Streetsblog USA

Waymos — the driverless taxis that operate in many cities — are involved in 68-percent fewer crashes than humans, a new independent study found.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety report compared state and federal crash data with incident reports from major autonomous vehicle companies in Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Francisco, and Austin. To improve the accuracy of its conclusions, the AV sample was limited to collisions to which police would normally respond. In addition to having fewer incidents than humans, researchers concluded that driverless car crashes are generally less egregious.

In addition to experiencing fewer crashes overall, Waymos experienced 85-percent fewer single-vehicle crashes per mile than human drivers, and 81-percent fewer crashes resulting in injury. The driverless cars also rear-ended other vehicles 91 percent less than their human-operated competitors.

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

The study corroborates Waymo’s previous claim that its fleet is less prone to collisions than humans are. Waymo cars did best in Phoenix, where its crash rate was 76 percent lower than that of human drivers in Phoenix. There were 71 percent fewer crashes in Los Angeles, but only 35 percent fewer in San Francisco, though the data may simply be reflecting inconsistencies around police reportability as a metric.

“We welcome this new research from IIHS, which confirms our previous peer-reviewed analyses and reinforces the significant safety benefits of the Waymo Driver,” the company said in a statement.

“Safer than humans” is better than nothing, but it’s still an unpleasant concept.

Driverless cars have been at-fault in several high-profile collisions since rolling out onto American streets. An Uber test vehicle struck and killed Arizona resident Elaine Herzberg while she was crossing a Tempe street in 2018. In 2023 a vehicle from Cruise, General Motors’s now-defunct robotaxi service, dragged a woman 20 feet after she was struck by a human driver. Earlier this year, a Waymo crashed into a 9-year-old child in a school zone in Santa Monica, California.

The report’s scope is limited to collisions, and does not take into account the dangers caused by Waymos parked in bike lanes, passing school buses, or blocking emergency vehicles, to name a few recent incidents.

Driverless cars are still cars and, as such, contribute to the many problems that cars bring to US streets.

Waymo has yet to invent a car that does not add to congestion on city streets. Traffic, as it turns out, is one metric by which Waymo might even be worse than human drivers. A report released earlier this week found that Waymos spend nearly 15 percent more time driving around empty than Uber and Lyft with drivers vehicles. In turn, they add tens of thousands of vehicle miles traveled to roads every day.

Recommended Report: Waymo Cars Mean Way Mo’ Traffic Gersh Kuntzman July 23, 2026

The solution to car problems is older than the cars themselves. Public transit is critical to curbing traffic and reducing pollution. It vastly outperforms cars, autonomous and not, on safety. Todd Litman, executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, reported that drivers are killed at 10 times the rate as transit drivers.

Investing in transit to save more lives, with less of the negative side effects, would be even better.

For this week’s Friday video, Streetsblog is featuring Peter Van Pelt’s epic quest to dethrone the city’s top Citi Bike Angel. Below, you’ll find Van Pelt’s introduction to his ambitious expedition, and after that, his three-part video series in which he tries to capture the top angel’s forbidding lead.

There is a person in this city known only as NS143. They have been the number one Citi Bike Angel for as long as anyone can remember. If you don’t know what a Citi Bike Angel is: it’s someone who rebalances docks, taking bikes from full stations and riding them to empty ones. You get points. There’s a leaderboard. NS143 is always at the top of it. By a lot. I decided to find out what it would take to beat them.

On my first day, which happened to be April Fools’ Day, I rode for 15 hours and racked up 54,000 steps. By the end of it, I was still more than 100 points behind NS143. This was going to be harder than I thought.

Then, after a day, NS143 suddenly stopped riding. No one knew why. Maybe they went on vacation? But even without them in the picture, I was still battling daily against the rest of the field. Riders like LV440 and HN277. I managed to squeak into first place, but it was a grind, day after day.

I needed a different approach.

The core inefficiency in the Angel system is transit time. You ride a bike to a dock, return it, walk to the next bike and start over. Every minute spent walking is a minute not spent earning points. My solution: ride two bikes at once.

The method: ride my personal bike to a Citi Bike station, then ride the Citi Bike while holding my own bike alongside it. It was clumsy. Several people assumed I was stealing a bike. But it worked. When I dropped a bike off, I could get back to my own ride much faster, collapsing the dead time between trips. I want to be clear that I am not recommending this. At all. Ever.

There were complications: two small accidents (both my fault), three flat tires and two trips to the same bike shop on Canal Street.

The strategy worked. My points climbed fast. But just as I was starting to feel confident, NS143 reappeared. If they really had been on vacation, they returned refreshed, tan, and ready to destroy an interloper. I was thousands of points ahead, but they seemed unfazed, going on an angeling bonanza and racking up absurd numbers of points.

I spent 30 days riding and competing, through temperatures ranging from the 20s to the 90s, several rounds of April showers, and every other kind of chaos New York’s streets could throw at me.

So did I defeat NS143? Sorry. No spoilers. You’ll have to watch the videos to find out.

