News)
• Sound Transit needs to find $10 billion by 2033 to fulfill its promise of building an already-delayed metro Seattle light rail line by the new deadline of 2042. (My Ballard)
• A hit-and-run driver killed a teenage pedestrian in Seattle, later identified as a member of prominent athletic family the Tuiasosopos. Deejay’s relative Matt was formerly a coach for my beloved Atlanta Braves. (KOMO)
• Las Vegas cyclists are rightfully miffed that drivers are waiting in bike lanes to pick up their kids from school. (Fox 5)
• Colorado is not ready for Waymo. (News From the States)
• Car-centric Dallas suburbs are going all in on walkable downtowns. (Morning News)
• In a rare exception to Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, yes, Charleston Post and Courier, safer biking and walking does help the climate.
• YouTube urban planning influencer CityNerd declared Minneapolis the best biking city in the U.S. (Star Tribune)
• Muni service was disrupted over the weekend when a San Francisco driver drove their vehicle into a subway tunnel and abandoned it. (Mission Local)

What will it take for the federal government to get illegal, ultra-fast e-motos off the streets, and stop the wave of deadly crashes that have been falsely attributed to safe and legal e-bikes?

That’s the question on the lips of bike advocates across the country as a rising tide of state laws aimed at curbing e-bike use sweep the nation — despite evidence that low-speed pedal-assist vehicles aren’t actually to blame for many of the most headline-grabbing collisions.

Let’s break down where that confusion comes from — and how to end it once and for all.

What a legal e-bike is — and why we need them now more than ever

Clearly defined by the Consumer Product Safety Commission as “two- or three-wheeled bicycles with an electric motor of less than 750 watts, fully operational pedals, and a maximum speed of less than 20 mph when operated solely on electric power,” real e-bikes are widely regarded in advocacy circles as one of the most critical street safety tools around. 

That’s mostly because of their potential to reduce the constant driving that’s helped make American roads the deadliest of any high-income country. One study found that 46 percent of North American e-bike trips replaced a car trip, and those percentages may be even higher in European cities with more diverse mobility landscapes.

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Critically, many of those replaced car trips happen at conventional bicycle speeds, rather than the vehicles’ 20 mile per hour max; it just takes less effort (and sweat) for riders to pedal longer distances. And unlike many illegal e-motos, e-bike riders do have to pedal, or the bike won’t move.

Studies show that, on paths shared with pedestrians, e-bike riders average a super-safe 7.8 miles per hour, compared to 6.8 for conventional bikes; on all roadway segments, cyclists who use pedal-assist still tend to top out around 16 miles per hour, compared to 15.8 for those who don’t.

As e-bike use has grown, though, so has public frenzy over “e-bike crashes” — though many of the most-reported collisions ultimately didn’t involve what most cycling advocates or governments would even consider an “e-bike” at all.

Real crashes, wrong vehicle blamed

Of course, none of that is to say that the bloodshed isn’t real. A recent analysis of national data from 30 major US health systems recently reported a 760 percent increase across the last three year in emergency room visits for crashes involving some form of motorized, two-wheeled vehicle — and a 19.1-fold increase among children and adolescents.

Because the distinction between e-bikes and e-motos isn’t typically captured in emergency department records —and police officers who report on crashes don’t always know the difference, either — all of those crashes were recorded simply as “e-bike” injuries in the researchers’ press materials, which mentioned the term a staggering 70 times.

The role of drivers in those collisions, meanwhile, was not mentioned at all, even though the vast majority of all fatal bike crashes involve cars.

Recommended PART I: The E-Bike ‘Problem’ is an E-Moto Problem Matt Moore November 3, 2025

To be clear: some of those crashes almost certainly did involve a CSPC-legal e-bike — and the rate of actual e-bike crashes is likely rising, as both e-bike popularity and driver-on-cyclist violence continue to explode.

But time and again, media outlets have been forced to retract disturbing reports that an “e-bike rider” had killed or injured a pedestrian while traveling more than 30 miles per hour, or was killed or injured themselves in a single-vehicle crash — only to admit later that the vehicle involved was actually an e-moto instead.

“It used to be once a week I would see a crash with a teenager reported as an e-bike crash – now it’s almost every day,” said Matt Moore, General and policy council for PeopleForBikes. “But then you see the picture of [the vehicle], or when it’s corrected later on, and suddenly it’s, ‘Oh; police say that was actually an electric motorcycle.'”

More granular local data, meanwhile, suggests that e-moto use is on the rise — and horrifying crashes involving minors are, too. In California, for instance, “kids between the age of 11 and 14 accounted for 61.7 percent of e-motorcycle crashes, even though children under the age of 16 are legally prohibited from riding e-motorcycles,” ABC7 recently reported.

Moore says that shady e-moto manufacturers know kids like buying their product — and they have no serious incentive to stop selling it to them.

“That’s the target market, and they have hit that market,” he said. “And unless something is done to stop the importation of these products and their online sales …those statistics are going to continue to get more grim.”

