Streetsblog USA

America’s broken approaches to roadway safety and criminal justice are profoundly intertwined, a provocative new report argues — and until reformers in both fields reckon with how deeply their battles are connected, neither will notch any real progress.

Researchers at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law closely examined how mass car dependency amplifies harm in the criminal legal system, like rampant traffic stops that disproportionately turn deadly for people of color or traffic fines that trap low-income earners in “inescapable, inequitable cycles of indebtedness, as ticketing practices stress profits over safety.”

The report encourages Vision Zero advocates to consider how an over-emphasis on enforcement-based safety strategies is hobbling the cause, by creating incentives for ineffective policing that distract and siphon resources from proven solutions, like increasing mobility alternatives, that are often forgotten or ignored.

“Police reform advocates and road safety advocates should be working together, just as departments of transportation and police departments should be working together,” said Scarlett Neath, senior adviser at the Policing Project and an author of the report. “Those two agencies and those two groups of advocates need to be swimming in the same direction.”

Recommended How Some Traffic Fines and Fees Can Make Our Roads More Dangerous Kea Wilson July 31, 2023

The report authors say that, in many ways, America’s car-dependent transportation system and police-focused approach to safety evolved in tandem. They argue that “corporate interests, public investment decisions, and racial discrimination” collectively eroded public transit networks in favor of installing officers on roadsides across the nation.

Neath doesn’t deny that there should be consequences for deadly driving, but says the particulars of how our communities impose those punishments has devastated many communities — without significantly reducing the likelihood of future crashes fast enough. Indeed, the United States has twice the rate of fatal car crash deaths of other high-income countries, and more than triple the rate of police killings.

“We’re not saying there’s no deterrence effect [from policing],” she added. “But the deterrence it might cause often also comes with significant costs — and there other solutions that may have bigger deterrent effects without those costs.”

Recommended Study: Police Killings of Civilians Undercounted By More Than Half Kea Wilson October 7, 2021

One of the steepest costs of over-emphasizing policing in traffic safety, Neath says, is simply diverting attention and resources away from infrastructure and vehicle technology that make it difficult or impossible for motorists to drive in deadly ways— rather than reacting to bad behavior after the fact.

The design-focused solutions we do have, meanwhile, are inequitably distributed. A 2023 study found that roughly “60 percent of Black children live in neighborhoods that lack amenities associated with healthy development, including sidewalks or walking paths.” Black communities remain significantly more policed than white neighborhoods with similar homicide rates and income levels.

“If a lot of enforcement is happening at the same intersection that should be a sign that there are things we should do to stop enforcement from happening through structural, preventative measures,” she added. “If a ton of folks are blazing through a road and police aren’t able to control that behavior, the stop lights have to be retimed, the speed limit has to be lowered, and maybe, the road needs to be redesigned.” 

Recommended A Plan to Eliminate Pretextual Police Stops, While Still Increasing Traffic Safety Cameron Bolton November 21, 2023

Worse, Neath says many roadside stops aren’t motivated by traffic safety at all.

The report’s authors note that “pretextual” stops exploded in the 1970s, when War on Drugs-era politicians encouraged police departments to profile suspects based on their race and gender, and use broken tail lights, expired tags, and any other available pretext to stop and search their cars.

Today, explicit and implicit “stop quotas” still provide perverse incentives for cops to accelerate their rate of pretextual stops to write lots of tickets, rather than wait around to catch the most flagrantly dangerous drivers — especially as many municipalities have come to rely on fines and fees to pay for basic services.

“When people hear about traffic stops, there’s an assumption that they’re made for safety-related reasons,” Neath added. “But we know from data in jurisdictions across the country that it’s really a mixed bag. … Police resources are finite, and we’ve seen that when departments prioritize safety stops, they have better crash prevention outcomes — without negative outcomes for the kind of crime-fighting [efforts] that pretext stops are theoretically are used for, because [pretextual stops] are so infrequently discovering evidence of crimes.” 

Recommended Survey: Americans Still Want Police To Cut Traffic Stops That Don’t Make Anyone Safer Kea Wilson March 26, 2025

To truly make American streets safe, Neath says it won’t be enough just to end policies that incentivize or require ineffective policing in the transportation realm or to redesign streets to put safety first. It will require thinking about how those two goals interact — and looking to new models to enhance them both.

Across the report and a companion study written in partnership with the Vision Zero Network, the Policing Project outlined dozens of strategies that communities can consider, including under-discussed ones, like piloting civilian enforcement and equipment repair vouchers to remove a common pretext for police and motorist interaction.

Most of all, though, Neath says it’s time for advocates to think more holistically about what safety is — and how deeply intertwined the Vision Zero and police reform movements have always been.