Episode 1: Episode 2: Episode 3:

• Despite transit’s success during the World Cup, the event still created 8 or 9 million tons of carbon emissions, most of it stemming from fans flying to host cities. (Wired)
• The U.S. DOT continues to scrub references to bike safety from its websites (NPR). In related news, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy seems to think that bike lanes create traffic, despite all evidence to the contrary (Streetsblog USA).
• Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and John Curtis (R-Utah) introduced a bill to funnel more transit grants toward fast-growing regions.
• A city analysis of federal crash data found that Philadelphia has the highest pedestrian death rate of any major U.S. city. (NBC 10)
• North Carolina passed a law prohibiting most local governments from mandating a minimum number of parking spaces in new developments. (Smart Cities Dive)
• The North Carolina DOT awarded grants for 16 collaborations between two or more transit agencies. (News 12)
• Dallas Area Rapid Transit received a $25 million federal grant to upgrade eight light rail stations. (KERA)
• A New Jersey Complete Streets group is advocating for shorter light rail headways. (NJ.com)
• Nashville is installing barriers to protect existing downtown bike lanes. (WKRN)
• Atlanta broke ground on a Monroe Drive road diet. (Saporta Report)
• San Diego is lowering speed limits in school zones. (Inside San Diego)
• Seattle residents will vote in November on renewing a sales tax for transit and doubling it to 0.3 percent. (Seattle Transit Blog)
• Maryland is planning a transit-oriented development at Bowie State near Washington, D.C. (Maryland Matters)
• Logan, Utah, population 55,000, is an example of how small cities can do transit right. (Bus News)
• Dutch cities are replacing concrete with grassy blocks that absorb stormwater and create a cooler environment. (Times of India)
• From Japan’s automated underground bike parking to a psychedelic mountain tunnel in Norway, Momentum Mag highlights some of the world’s most innovative infrastructure projects.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is intensifying his war on bikes with a new missive to Congress asking legislators to eliminate federal grants for bike infrastructure.

In a letter to Republican and Democratic senators who lead the committees that will determine the fate of the stalled surface transportation reauthorization bill, Duffy asked the legislators to “Prioritize Motor Vehicle Travel Over Bicycle Lanes.”

The paragraph that follows the request is a companion piece to U.S. DOT’s recent erasure of long-established federal advice that bike lanes and road diets are street safety tools, a screed on how narrowing roads for bikes gives “preferential treatment of the few bicycle travelers over the many motor vehicles,” slows down traffic, makes it harder for people in wheelchairs to get around and slows down emergency response time (which is actually slowed down by putting more and more vehicles in the way of ambulances and fire trucks).

Duffy’s letter specifically asks that the Senate’s version of the surface transportation bill essentially end federal funding for bike lanes and make it easier for municipalities to remove them.

Recommended ‘Big Brother’ At U.S. DOT: Bike Lanes Aren’t Just ‘DEI,’ They’re Also Unsafe Gersh Kuntzman July 17, 2026

“We urge Congress to restrict competitive and formula grant funding for bicycle lanes and other bicycle infrastructure that reduce travel throughput [sic] for motor vehicles and support removal of existing bike lanes that contribute to congestion,” the secretary wrote.

If such language was added to the bill, it would represent a threat to efforts to install more traffic-calming bike lanes and encourage cycling across the country. Veteran planners criticized the inclusion of it along with the litany of anti-bike lane carping that Duffy included in the letter.

“This is brain dead, zombie ideology masquerading as national transportation policy,” said Jon Orcutt, a former top official with the New York City Department of Transportation under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a Republican, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat.

Cities can get federal funding for bike lane projects from the Congestion Mitigation Air Quality improvement program or from National Highway Safety grants. But Duffy’s choice to include this language could also simply be political messaging for a base that hates bike lanes, since the House version of the transportation bill that made it out of committee did not include any language trying to end federal funding for bike lanes.

“It’s weird he’s sending this letter now, it seems like it’s red meat for the base. The Republicans have already thrown down what they want in the bill in the House,” said Orcutt.

The further Duffy tries to pull this bill into ultra-conservative waters, the harder it may be for he and the White House to get it passed. The current surface transportation law expires on Sept. 30, and if a new bill is not signed into law by then lawmakers would have to pass an extension of the previous surface transportation law. According to multiple reports, the Senate has not begun work on its own version of the bill, and Congress is rapidly approaching its August recess.

Senate Democrats will likely seek to block the Republican-led effort to pass a new infrastructure bill, since polling indicates that the Democrats may take back the House — and maybe the Senate? — in this year’s midterm elections.

This week, let’s talk to Steve Davis of Smart Growth America about the group’s most-recent edition of Dangerous by Design — the annual report on pedestrian traffic deaths in the United States and why we don’t improve safety.

But if you know anything about Talking Headways, you know we give you three ways to enjoy our content:

• Check out the unedited transcript, which may have some AI typos.
• Use your ears and the audio player below:

• Or you could read the cleaned-up transcript, which begins now:

Jeff Wood: There are actual consequences for not spending money or not getting the results that you want. So in transportation policy, how do we get real tangible consequences for folks that are underperforming in terms of safety. Because they’re obviously saying “safety,” but they’re not doing anything about it. For instance, when the speed limit went to 55 miles per hour, the government took away money if states didn’t do it.

In soccer, a team gets relegated to the lower level if it’s in the bottom three of a division. And so that team loses money from the TV contract. And so there is something to say about having some consequences, like the ability to say, “You didn’t do this correctly, and so until you improve we can’t help you in this instance” or, “We can’t help you more until you improve,” or something along those lines.