What an illegal e-moto is — and why we have so many of them

Moore says most e-motos on US roads tend to slip in through loopholes in federal regulations, which are supposed to police what can be legally sold as an electric bicycle instead of an electric motorcycle — and what gets turned away at the border because it doesn’t meet either modes’ safety standards.

Faster two-wheeled vehicles that don’t meet the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s narrow definition of an “e-bike” are theoretically classified as motorcycles, which means they must have VIN numbers and meet strict safety and import standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Their riders, meanwhile, need to register their vehicles, maintain motorcycle licenses, and buy insurance.

Recommended Op-Ed: Don’t Let Fear Flatten Progress on E-Bikes Bike East Bay March 20, 2026

In practice, though, the Chinese manufacturers who dominate the production of all two-wheeled vehicles have become astonishingly adept at evading NHTSA and CSPC scrutiny, by slapping an “e-bike” label on an electric motorcycle box and adding design features to blur the line between the two modes.

And since one in four Chinese residents already own an “e-bike” — most of which, experts warn, are actually classed as throttled e-motos in the US — the companies have a lot of product to move, and a lot of incentive to break into the wide-open North American market.

“These manufacturers are all overseas, and they have very little interest or expertise in what our requirements are here — but they are pretty good at evading enforcement,” added Ash Lovell, PeopleForBikes’ Vice President of Government Relations.

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Lovell and Moore say some e-moto manufacturers dodge US regulatory requirements by equipping their vehicles with fake, removable pedals that don’t even turn, since they’re actually powered by throttle alone. Others ship motorcycles with a 20-mile-per-hour setting, but offer another setting capable of reaching 80 miles per hour, and easy instructions on how to unlock it.

And when all else fails, manufacturers can just check a box that their vehicle is really an electric “dirt bike” intended “off road use only” — even if their marketing materials depict it being ridden on public roads, sometimes even by children.

“I think that the manufacturers and importers of e-motos, have tried to create a gray area,” Moore adds. “[Because] it costs money to make a motorcycle that’s certified and compliant … If you’re avoiding triggering the scrutiny of either [the CPSC or NHTSA], you might be able to get that product into the United States without any sort of regulatory framework.”

Because it’s “extremely difficult” for U.S. courts to get jurisdiction over Chinese companies, Moore says consumers typically have no recourse to sue when they buy an e-moto falsely advertised as an e-bike — even when someone gets hurt or killed. And in the rare case that a domestic e-moto company gets sued, accountability is still hard to come by.

“If I’m a brand called ABC E-Moto, and and I get a cease-and-desist letter or judgment or a lawsuit, I can say ‘well, ABC E-moto just went out of business’ — and it’s now DEF E-moto, and we’re selling the exact same product with a different label,” he adds.

State confusion leads to bad state laws

To complicate matters even more, all but eight states have added another layer of complexity to the conversation about what an e-bike is: the three class system, which divides the market into categories based on vehicles’ speed and the presence of a throttle.

While People For Bikes say it’s been essential to helping states dictate where different sub-types of e-bikes can legally be ridden, some advocates say the three class system has made it harder to define them in relationship to e-motos, since the Class I e-bike — 20 miles per hour max, no throttle — is the only one that neatly aligns with the federal definition of the term.

Class II models, meanwhile, can have a throttle, which isn’t explicitly mentioned by the CSPC — leading some consumers to assume that it’s actually a motorcycle, even though that “accelerator” is often only used to get a heavy cargo bike going from a full stop on a steep hill, and speeds are still capped at 20 miles per hour.

Class IIIs, meanwhile, flatly violate the CSPC definition because they can go 28 miles per hour to help cyclists keep pace when they’re riding in car traffic. But proponents argue they’re still safe, since state laws banish them from standard bike paths when they’re not operating at slower speeds — and because it’s intentionally challenging to actually get them to their top velocity, since they can’t have a throttle, and only speed up when the rider pedals as fast as she can.

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And then there’s New York.

By far the largest market for e-bikes and e-motos in the country thanks to its legion of 80,000 delivery workers and the fact that most people can easily live in New York City without a car, New York State adopted a different definition of a Class III e-bike than the rest of the country in 2020, dropping top speeds to 25 miles per hour — but allowing the use of a throttle, unlike class III’s everywhere else.

Moore says that simple shift transformed the class III e-bike into “essentially a moped,” and made it even harder for law enforcement to distinguish between e-bikes and e-motos. And as crashes involving faster, two-wheel vehicles on both sides of that blurry line mounted, neighboring New Jersey — where many deliveristas live — enacted a widely criticized law to require all e-bike riders to carry driver’s licenses, registration and insurance.

“What we’re seeing in New Jersey is that if you make it mandatory to do registration and insurance for electric bicycles, no electric bicycles will be sold,” added Lovell. “We have e-bike retailers that are going out of business in New Jersey because these requirements are on the books. But the overseas e-moto sellers that are still selling into New Jersey? Nothing has happened there.”