“Preventable deaths and injuries in car crashes, unacceptable violent outcomes from the most common form of police community member contact — these are both public health crises,” she added. “It’s an opportune time to learn from the progress we’ve made on both fronts, and to double down on that progress.”

• Are conservatives coming around to walkability? The American Enterprise Institute thinks they should. And the Reason Foundation is in favor of transit-oriented development.
• Much of AEI’s argument has to do with how being able to roam around the neighborhood improves their mental health and takes pressure off parents to drive their kids everywhere. But not everyone on the right accepts Tim Carney’s thesis (Longer Forms). Carney’s critics on the right should talk to school crossing guards before claiming that car-centric streets don’t influence where kids can walk (The Guardian).
• In related news, Brandon Donnelly wrote about how more young families that can afford to do so are staying in cities rather than moving to the suburbs. And Angie Schmitt interviewed Lenore Skenazy, the author of “Free Range Kids.” (Love of Place)
• Uber is offering transit agencies $50,000 grants to test on-demand transit service. (Cities Today)
• CalTrans is looking into “bullet buses” that would travel 140 miles per hour on dedicated freeway lanes between Los Angeles and San Francisco. (Hoodline)
• L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez returned to one of his favorite topics: how screwed up the city’s sidewalk repair program is.
• Debris from one of Amtrak’s new Acela cars is the likely cause of a recent fire at Penn Station. (New York Daily News)
• Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller criticized the city council for cutting $5 million from pedestrian safety. (KOB 4)
• Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell defended himself against protesters who say the city is diverting funds for Vision Zero to road repaving. (News Channel 5)
• Kansas City will add east-west bus routes and step up frequency during the World Cup. (Star)
• Bike buses are catching on in Baltimore. (The Banner)
• Amtrak’s sleeper cars are getting upgraded (Business Insider).

We hear it all the time: “Americans just love their cars.” But the recent opening of a subway line in Los Angeles proves that Americans are even more crazy for transit — and when new stations open, they turn it into a party.

Check out this dispatch from Los Angeles by Hideaki Transit, where the opening of the new Metro D Line extension turned into nothing short of Woodstock for NUMTOTs. Complete with off-color puns, viral merch, spontaneous group chants, and even a pop-up furry convention, this raucous celebration of shared transportation should inspire leaders across the country to build party-worthy transit projects everywhere. (And yes, we promise: it’s safe for work.)

• The author of the book “Sidewalk Nation” reports that many cities do a terrible job of maintaining sidewalks, but some are improving. Siloed departments’ areas of oversight overlap, property owners are put in charge of repairs, and municipal budgets are tight. Michael Pollack advocates for cities to create departments of sidewalk and institute funding mechanisms like sidewalk improvement fees. (Governing)
• Rep. Rick Larsen, the ranking Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said a bipartisan consensus is emerging around a multi-year funding bill involving safety improvements and freight connectivity. (Transport Topics)
• Amtrak unveiled the new Freedom250 next-gen Acela train (Railway Age) and, separately, a new train wrap celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (Axios).
• Short-hop flights of less than 250 miles are on the decline. (NPR)
• A federal bill encouraging transit-oriented development would bolster transit agencies’ bottom line by adding more riders. (Transportation for America)
• On the Seams goes inside Amazon’s vast distribution and delivery network.
• “Just one more lane, bro,” transportation engineering textbooks still say. “Just one more lane, and I promise, no more traffic.” (State Smart Transportation Initiative)
• San Antonio found a way around Texas’ ban on rainbow crosswalks by painting sidewalks instead. (New York Times)
• A Minnesota bill would consolidate Twin Cities transit agencies. (streets.mn)
• Empty Waymos are circling aimlessly around Atlanta cul-de-sacs. (WSB-TV)
• Saratoga is taking public input on a Complete Streets makeover for Main Street. (Saratoga Magazine)
• The fast-growing Arkansas village Cave Springs is also redesigning its Main Street to make it more pedestrian-friendly. (CNU Public Square)
• A think tank is urging the British government to lower speed limits to avoid an “energy shock” due to the Iran war. (The Guardian)
• Fox News reporters are probably so used to being able to park illegally with impunity that they were shocked when an automated camera ticketed them within two minutes in Beijing — ironically, while they were there to do a negative story about Chinese surveillance. (X)

This week on the Talking Headways, former Supreme Court law clerk and Cardozo School of Law Professor Michael Pollack discusses his new book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource.

Pollack discusses who manages, owns and feels ownership of sidewalks, and advocates for a department dedicated to them.

We also talk about the nexus between sidewalks and roads, the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Denver’s successful funding and maintenance referendum.

Scroll past the audio player below for a partial edited transcript of the episode — or click here for a full, AI-generated (and typo-ridden) readout.