Steve Davis: We have a rough outline for what that could look like if we put any teeth on the system. Bear with me. We’re at the very tail end of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was passed in 2021 as part of a big infrastructure package, right? But go back to 2012.

The thing that all the states and AASHTO, their trade organization, has always wanted forever (and they will never stop asking for this), is more flexibility in how they spend the money. The federal transportation program is essentially a federally funded, state-administered block grant program. There are some restrictions on the funding, but for the most part, the feds hand blank checks to states. There’s not a lot of performance required.

So after years of saying, “We want more flexibility, we want more flexibility,” the law in 2012, MAP-21, essentially created a new structure for measuring safety performance. States were going to have to set targets each year for how many people are gonna die on their roadways.

And they did that. But the whole process got incredibly watered down during the rulemaking process. And essentially it is now a pretty worthless paperwork exercise that honestly we would be better off without.

The only use of this process right now is that it gives us some transparency into which states are at least thinking about safety in an ambitious way. If you go to the FHWA dashboard for all of these performance measures, you can see what states are doing. But 15, 20 states are still setting targets in the wrong direction: “In the next year, we are planning for more people to die on our roadways.”

And the problem with this system is that there’s no penalties. A state is free to say more people are going to die and continue to get an increased amount of federal funding.

When you meet those targets, you don’t get penalized. And you don’t get a reward if you’re a state that sets targets for fewer people to die on their roadways. Some states are indeed spending money to get to that outcome.

The main problem is that we’re getting an incredibly bad return on the money that we’re sending to states and even to metro areas. We’ve spent a trillion dollars in federal surface transportation funding over the last 20, 30 years and what do we have: The engineers say that our roads and bridges are in roughly the same shape as they were back then.

Safety has only continued to get worse and worse. Why are we pumping more money into a program that is not oriented around accomplishing anything.

We don’t even have to be prescriptive about how you get there, but we do need to say, “You have to reduce traffic fatalities or you’re going to lose money. And here is a whole suite of ways and solutions that are proven for things that you can go and do to make your streets and roads safer and try to get to those reductions that you say is your top priority.”

Recommended ‘Big Brother’ At U.S. DOT: Bike Lanes Aren’t Just ‘DEI,’ They’re Also Unsafe Gersh Kuntzman July 17, 2026

• Angry drivers in cities worldwide have been so mad about getting speeding tickets that, instead of slowing down, they’re destroying cameras that are proven to save lives. The response is bulletproof cameras resistant to vandalism. (Jalopnik)
• Now that the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is expiring, states are looking to new methods for funding infrastructure. (Pew)
• It looks like the House version of a new five-year surface transportation funding bill is DOA in the Senate. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Through technology, tactical urbanism can now provide data for transportation planners. (Norwegian SciTech News)
• Lloyd Alter continues his series on how the suburbs are not well suited for older residents who can’t or shouldn’t be driving anymore. (Carbon Upfront)
• Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is proposing cutting 12 bus routes in the name of a balanced budget, even though her overall budget is $1 billion higher than the current one. (Miami Times)
• The Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority is trying to convince voters to raise its share of sales tax revenue and avoid service cuts. (Signal Cleveland)
• Who is Nathaniel Ford, the recently departed Jacksonville transit chief and frontrunner to lead Dallas Area Rapid Transit? (D Magazine)
• Cal Matters says California is making a mistake by looking to repeal requirements for EV chargers at new apartment buildings to address housing costs.
• Velo Micromobility unleashed 1,000 new e-scooters on Salt Lake City (KSL). We’ll see how that goes…
• Honolulu cut the speed limit in school zones to 20 miles per hour, but didn’t bother to change the signs. (Civil Beat)
• A proposed Greenville, South Carolina penny sales tax for transportation would devote 90 percent of the revenue to roads. (Greenville News)
• A UK study found that, while micromobility does compete with buses, more importantly it does also replace car trips. (Route One)
• Queensland, Australia is testing whether AI traffic sensors can reduce congestion and improve pedestrian safety. (The Conversation)

Are Waymo cars safer? Maybe. But will they make our streets and neighborhoods more livable? Way no.

If unleashed in New York City, autonomous taxis will dramatically increase the amount of congestion on our streets, according to a report released on Monday by the Sam Schwartz Transportation Research Program at Hunter College in collaboration with Open Plans.

The reason? Waymo cabs spend far more time driving around without passengers than comparable human-driven Uber and Lyft cabs. In California, where Waymo’s autonomous taxis have been operating and churning out trip data for years, a Waymo will travel 0.71 miles empty for every one mile. But in New York City, so-called high-volume taxis — Uber, Lyft and the like — drive empty for 0.49 miles for every one mile with a passenger.

That 14.8-percent gap would translate to tens of thousands of additional vehicle miles every single day.

The amount of additional miles depends on the extent to which robotaxis replace existing taxi trips — and the report offers a range. If robotaxis are deployed and only add to existing taxi trips, obviously, the additional number of VMTs will be much higher than if robotaxis slowly replace existing taxi trips.

Under both scenarios, VMTs increase. If 2,000 new autonomous taxis show up in New York City and there is no commensurate decrease in taxi trips, suddenly there will be 293,800 more vehicle miles traveled in New York City every day. No, that’s not epic, glacial congestion, but it is the equivalent of more than 3,750 trips around Manhattan every day.