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And New Jersey may not be the last. Lovell says she and her group have tracked over 400 e-bike related bills this year, which is “up dramatically from when I started five years ago”; shortly before the publication of this article, Ohio introduced a new law eerily similar to New Jersey’s.

“State legislators are seeing that nothing is really being done federally, and they’re all coming up with ‘solutions’ for the quote-unquote ‘e-bike problem,'” Lovell added. “That’s a huge challenge for the bicycle industry — because if there’s 50 different states with 50 different solutions, it’s going to be nearly impossible for anyone to sell bikes.”

That’s not to say that all states have embraced bad e-bike policy. California made headlines in September for a nation-leading law that drew a clearer line between e-bikes and e-motos, and more consequences for falsely advertising the latter as the former to Californians. Usually, states mostly regulate the use of vehicles on their roads, not their import or sale, which is typically the federal government’s purview.

In most states, Moore says getting laws like California’s passed has been a battle.

“In every meeting that I have with legislators and staff, there’s usually about half an hour explaining what an electric bicycle is and is not,” he added “In Minnesota, I had a legislator say, ‘So, the one I just got for my kid isn’t legal?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not.'”

How to fix this mess

At the end of the day, Moore says that the federal government is the one responsible for regulating all vehicles on the road, and they must stamp out the e-moto crisis once and for all — rather than leaving it to often-confused state leaders to try to make up for their failures.

That starts with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stepping up and treating e-motos as what they are: dangerous illegal motorcycles dressed in sheep’s clothing. He particularly urges officials to search and intercept more import shipments of fake “e-bikes” — and publicize those seizures far and wide.

“It’s a shot across the bow for these sellers,” he adds. “It’s [saying:] ‘You’re not going to be able to get away with it.’ Do you really want to risk your entire container being seized, and never getting it back, and maybe getting fined as well? That would change the landscape.”

Both NHTSA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, need more resources to conduct that market surveillance — something Congress could and should provide.

That would better position the CSPC to enact the Safe SPEEDS Act, which, if passed, would direct the agency to draw a clearer line between e-bikes and e-motos and require them to publish periodic studies on crashes involving both.

The bill would also help federal officials teach local governments, law enforcement agencies, and emergency medical workers how to standardize crash reports so media outlets are less confused about what kind of riders are actually getting hurt. And in the meantime, PeopleForBikes stresses that education is critical to help the public and media outlets understand the difference on their own.

Without these sorts of structural fixes, keeping dangerous illegal e-motos off our roads and protecting the good name of the humble e-bike will both be an uphill climb — and not the easy kind with pedal-assist.

• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy may have nine kids, but the self-described “fertility president” tying transit funding to birth rates is not going to help families that fled cities for car-centric suburbs — nor will it help struggling parents who can barely afford a metro card, let alone a car. (Vox)
• Another of the Trump administration’s priorities is to spend billions of dollars completing an interstate highway system that was actually finished in 1992. (Transportation for America)
• FedEx is spending $300 million on 2,000 electric delivery trucks, but could save almost three times that much on diesel fuel. (Electrek)
• In the face of fiscal uncertainty, too often cities make short-sighted cuts, like deferring maintenance on transportation infrastructure, that lead to long-term problems. (Governing)
• New Trump administration press secretary Katie Zacharia was cited multiple times in Los Angeles for distracted driving. (L.A. Material; registration required)
• Climate change is causing a Southern California coastal Amtrak line to collapse into the Pacific Ocean, and it could cost $5 billion to fix. (Los Angeles Times)
• Austin’s main street, Congress Avenue, is getting a major bike- and pedestrian-friendly makeover. (My San Antonio)
• The Detroit city council is urging the Michigan DOT to prioritize safety on Gratiot Avenue, a major six-lane thoroughfare. (Bridge Detroit)
• MARTA was expected to roll out new train cars before the World Cup came to Atlanta, but they still haven’t arrived. (Fox 5)
• A Salt Lake City business owner who almost ran over a cyclist is now on a crusade to get rid of a new bike lane. (KSL)
• Mass Transit explains how a small New Mexico transit system is shooting for zero emissions.
• Uber is testing robotaxis in Manchester, England. (The Guardian)
• A new European initiative will help up to five cities tackle transportation inequality. (Cities Today)
• Police are arresting Toronto demonstrators trying to stop the Ontario government from ripping up bike lanes. (CTV News)

What good is a “walkable” city if average people can’t afford to live in it?

That’s just one of the questions asked by this provocative new video from Safe By Design, which argues that even the urbanist darlings of Europe can fall short of their potential when “design, governance, and affordability failures” get involved.

And while livable streets policy itself isn’t responsible for, say, the wave of tourists overwhelming Barcelona or collapsing pedestrian walkways in Naples, it is an interesting reminder that the conversation about building great places can’t stop at the edge of the sidewalk.

Watch this video YouTube.