Jeff Wood: Are we free on the sidewalk?

Michael Pollack: Ha. That’s a loaded question.

Jeff Wood: I know. People should go read the book to get the whole answer.

Michael Pollack: Are we free on the sidewalk? We are freer than we might think, but also more subject to being made un-free than we might think. So again, it’s public space, or at least it is private space with a public easement, and so the Constitution applies.

We have rights to speak. We have rights to protest. We have our First Amendment rights. We have our Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by the police. I don’t get into this in the book, but sidewalks also raise Second Amendment concerns about the freedom to carry weapons openly or concealed.

So we have our constitutional rights on the sidewalk, and yet the law, the constitutional law, as well as what cities have in fact done, has limited all of those rights, sometimes in the name of public order, as we were discussing before, and sometimes in the name of protecting the adjacent property owners.

So for example, you do get to protest and picket on the streets, but the courts have said it’s okay sometimes if a municipality says you’re not allowed to do that in a residential neighborhood. Sometimes that’s gonna be upheld. Why? Because the owners of those homes or the residents of those homes deserve their peace and quiet, even if, you know, or perhaps especially if they are the target of that protest.

But we are in fact free to picket in front of commercial establishments. That’s well established. We’re free to, as I was saying before, engage in signature gathering for petitions, referendums, things like that on most sidewalks, except sidewalks at post offices, where there’s a whole line of cases where that’s deemed to be obstructive of important federal efforts, right?

When it comes to policing and our right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, well that’s true, except that we can be stopped by the police and briefly frisked by the police. If you put your garbage out for collection on the sidewalk, which in New York City, that’s what we do, that garbage can be searched by the police because it’s considered abandoned property.

And then there’s all of the new technology surveillance architecture that is deployed on the sidewalk, so that’s cameras or license plate readers or facial recognition. None of that is really governed by our current Fourth Amendment law at all. So yes, are we free on the sidewalk? Absolutely. It is public space.

It is not private space, therefore we have constitutional rights. But those rights are not quite as capacious as I think we often think they are. Now, when I say that, I don’t mean that we automatically don’t have the right to protest in a residential neighborhood or that we don’t have XYZ rights from unreasonable searches and whatnot.

Rather, what the Constitution tells us is that, or at least how the courts have interpreted the Constitution, what it tells us is that governments have the ability to prohibit us from protesting in a, in a residential neighborhood. They have the ability to instruct their police officers to stop and frisk folks in these ways.

It doesn’t mean that they have to make those choices. It doesn’t mean that we as voters have to make those choices either. And so part of my message in the book is when we think about what we want our public life to look like, that includes what we want our speech, protest, policing, surveillance public life to look like.

And we have more, we as voters have more of a role to play here than I think we often think we do. The Constitution does not answer all of these questions one way or the other. It leaves them to the local political process. And so if you don’t like what’s happening, you can and should vote for something else.

Congress could be days away from passing a bill that strips local communities of stable funding for multimodal transportation and deprives the entire country of predictable rail dollars that the overwhelming majority of Americans demand.

In a letter sent on Tuesday, Senate Democrats pressed the upper chamber’s appropriations committee to resist the Trump administration’s demands and renew multi-year funding for a raft of vital multimodal grant programs when they write the next federal transportation law.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, colloquially known as the BIL, will expire on Oct. 1, and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is scheduled to begin marking up the replacement bill as soon as next week.

That committee’s chairman, Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), said in November that he would lobby for a “traditional highway bill” to replace the BIL, and promised that lawmakers would refrain from “spending money on murals and train stations or bike paths or walking paths” — a suggestion Trump echoed in his budget proposal, which recommends draconian cuts to multimodal programs.

What the BIL Did Right

For all of its flaws, the BIL did at least one thing right: It provided local communities with historic levels of “predictable, multi-year funding” for multimodal transportation projects for five years, thereby insulating projects from the fickle whims of Congress’s annual appropriations process.

Since infrastructure projects generally take several years to plan and complete — especially ambitious ones like new rail lines, high quality bike paths and major road diets to keep pedestrians safe — this funding structure allowed communities to dream bigger about their transportation futures.

It also allowed locals to apply for far more grant money directly, rather than forcing them to rely on state-level Departments of Transportation, who far too often redirect gas tax receipts generated on city roads to pay for highway expansions in the suburban and rural periphery.

The BIL created a similar opportunity for the American rail industry, which secured its first predictable, multi-year funding streams in U.S. transportation history — finally allowing train operators to plan long-term expansions and start building out the expanded network that 92 percent of Americans want.