In the more-likely scenario that robotaxis slowly replace human-driven Uber and Lyft trips, there will still be an increase in vehicle miles traveled because of that 14.8-percent higher “deadheading” rate for robotaxis.

“As it stands, replacing a HV-FHV with a robotaxi would increase VMT and congestion,” the report states.

But wait, there’s more: In California, robotaxis spend roughly 58 percent of their empty time in a parking space. But analysts at the Sam Schwartz program and Open Plans say it’s far less likely in New York that a robotaxi would be able to find an empty space between rides. The report states that for every 1-percent decrease in parked time, the robotaxi would experience a 1.5-percent increase in deadheading.

How much deadheading again depends on how few parking spaces are available to robotaxis: If, for example, robotaxis in New York were parked just 25 percent (vs. the 58 percent of the time in California), it would translate to roughly another 62,000 vehicle miles traveled every day in New York.

So the increase in traffic is not massive, but it’s still frustrating because deadheading is just dumb. “Deadheading is particularly impactful in urban areas,” the report states. “While an empty mile and an occupied mile impose similar per-mile costs on roadway congestion and safety, deadheading represents VMT added without any corresponding transportation benefit.”

Sara Lind, co-executive director of Open Plans, said her group’s report is not meant to be a condemnation of autonomous, but merely a wake-up call to their unintended consequences.

“While robotaxi technology is groundbreaking, the underlying reality perpetuates our current system: a focus on single-use vehicles over public transportation and active mobility,” said Lind, whose organization shares a parent company with Streetsblog. “Not only would robotaxis continue trends of increasing driving and congestion, they may very well exacerbate these issues. Cities should use this moment to update parking policies, explore fees on vehicle miles traveled, and pursue people-centered planning.”

Waymo pushed back on the report, saying that the company’s deadheading in California is “decreasing over time as we increase the efficiency and utilization of our fleet.”

“The premise put forward by the report — that the New York City [taxi] fleet could fully turn over to Waymo vehicles — is also inaccurate,” company spokesman Ethan Teicher said. “Waymo vehicles make up a fraction of the total ride-share vehicles on the road in the places where we operate, and that would also be true of New York City. For example, we have more than 3,500 vehicles in our fleet nationwide, whereas there are more than 100,000 for-hire-vehicle drivers operating in New York City alone.”

But Teicher did agree that the company is keenly interested in making sure its robotaxis will be able to store themselves at the curb rather than deadheading.

“Research has shown that Waymo vehicles’ ability to park at the curb when not serving a passenger is important for reducing empty VMT,” he said. “This study correctly identifies parking as a challenge in New York City, presenting an opportunity for renewed focus on municipal curb management. We’d be thrilled to share our experience with city leaders.”

After all, he added, Waymo’s business model is dependent on reducing empty models because unlike other taxi fleet, the company owns the vehicles in its fleet.

But even the company statement reminds anew that the robotaxi industry in general, as well as Waymo specifically, is a very small business right now.

“Waymo is like a rookie hitter who goes two for five in his first game and claims to be a .400 hitter,” Schwartz told Streetsblog. “Let’s see what he does over a season and lifetime. Waymo has driven about 200 million miles over past six years. Over that period, Americans alone drove almost 20 trillion miles, so Waymos made up just one-thousandth of a percent. Waymo may be a candidate for Rookie of the Year, but it is still a rookie!”

The mayor of Milwaukee is abandoning a proposal to scrap a half-century-old freeway out of fear of upsetting the region’s motorists, setting aside years of findings that highway removals help revitalize Rust Belt downtowns for the 21st century.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson announced on July 8 he wanted to maintain the elevated Interstate 794 known as the Lake Interchange, which stretches between the Marquette Interchange and the Hoan Bridge and is approaching the end of its useful life. State transportation officials have been weighing alternative proposals for fixing or removing the freeway.

A waterfront city hemmed in by highways. This is Downtown Milwaukee (with the I-784 corridor highlighted).

Johnson rejected replacing the highway with at-grade boulevards that connect to the street grid because he worried drivers would get stuck in traffic.

“Any mayor across the country would love to have this same thing,” Johnson said at a press conference. “However, given the challenges that I mentioned, given the decades of established traffic patterns here, I think it makes it a little more difficult for us to be able to accomplish what some have imagined could be accomplished with taking the freeway down.”

But Milwaukee Common Council members Alex Brower, Robert Bauman and Sharlen Moore argued that a highway-to-boulevard option would benefit residents by generating thousands of new homes and increasing city tax revenues.

“This is a generational opportunity for our city, and we should not bristle at the idea of freeway removal simply because it represents the greatest departure from the current status quo,” the officials said in a joint statement released on July 13. “We should embrace the change that will yield the greatest long-term benefit for Milwaukee, rather than settling for less because of established traffic patterns.”

And members of Rethink 794, a volunteer transportation advocacy group, lambasted the mayor for doubling down on congestion that will hamper the city’s ability to grow in the future.

“It seems like the priority for folks who [want] to save five minutes on their commute, but the tradeoff is opportunity for housing development, retail development, public space, economic development,” said Raphie Torralba, lead advocate on the Rethink 794 campaign.