How Trump’s Proposal Could Halt Transportation Progress

If Congress accepts the Trump administration’s budget proposal, those rail programs would lose an astonishing 84 percent of their funding in fiscal year 2027, and they wouldn’t be guaranteed any money beyond that year. That would make it impossible for Amtrak and its peers to plan for the future.

Meanwhile, a host of programs that fund multimodal transportation would lose 96 percent of their 2027 funding — with no assurance of more money later. Safe Streets and Roads for All, for instance, would be zeroed out completely in FY2027, while the Capital Investment Grants program, a major source of transit funding, would receive a 48-percent cut.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who led the letter’s release and serves as ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, recently oversaw the publication of a 26-page report that described these efforts as “Main Street improvement” programs. The same document noted that these programs are especially vulnerable to budget cuts despite attracting so much interest that the Department of Transportation rejected more than 1,000 applications for funding.

“Congress must reject President Trump’s budget cuts and reauthorize surface transportation programs with advance appropriations that continue to provide dependable multiyear funding for our entire transportation system — not just part of it,” Cantwell’s office wrote.

Future-proofing the federal transportation program

Unfortunately, in an era of federal clawbacks, the mere existence of robust, multi-year funds for multimodal priorities doesn’t always mean that communities will actually receive their designated money — at least without a lot of lawsuits.

The Trump administration recently gained the dubious distinction of becoming “the first administration in at least three decades to fail to approve a new transit project in its first year,” according to Transportation for America’s Steve Davis. And that’s in addition to months of freezes, clawbacks, delays, and rescissions of programs that the administration deemed too “green” or “woke.”

That’s why advocates have launched parallel efforts to persuade Congress to stop negotiating the next transportation bill until Trump stops holding existing funds hostage — and, when negotiations resume, to build more guardrails to prevent future executive interference.

Recommended Trump Is Holding Affordable Transportation Projects Hostage, and Congress Could Call His Bluff Kea Wilson May 7, 2026

Until that happens, though, average Americans will continue to suffer from a lack of affordable, safe and multimodal transportation options — and that’s costing them real money.

Two years ago, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that discontinuing infrastructural investment and canceling money for freight priorities — as Trump’s proposed cuts would do — would cost the average U.S. household more than $700 per year. And that’s to say nothing of the missed opportunity costs of everything our transportation network could be if we funded multimodal priorities.

“Our roads are more than just highways — they are also hubs for community activity, hosts to small businesses, routes to and from schools, and drivers of economic activity,” Cantwell’s office wrote in its report. “Our federal investment strategy must reflect that reality and empower communities to make the most of their infrastructure.”

An earlier version of this article misstated Senator Cantwell’s role on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. We regret the error.

• At 18 cents a gallon, suspending the federal gas tax would only save drivers a few pennies on pump prices that have topped $4.50, on average (Wall Street Journal; paywall). Gas stations often pocket the difference, and encouraging people to drive more during a shortage could push prices even higher (CNN). It would also drain the already insufficient highway trust fund (PBS). Even if state gas taxes were suspended, too, gas would still be 35 percent higher than before the war on Iran (NBC News).
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to get dunked on for filming a reality TV show funded by companies his department regulates. (NPR)
• Too many transit projects get bogged down because an agency tries to engineer its way around a problem rather than try to work things out with other agencies involved. (Infrastory)
• Electrifying bus fleets involves a lot more than just acquiring the buses. (Metro Magazine)
• Waymo and Waze recently started sharing pothole data with cities, and now a company that sells security cameras for trucks is offering the same service. (TechCrunch)
• After the H Street streetcar was unceremoniously shut down, the D.C. Metro is now considering a bus rapid transit line along H Street to get Commanders fans to the new RFK Stadium because a rail station won’t be open by 2030. (WUSA)
• The board of Vancouver, Washington transit agency C-Tran voted to support light rail along the controversial I-5 bridge connecting the city to Portland. (The Columbian)
• The Charlotte city council reversed course on supporting new toll lanes on I-77. (Observer)
• An Atlanta city council member pulled a bill to separate “heels” and “wheels” on the Atlanta Beltline, which transit advocates said would preclude future rail, but supporters said would protect pedestrians from the scourge of e-scooters. (AJC)
• New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill announced a plan to improve cleanliness, reliability, access and safety for NJ Transit. (NJ Business Magazine)
• Is Florida private passenger rail company Brightline headed for bankruptcy? (Palm Beach Post; paywall)
• A Kansas City program is helping small businesses find empty storefronts along the streetcar line. (KSHB)
• Unfortunately, America’s fondness for oversized SUVs is spreading to Europe. (The Guardian)
• A new report established a baseline for English roads’ carbon footprint to help reduce emissions in the future. (Smart Cities World)

The Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate federal transit funding would clearly devastate riders, but it would also be a bloodbath for transit workers and the families who rely on them, particularly in the type of communities that make up much of the GOP base, according to a recent analysis.

Researchers at the Urban Institute recently found that the White House’s recommendation that Congress eliminate the Mass Transit Account of the Highway Trust Fund would force agencies in small metros and rural areas to cut half or more of their staff. That move which would force them to halve transit service, too, impacting countless U.S. workers’ ability to reach their jobs, too.

That’s because unlike bigger cities, which have been mostly restricted to using their federal dollars for capital projects since the 1990s, small agencies can rely on grants sent from Washington to help pay for the basics, like salaries for bus drivers and people to clean train stations.

Even larger cities have come to depend more heavily on federal money for operations since the pandemic, when lawmakers relaxed the operations funding rule to help keep agencies afloat when riders fled buses and trains. The report authors say that makes it “difficult” for them “to estimate how much cuts in federal funding could affect workforce outcomes” even into the future, especially if local sources don’t fill the gap — which they often don’t.

As a result, by 2024 even urban areas over 200,000 residents were getting 17 percent of their operating costs paid for by U.S. taxpayers. Tribal areas, meanwhile, were getting an astounding 92 percent — which means the elimination of federal dollars could essentially wipe out transit for most indigenous communities in the country.

Recommended More Than One Million Households Without a Car in Rural America Need Better Transit Kea Wilson May 18, 2020

The human costs of that move can be even higher, the researchers behind the study say. People in non-urban areas are often even more reliant on transit than their urban counterparts — and even more devastated when it vanishes, too.

An astonishing 4.3 million rural residents in the U.S. don’t have personal cars, even as they face longer commute distances that often put even the most basic needs well out of walking or biking distance, along roads with little protection for people outside vehicles.

“When you talk about the federal government cutting funds for transit, we’re talking about essentially firing half or more of the staff who work for transit agencies in those rural and tribal areas,” said Yonah Freemark, who co-authored the report. “And if folks are not there to actually drive the bus, transit agencies do not have the ability to hire a scab to make up the gap. … There has to be somebody that provides the service when the bus is ready to run, or the bus will literally not run.”

Recommended Four Factors Driving the Bus Operator Shortage (And What to Do About Them) Kea Wilson July 20, 2022

Of course, the need for more federal operations funding alone isn’t the only reason why so many transit agencies are facing a worker shortage — even if it certainly doesn’t make matters easier.

The researchers say that longstanding internal challenges like steep “job entry requirements, health and safety conditions, scheduling rules, and a lack of career advancement pathways” are all making it harder for communities to attract and retain workers, with direct impacts on the level of service they can provide. A companion study conducted by the Institute found that worker shortages in New York City caused as many as 17,843 delayed subway trips in a single month.

Low wages, on the other hand, might not actually be one of the main reasons why America is struggling to hire bus drivers and other staff — though that varies from community to community. Freemark says that while, by and large, “transit jobs are pretty competitive to other transportation industry jobs from a wage perspective,” places like Boston pay significantly less than the median wage for workers overall.

And while some GOP pundits paint transit as a lawless hellscape where workers and riders alike are under constant attack, but fear of violence is less of a concern today than it was during the pandemic — at least compared to stickier problems like inconvenient peak-hour schedules.

“Transit plays its most important role during peak hours, when other people are moving around the city or trying to get home to their families,” Freemark added. “And so from that perspective, I think transit agencies can play an important role by doing things like offering childcare benefits — which many of them do not do right now. But it could be beneficial in getting people to say, ‘It’s okay for me to take this job, even though it’s at this time that’s not ideal.”

Regardless of the reasons behind their hiring challenges, Freemark stresses that freeing up federal money for operations could help agencies solve them — and that, in turn, could help increase transit ridership across the country.

In addition to modeling Trump’s doomsday cuts (which have the support of some members of Congress), the Urban Institute also modeled what would happen if agencies got an infusion of federal operating money, by mapping how much staff agencies would need to double the number of revenue miles they operate by 2033.

That feat would require a lot of funding, but it would also result in a massive increase in jobs and access, which Freemark argues would pay for itself.

“If we were to make that investment of improved transit, it would also be a job generator, and that is not to be dismissed,” added Freemark. “Frankly, job creation is something that a lot of folks care about. We’re hopeful that this paper can help make the case for improved transit investment — not only as something that benefits riders, but also as something that benefits labor.”

Freemark acknowledges that with the GOP at the helm of the negotiations, there might not be much of an appetite in Washington for an influx of transit operating cash right now— even if advocates are still pushing hard for legislation like the Stronger Communities Through Better Transit Act to do just that.

Still, he says that we should never assume that getting shared modes more is a lost cause, especially if we can market that move as a job creator in addition to increasing access to basic mobility.