The controversial span has divided Milwaukee since its erection in 1969. Commuters from suburban Waukesha, Racine, and Kenosha counties take I-794 to get to work and access the Brew City’s top attractions. By 2022, roughly 78,000 vehicles per day traveled east of the Marquette Interchange, 73,500 vehicles drove across the Milwaukee River and 42,500 motorists crossed the Hoan Bridge, a Wisconsin DOT traffic study found. 

But the interstate served as a barrier separating Milwaukee’s Historic Third Ward from other downtown neighborhoods and discouraged residents in the region from using Milwaukee’s Amtrak station, which transported 555,000 riders last year.

This century, razing an elevated highway is no longer a radical idea. Several cities have successfully ditched elevated interchanges slicing through their downtowns including Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and Syracuse, NY, which will begin tearing down a stretch of Interstate 81 later this year. Even Milwaukee saw the benefits two decades ago of turning Park East Freeway into a six-lane boulevard that opened up 24 acres to new development.

As I-794 approached its golden anniversary, parts of its spans began to crumble, prompting state officials to develop a long-term plan to fix it. In April, the Wisconsin DOT held open houses on four proposals to rebuild the interchange, slim it down, or replace it entirely, with another option to conduct routine maintenance and put off significant repairs. (Meanwhile, Milwaukee urbanists released their own vision for razing the interchange in order to transform the surrounding neighborhood into thousands of homes with new schools, libraries, and roads.)

It seems likely that there’s a better use for this central Milwaukee land.

Each alternative came with a different price tag while generating additional land for the city to develop by 2050. 

Rebuilding the highway ranged between $425 million and $575 million while the proposal enabled the city to build on a 2.7-acre site created during a reconfiguration. One design would reduce the highway with right-side ramps purported to cost between $725 and $1 billion while another was estimated between $675 and $900 million. Both opened up 5.1 acres of land.

Finally, replacing the span with a boulevard reportedly cost between $850 million and $1.25 billion while freeing up 16 acres of property to be converted into housing and other development, which could produce $16 million in property tax revenue each year, plus ancillary economic benefits to the city and its people. 

Advocates argued state officials overestimated the cost of dismantling highways and building new roads, and underestimated the benefit on downtown neighborhoods if boulevards were built instead.

“They are predicting much of the same traffic will end up on city streets, whereas we know that will not be the case in removals in other parts of the country and even our own city,” Torralba said. “One-third of current traffic that uses the stretch of freeway is using it to go across but the majority of it is already ending up downtown.”

State Department of Transportation officials expect to choose a design by 2027, begin construction about three years later, and complete the project by 2038, although funding has not been officially allocated.

Political tea

The issue could become part of Wisconsin’s contentious gubernatorial race since the next governor will choose a new transportation secretary and have an effect on the direction of state infrastructure projects. 

Democratic candidates Francesca Hong and David Crowley expressed support for the benefits of replacing the highway with new housing development, according to Rethink 794 advocates. Republican Andy Manske told Streetsblog he wants to see a temporary closure of I-794 to see if it would result in “widespread chaos and delays” and wanted to ensure that new housing would be managed closely and not by an institutional investor (Democratic candidate Mandela Barnes and Republican candidate Tom Tiffany did not respond to emails).

Torralba said the climate advocates have been navigating has been complicated. 

“The highway’s removal is a question of political will,” she said. “Candidates understand the benefits of the idea, but the political power [to advance] that decision is another thing entirely.”

This post is sponsored by Ride Illinois.

Thanks to StreetsblogMASS Editor Christian MilNeil for his reporting on the Louisa Gag case, and input for this piece.

The last two months have been heartbreaking for sustainable transportation professionals and advocates in Chicago and Boston, where two hauntingly similar bike crashes took the lives of well-loved Complete Streets planners Riley O’Neil and Louisa Gag. But there’s reason to be hopeful that these tragedies will spur new political support for Vision Zero efforts in these cities, and possibly have a ripple effect across the country.

O’Neil’s and Gag’s stories

O’Neil, 35, was a planner with the Chicago Department of Transportation. In the afternoon of Friday, June 5, he was cycling home from work on a non-protected bike lane on Halsted Street in the Bridgeport neighborhood, when a car driver opened his door without checking for bike traffic. O’Neil swerved to avoid the door but clipped it, and was thrown under the rear wheels of an oncoming semi. If the bikeway he was riding in had been a curbside protected lane, he would still be alive.

The aftermath of Riley O’Neil’s crash on June 5 in Chicago’s Bridgeport. Photo: Austin Busch

O’Neil’s friend and colleague fellow CDOT planner David Powe posted a eulogy the next day. “Riley O’Neil led Chicago’s bike parking program for several years and completely transformed it,” he wrote. “More recently, he was helping lead both CDOT’s school zone safety work and bus priority projects. He cared deeply about making biking, rolling, walking, and riding better for everyone.”

“Riley could get anyone excited about making Chicago better,” Powe added. “He never met a person he couldn’t immediately connect with. His enthusiasm and love for bikes, transit, infrastructure, and public service was contagious.” Powe said CDOT would start calling the bike parking racks “Riley Racks” as a tribute.