“At the beginning of Covid, transit agencies were on their knees, and Congress stepped up,” Freemark added. “I mean, they provided $69 billion — kind of out of nowhere — for transit agencies. That suggests that if the message is right and if the time is right, change can be made.”

• The highway lobby fossil fuel companies, asphalt manufacturers, automakers, engineers, road builders and truckers spends $100 million a year lobbying Congress, funding political campaigns, producing slanted policy research and trying to influence public opinion, according to a Union of Concerned Scientists report. That helps explain why 80 percent of transportation funding goes to highways, 90 percent of Americans lack access to frequent transit, and the average household spends $12,000 a year on vehicle ownership. (The Equation)
• The Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act will hurt not only Black voters, but anyone who lives in a blue city in a red state could be stripped of their representation. (The American Prospect)
• Some have been calling for TSA-style checkpoints on Amtrak after a would-be Trump assassin snuck guns onto a train, but stations just aren’t set up for it, according to the Rail Passengers Association.
• FIFA gets all the money from the World Cup, while the host cities have to foot the bill for things like transportation (The Atlantic; paywall). It’s been especially challenging for places like Kansas City that don’t have a robust transit system to begin with and are tying to impress visitors (New York Times).
• Light rail advocates say a proposal to build a separate paved trail for bikes and scooters on the Atlanta Beltline would kill longstanding plans for transit. (Rough Draft)
• Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott pledged to build 17 miles of bike lanes over the next three years. (WBAL)
• Nashville residents are pushing for more Vision Zero funding as pedestrian deaths surge. (Scene)
• A Charlotte city council member was involved in a serious car crash, and says it’s deepened his commitment to Vision Zero. (WCNC)
• None of the three options approved by Sound Transit to close a budget deficit includes extending Seattle light rail to Ballard, outraging electing officials and citizens who voted for it 10 years ago. (KOMO)
• It could take more than 100 years for Ann Arbor to fill its 138 miles of sidewalk gaps unless voters approve two tax referendums. (MLive)
• China is building a new type of transit-oriented development: housing on top of train maintenance depots. (Planetizen)
• Southeast Asian nations are using transit to improve on Le Corbusier’s flawed concept of the satellite city. (Arch Daily)
• Sydney is a sprawling city like most in the U.S., but still makes public transportation work in the suburbs. (The Guardian)
• Vienna is having problems procuring parts for its hydrogen buses, which is a good reason for transit agencies to buy much more common battery-electric models instead. (CleanTechnica)

The US Department of Transportation launched a “Freedom to Drive” initiative last month that aims to “tackle the nation’s growing congestion problem.” The belief that congestion is a problem is not new. People have been complaining about traffic congestion for more than a century, from when cars first clogged city streets. They are complaining about it still, as in a recent New York Times article describing traffic in Los Angeles as “soul-crushing.”

It is not surprising, given all the complaining, that congestion remains the primary focus of transportation policy in the United States. But why all this obsession with congestion?

Recommended For Earth Day, the Trump Administration Wants To Expand Highways Across America Kea Wilson April 22, 2026

Congestion is unquestionably bad for us. It causes stress and negatively affects mental well-being. By adding to travel time, congestion increases exposure to potential injuries and fatalities as well as air pollutants for drivers and passengers. The simple act of sitting in a car is not good for one’s health. Compounding these problems, time stuck in traffic is time that one could otherwise spend in activities healthy for mind and body. 

Psychology might also explain our hatred of traffic. Because a driver stuck in traffic cannot go as fast as they think they should be able to, a twenty-minute trip with traffic feels worse than a twenty-minute trip without traffic. The inability to move means that drivers have lost not just time but autonomy, their ability to act independently of external forces. Being trapped in a traffic jam might trigger feelings akin to claustrophobia. All these effects are possibly greater when one does not anticipate the congestion.

From a policy standpoint, we villainize congestion for its impacts on the economy. The annual Urban Mobility Report, published by the Texas Transportation Institute, estimates that “Americans lost an average of 63 hours sitting in traffic in 2024” and converts this into monetary impacts of $269 billion annually.

In promoting its new initiative, US DOT even calls congestion a “drain on American families and our economy.” Time is money, after all.

According to this line of thought, efficiency depends on speed, and economic growth depends on minimizing delays. This belief explains a century of highway expansions sold to the public as solutions to the congestion problem and essential for the economy.

But these projects have succeeded in reducing congestion only in the short-term despite consuming vast sums of public funding. The new federal initiative, which encourages states to expand their highways, are likely to be as ineffective as the old ones. 

It’s time for some new thinking.

Recommended How Congestion Pricing Proved the Haters Wrong and Is Changing New York for the Better David Meyer January 5, 2026

We can start by embracing the one proven strategy for reducing congestion: congestion pricing.

Congestion pricing is a way of prioritizing driving trips: if driving is important enough for a given trip, the driver will pay; if not, the driver will switch to another mode or reschedule or forgo the trip. This sorting results in more efficient use of the roadway system by ensuring that it serves the driving trips with the highest value to drivers at peak hours.

We can address the equity concerns this pay-to-drive strategy raises by using the toll revenues to improve transit and other driving alternatives and to subsidize tolls for low-income workers who need to drive. A year of congestion pricing in New York shows it can work.

We can think about congestion not as a phenomenon in need of reduction but rather as an experience that should be optional. Congestion becomes optional if we provide good alternatives to driving.

This would require a shift in funding away from highway expansion projects that have at best a short-term effect on congestion to alternatives such as transit, biking, and walking that give people a long-term way to avoid it. It would also require changes in land use patterns to improve the viability of these alternatives and that would, as a bonus, enable shorter driving trips. We would also need to make housing more affordable in these places, and one way to do that is to waste less land on roads and parking. 

Recommended Traffic Congestion Is a Housing and Transit Problem, Not a Highway Problem Damien Newton October 23, 2025

We could also reconsider our definition of congestion.

Congestion is measured relative to “free-flow” speed, the speed at which one can drive in light traffic conditions, usually around 70 mph on highways. An average speed less than that produces a “delay” — defined as the difference between the travel time at the free-flow speed and the travel time at the actual speed given roadway conditions.

But this is an entirely subjective standard, and it is also an unrealistic expectation, as experience has proven time and time again. By simply resetting our expectations to lower speeds, by reconciling ourselves to having to spend a bit more time getting places, we lessen the congestion problem by definition. 

After all, time isn’t the only way to think about the efficiency of the system. The congestion problem stems in part from the fact that cars are a spatially inefficient way to move people: each car requires considerable roadway and parking space but carries less than 1.5 people on average in the US. 

From a space efficiency standpoint, it would make sense to devote more road space to modes such as transit, biking, and walking that consume far less space per person moved. Contrary to the backlash against bike lanes in cities like Toronto and Washington, DC, studies show that taking space away from cars does not generally increase congestion. 

Recommended In Praise of Traffic Congestion Lloyd Alter July 10, 2024

Recalibrating our fear of the economic impacts of congestion would also help.

Although decision-makers justify highway expansions on the basis that congestion is an economic drain, research suggests that congestion has little impact on economic growth. This is in part because congestion is to some extent self-correcting: when congestion gets bad enough, people adjust their choices to cope with it.

It is also helpful to recognize that congestion, as history shows, is a fact of life in vibrant urban centers with thriving economies. The entire world experienced this truth in reverse during the COVID pandemic.

All of which is to say that maybe we shouldn’t be quite as obsessed with congestion as we are. Thinking differently about congestion would open the door to more effective strategies for addressing it while creating space for increased attention to other pressing problems —like safety.

The single-mindedness fostered by our congestion obsession has been counterproductive. Approaching the problem with a more expansive, more equanimous frame of mind might just get us to a solution.

The last federal transportation law gave states more than enough money to fix every crumbling highway and bridge in America — but a disturbing share of departments of Transportation sunk that windfall into expanding highways instead, a new report found. And unless Congress learns from its mistakes and finally requires transportation officials to “fix it first,” we will continue to set billions of taxpayer dollars on fire.

A stunning 16.3 percent of U.S. roads that were eligible for federal money were still rated in “poor” condition in 2024, according to a recent Transportation for America analysis — despite Congress providing state DOTs with $56.8 billion in largely unrestricted transportation funds that year alone, and nearly $1.5 trillion over the 30 years prior.

Experts say it would take $43.2 billion per year to maintain all of the country’s existing roads in “acceptable” condition, or roughly 23 percent less than Congress authorized annually under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

And the authors of the report say the waste may be even worse than it seems.

Because increasingly lax reporting standards conceal broken roads from public view, and DOTs routinely mis-categorize expensive expansion projects as simple “maintenance” or lump them into a mysterious “other” category, Transportation for America suspects the national highway network is actually even more drastically overbuilt than it appears on paper.

That means that even a steep increase federal dollars may not be enough to repair our rapidly expanding transportation network — at least without using that money to shift people onto modes other than driving and take pressure off our battered asphalt.

“We’re still adding to the system faster than we’re able to take care of it,” said Mehr Mukhtar, the group’s senior policy associate. “We’re still seeing inconsistencies and a lack of transparency in reporting standards. And all of this just leads us to the conclusion that until we see a meaningful shift in our priorities, and in how we’re tying our spending to our outcomes, the backlog of roads in poor conditions is going to persist — and likely it’s going to worsen.”