Just over a month after O’Neil’s death, on the morning Thursday, July 9, there were terrible parallels in Louisa Gag’s case. A year older than O’Neil at 36, she also served as a planner at her city’s transportation department. Gag previously worked for several years as a public policy advocate with the Boston area’s LivableStreets Alliance. She was also commuting by bike that day, riding to work in a paint-only bike lane on Tremont Street in Boston’s Mission Hill community. And, like O’Neil, Gag died in a truck collision. The Boston Globe reported today that a recycling truck driver maneuvered around another vehicle before striking her.

The truck driver hit Louisa Gag on July 9 in the bike lane to the right in Boston’s Mission Hill. Image: Google Maps

According to StreetsblogMASS, Gag spent most of her career on efforts to make Boston Streets more livable. As an advocate, she worked on projects to promote Vision Zero and hold the City accountable for following through on its 2017 long-range transportation plan. At the Boston Transportation Department, she was involved in initiatives like the Lower Roxbury Slow Streets project, and the expansion of the Bluebikes bike-share network.

“She was the type of person who was so at ease with herself, and grounded in some way that anyone around her would immediately feel more OK,” Gag’s BTD colleague Jen Rowe told StreetsblogMASS. “And she worked to cultivate that to support the people she worked with… She loved people, and everyone on our team.”

Safe Streets advocates respond in Chicago and Boston

Three days after O’Neil’s death, on June 8, hundreds of Chicagoans hit the streets for a memorial ride and “die-in” at his crash site, organized by the grassroots group, Chicago, Bike Grid Now! They urged City leaders to create a continuous network of safe, low-stress cycling routes. “A preventable incident, not an ‘accident,’ has brought us here today,” said Eli Orozco of the neighborhood bike group Gage Park Cyclists in a speech at the start of the event, also mentioning four other recent Chicago bike and e-scooter crash victims. “There is no reason why families should have ever been destroyed with loss.”

The June 8 “die-in” at the Chicago crash site. Photo: John Greenfield

A week later on June 15, dozens of advocates again gathered in Bridgeport for CBGN!’s “Bike Protest for a Bike Grid,” riding to local City Council member Alderwoman Nicole Lee’s office to lobby for safety upgrades on Halsted and elsewhere in her district.

And more recently, the Bridgeport Alliance, a community group which advocates for traffic safety, launched a letter writing campaign so Ald. Lee’s constituents can ask her to support bold street redesigns. The petition has almost 400 signees.

Likewise in Boston, advocates are demanding action on Vision Zero in the wake of Gag’s killing. In a July 14 StreetsblogMASS op-ed, several residents in Boston’s Forest Hills neighborhood blamed the City’s foot-dragging for the recent crash death. “This week, the consequences of inaction were brought home painfully when one of our neighbors, Louisa Gag, was killed by a driver while commuting to work,” they wrote. “Louisa died a block away from a stretch of Tremont Street near the Roxbury Crossing MBTA station where earlier this year, Boston’s Acting Chief of Streets, Nick Gove, postponed a major traffic calming and center-running busway project.”

Not unlike Chicago’s “die-in,” Yesterday hundreds of Bostonians converged on the plaza of their City Hall to honor Gag, and put pressure on politicians.

Mourners fill Boston’s City Hall Plaza for the July 16 vigil. Photo: Christian MilNeil, StreetsblogMASS

Reactions from local elected officials

In the Windy City, politicians have been taking notice of the Riley O’Neil case, and its significance for Chicago. “Riley O’Neil was an incredible public servant who contributed deeply to the work of making our city a safer and more sustainable place,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson on social media. “A member of the Complete Streets team, Riley was a valued and dedicated advocate whose work touched communities across Chicago.” That statement was later included on the permanent display panel of the “The Riley O’Neil Memorial Station” for Divvy bike-share cycles, located across the street from City Hall.

Ald. Lee as the June 8 memorial ride in Chicago takes off. Photo: John Greenfield

And six of Chicago’s 50 City Council members showed in Bridgeport for the June 8 memorial, with five of them riding bikes. While Ald. Lee didn’t bicycle that day, as the ride departed, she indicated to me that she’s open to a street redesign on Halsted and other roads in her district. “It’s going to take all of us working together to get physical infrastructure that protects people better,” she said, mentioning that her own nephew was recently injured on his bicycle by a negligent driver in Chicago’s nearby Chinatown.

Meanwhile, Boston’s Mayor Wu made a surprise appearance at the Government Center event. According to StreetsblogMASS, prior to her speech, Gag’s former LivableStreets Alliance boss Stacy Thompson, who was emceeing, asked the frustrated Vision Zero advocates present to follow the fallen cyclist’s example by listening respectfully.

Thompson addresses the crowd at the July 16 memorial in Boston. Photo: Christian MilNeil, StreetsblogMASS

Mayor Wu was contrite. “We owe Louisa more than our grief,” she said. “We owe her our action. We have to do better.” She listed a number of ways “the City is taking action,” including a full analysis of the street design of the crash site, with plans to make that standard practice. She also promised better enforcement of bikeways and crosswalks; more protected bike lane installation and maintenance; and the assignment of two of her key staff members “to accelerate the policies, planning, and capital delivery work that will make our streets safer.”

StreetsblogMASS Editor Christian MilNeil told me, “It’s still early days here but people are fired up, and there may be a shakeup at our City transportation department.”

The ripple effect

There are signs that O’Neil’s and Gag’s stories are attracting the attention of decision-makers across the country. For example, the New York City-based National Association of City Transportation Officials honored each of them in blog posts.

“Transportation planning often involves navigating complex political landscapes and conflicting stakeholder demands,” NACTO said in its tribute to O’Neil. “When facing challenging issues or difficult days with aldermen and community members, Riley’s colleagues turned to him. He was a master of cutting through bureaucracy without creating unnecessary conflict. He maintained an infectious positive attitude, thought creatively, and found collaborative paths forward where others saw roadblocks.”

A shrine to Riley O’Neil at the Chicago crash site. Photo: John Greenfield

“Louisa’s work for the City of Boston focused on improving bike-share and street safety, including growing the Bluebikes system by adding 100 new stations across the city and leading engagement for street redesigns in the Allston and Brighton neighborhoods,” NACTO said in its memorial. “Beyond the technical work, Louisa was an integral force in spreading community bike joy, taking over the organization of Boston’s annual Bike to Work Day Festival and teaching Bostonians how to bike.”

A memorial for Louisa Gag at the Boston crash site. Photo: Christian MilNeil, StreetsblogMASS

Let’s hope that more politicians and city planners – from Seattle to Miami, and from Los Angeles to Portland, ME – take notice of these stories, and are inspired to support progressive street designs and policies to prevent future heartbreak. If that happens, the deaths of Riley O’Neil and Louisa Gag will not have been in vain.

If you value Streetsblog Chicago’s livable streets reporting and advocacy, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work. Thank you.

• A hundred years ago, American passenger trains were the fastest in the world, and some were even faster than Amtrak is today. So what happened? Long story short, reduced federal funding and freight carriers’ greed. (Planetizen)
• A new study shows that bikeshares do reduce air pollution, especially in big cities that weren’t bike friendly and had poor transit systems to begin with, because they offer an alternative to driving. (Transport Policy)
• Streetsblog editor in chief Gersh Kuntzman takes on the Trump administration’s Orwellian claims about the dangers of bike lanes.
• Privately, most Republican elected officials aren’t climate change deniers, but they lack a political incentive to do anything about it. (Heatmap)
• A new edition of “Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns” has been released. (Common Edge)
• Oklahoma City officials are proposing a penny sales tax referendum that would raise $130 million a year for transit expansion. (Voice)
• Next week Detroit will hold its last public hearing on capping I-75. (Michigan Chronicle)
• Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan’s proposed budget puts almost $75 million toward fixing potholes, sidewalks and stormwater drainage. (News4Jax)
• Cameras mounted on Philadelphia buses and trolleys have issued more than 200,000 tickets over the past year, increasing speeds by 3 to 6 percent. (Axios)
• A proposed Amtrak route connecting Cleveland, Cincinnati, Dayton and Columbus would help disabled Ohioans reach jobs and medical care. (Plain Dealer)
• The Colorado Connector train would provide two round-trips between Pueblo and Fort Collins within five years if voters approve a sales tax. (Colorado Newsline)
• Portland did in fact set a new Guinness World Record for largest mass e-bike rate, at 1,060, more than doubling the previous record of 405 in Seattle. (KPTV)
• Police in Connecticut “arrested” a tortoise they caught jaywalking, no doubt trying to take a shortcut to beat the hare. (WTNH)

Bike lanes are unsafe. Speed cameras cause crashes. Safety redesigns cause congestion and injuries.

Or, as Big Brother said, freedom is slavery, war is peace, ignorance is strength.

President Trump and federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy have made it clear for more than a year that they object to bike lanes, automated enforcement cameras and other proven safety measures — with Duffy going so far as to say that bike lanes are just government “DEI” activism — but neither man went out of their way say that such safety measures were, in fact, unsafe. Until now.

Sometime between June 30 and July 10, the Trump-run Federal Highway Administration changed its web page of “Proven Safety Countermeasures” to eliminate safety strategies that, before President Trump’s second term began, the agency had long supported, including protected bike lanes, speed cameras and road diets:

The previous safety page had proven infrastructure and enforcement strategies (top, circled) that President Trump and Sean Duffy have deleted (bottom).

The administration had previously criticized road diets — the removal of a lane of traffic to make room for bike lanes or pedestrian safety measures, or also to improve flow with turning bays — by claiming without evidence that they cause traffic congestion. The agency has also canceled grants for projects that it deemed hostile to cars.

But the changes to the web page reflect the administration’s new contention that safety measures are not merely annoying to drivers, but unsafe.

Activists can’t believe it.

“Bike lanes and road diets are still legitimate safety measures,” said Ken McLeod, policy director at the League of American Bicyclists. “Absolutely nothing has changed about their effectiveness or the data that led them to be placed on the Proven Safety Countermeasures list in the first place.”

And until July, the FHWA certainly agreed. On the archived web page, the agency said protected bike lanes “can mitigate or prevent interactions, conflicts, and crashes between bicyclists and motor vehicles, and create a network of safer roadways for bicycling. … State and local agencies should consider installing bicycle lanes.”

Bicycle lanes align with the Safe System Approach principle of recognizing human vulnerability — where separating users in space can enhance safety for all road users,” added the web page (which, ironically, was illustrated with a protected bike lane in Washington, D.C. that the president sought to remove earlier this year).

The agency said that creating separated bicycle lane to protect cyclists from car traffic “reduces crashes up to 53 percent.”

And on road diets, the FHWA (at least until July) said they “can improve safety, calm traffic, provide better mobility and access for all road users, and enhance overall quality of life.” The agency said conversions of roadways from four lanes to two (plus a turning bay) lead to:

• Reduction of rear-end and left-turn crashes due to the dedicated left-turn lane.
• Reduced right-angle crashes as side street motorists cross three versus four travel lanes.
• Fewer lanes for pedestrians to cross.
• Opportunity to install pedestrian refuge islands, bicycle lanes, on-street parking, or transit stops.
• Traffic calming and more consistent speeds.
• A more community-focused, Complete Streets environment that better accommodates the needs of all road users.

It promised a 19- to 47-percent reduction in crashes.

And on speed cameras, the agency’s archived page boasted that can reduce crashes by 54 percent. In New York City, which has the nation’s largest speed- and red-light camera enforcement program, officials reported a 95-percent drop in speeding at locations with cameras, and that locations with cameras experienced 14 percent fewer injuries and
fatalities compared to control corridors without cameras.

But as of July 10, those measures are no longer considered safe by the federal government. In a statement, an FHWA spokesperson did not address Streetsblog’s questions about why the agency now considered its own safety countermeasures to be unsafe.

“The Federal Highway Administration is conducting an ongoing administrative review of its ‘Proven Safety Countermeasures’ to ensure they align with US DOT policies and the Administration’s priorities,” the statement read. “The Department is taking action to reverse the last administration’s policies that decreased lane capacity and increased congestion. Drivers paying taxes and vehicle fees expect their dollars to be reinvested into our roads, not social initiatives that burden their commutes.

“Under Secretary Duffy, the Department is getting back to basics and putting safety first,” the statement concluded.

The agency did not respond to a follow up question: “We understand the administration’s position on road capacity, but are bike lanes and road diets now considered unsafe?”

Clearly, bike lanes, road diets, speed cameras are just as safe now as they were a month ago, when they were promoted on the very same agency’s site, advocates said.

“Nothing has changed; no new evidence has emerged to indicate that separating cyclists from motor traffic or slowing and better ordering motor traffic with fewer lanes are anything but tremendously successful street safety measures,” said Jon Orcutt, a former top official with the New York City Department of Transportation under then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, a Republican, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat. “Their removal from FHWA’s proven safety list is the latest step in Sean Duffy’s intentional infusion of stupidity into US DOT policy.”

Orcutt included in that list Duffy’s war on congestion pricing, which also ended up being a stunning safety and traffic-reduction success.

Orcutt added that FHWA’s action “could be harmful” because there are many places in the country “where the efficacy of bike lanes or road diets is contested, or state or city officials are still foot-dragging over them.”

“In places smart enough to already implement such measures — like the 80 cities that are members of NACTO — [the FHWA change] will be rightly ignored,” he added. “If FHWA tries to use the change to interfere with specific projects, local and state agencies should take their cues from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and sue the Trump DOT early and often.”

The irony, of course, is that until very recently, federal officials did not dare to testify under oath that bike lanes are unsafe. In ruling earlier this year against the Trump administration’s attempt to remove the 15th Street bike lane in Washington, the court wrote, “The government does not dispute, and it did not submit any data that would contradict, plaintiff’s contention that the dedicated bike lanes reduce collisions. As counsel for defendants acknowledged at the motions hearing, “[t]here is information in the record that says as a general principle, protected bike lanes prevent collision.” 

One former FHWA administrator said there’s a reason that even the Trump administration didn’t put on the record that bike lanes are unsafe — because they remain safe.

“We should be making decisions about safety based on evidence,” Stephanie Pollack, the former acting administrator of the FHWA under President Joe Biden, told NPR. “It’s hard for me to understand how you could say you’re putting safety first, and then make arbitrary decisions about what does and doesn’t improve safety.”

• Not only is speeding wasteful and dangerous, it only saves the average driver less than a minute off their commute. (Yahoo!)
• The U.S. DOT has removed bike lanes and speed cameras from its list of best practices that have been shown to reduce crashes and save lives. (NPR)
• A long article in tech magazine Noema argues that driverless cars save lives even if most people don’t perceive them as safe.
• People who work from home one day a week drive more than full-time commuters, while those who work from home at least three days a week drive less. (Science Direct)
• A Democratic bill would provide $205 billion over five years for high-speed rail projects. (Streetsblog USA)
• Distracted driving declined 14 percent after Iowa passed a law banning the use of mobile devices while driving. (Government Technology)
• A new depot is essential to the success of Austin’s light rail line. (Metro Magazine)
• Video of police stopping a Black Pennsylvania teen for jaywalking went viral. (Patriot-News)
• The last streetcar bridge in Washington, D.C. will be torn down, allowing the National Park Service to reopen a trail that’s been closed due to falling debris. (WTOP)
• Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava wants to slash bus service and future transit projects to close a budget cap. (Herald; paywall)
• The Milwaukee County Transit System is facing 25 percent bus service cuts. (Urban Milwaukee)
• Bike traffic in Paris increased by 240 percent between 2018 and 2023. (Momentum Mag)
• Some Southeast Asian cities are organized around rivers rather than roads. (Arch Daily)
• Toronto is integrating bikeshare and public transit. (Cities Today)