Mukhtar traces much of America’s pothole crisis to a long-standing tradition of giving states broad latitude over how they spend their federal “formula” dollars, or grants doled out to DOTs based on a pre-determined government calculation.

In the absence of federal rules to rein them in, many states pick ribbon-cuttings for new and “improved” — i.e., widened — highways over the unsexy work of repaving the lanes they already have, even if those lanes are falling apart.

A whopping 24 states chose to spend less than $2.35 on maintenance for every dollar they spent on expansion — a ratio that Transportation for America says is alarming — despite the fact that those states have a higher share of roads in poor condition than the national average.

Worse, experts say those expansions won’t come close to accomplishing the goals they’re theoretically supposed to achieve. Decades of research has shown that widening roads does nothing to fix traffic jams over the long term, encourages drivers to fill newly added lanes, and saddles communities with compounding long-term maintenance obligations that they can’t keep up with.

It’s a little like adding a ballroom to a house when the roof is so leaky that rain is pouring in — except that ballroom is somehow accelerating a traffic violence crisis that claims nearly 40,000 lives a year, super-charging climate change, and amplifying income inequality by reducing access to jobs, rather than, say, hosting waltzes.

“That’s fiscally irresponsible, and it’s a burden on taxpayer dollars,” Mukhtar added.

Of course, not all states are neglecting their maintenance backlog in favor of climate arson — and some of them are even offsetting the worst offenders.

Communities like North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Vermont won applause from the report’s authors for strong repair-to-expansion ratios, which helped bring their average road conditions above the national average — though, to be fair, many of those states have a high share of depopulated rural roads that need less-frequent maintenance than highly trafficked urban arterials. Still, Mukhtar credited those communities with lowering America’s total share of roads and bridges in poor condition by three percentage points between 2018 and 2024.

But she warned that extremely modest progress won’t be enough to outrun America’s looming maintenance obligations. The report says every new lane-mile of highway built will cost future taxpayers $47,300 per year to maintain in good condition — roughly the cost of a year’s out-of-state tuition at a decent public university — and America built 119,257 of them in the six years the researchers analyzed.

Worse, even some of the “good” states are still delaying maintenance until its bridges are on the brink of collapse, driving maintenance costs well above the average. Mukhtar pointed to Michigan, whose maintenance spending, which looks impressive on paper, actually masks the fact that the Wolverine State tends to postpone repaving until roads are so bad that they need to be totally rebuilt.

“With the costs of construction ballooning and inflation rising, even those same dollars don’t get stretched as far now as they would have decades ago, if [states] started prioritizing repair earlier,” she said.

With the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act due to expire on Sept. 30, Mukhtar said Congress has a rare opportunity to restore sanity to the transportation system and finally require states to “fix it first,” rather than adding endless new ballrooms to a falling-down house.

That might look like setting “tangible goals, such as reducing the backlog by half,” requiring federal agencies to collect better data on the actual condition of roads, and establishing enforceable mandates that state DOTs be more transparent about how taxpayer dollars are spent.

And until they actually do, no voter should believe a politician who pledges to “fix America’s crumbling roads and bridges” — because nearly $57 billion a year later, they still haven’t done so.

“Whenever a transportation bill is passed, we hear the same thing come out of Congress time and time again: the same rhetoric about fixing crumbling roads and bridges, and why we need to increase funding,” said Mukhtar. “But I think what we need to see this time around are enforceable requirements, which actually compel states to spend that money on fixing it first.”

• The Guardian asked experts how to fix traffic-choked cities, especially in light of high gas prices. The answers: Expand and improve transit, create more space for pedestrians and cyclists, focus on providing alternatives for commuters traveling into the city core from car-centric suburbs, and address the reasons why people choose to drive, such as service hours and safety concerns.
• Uber is shifting tactics away from fighting with local governments and labor unions as it seeks to roll out robotaxis, according to Axios. Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating Uber partner Avride after at least 16 documented autonomous vehicle crashes (Tech Crunch).
• Urban trees counter half the heat island effect from climate change in cities, but less so in poorer neighborhoods, according to a new study. (Associated Press)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit adopted a two-decade plan to close a $34 billion budget gap in future capital projects. (KOMO)
• The first Vision Zero report from Indianapolis indicates that traffic deaths fell to 85 last year from a high of 120 in 2021, but a number of major roads remain dangerous. (WTHR)
• Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell, whose major accomplishment has been passing the “Choose How You Move” transit expansion referendum, will run for re-election. (News Channel 6)
• San Antonio is considering dropping speed limits on neighborhood streets from 30 miles per hour to 25, but in places where it’s already been done, it hasn’t had an effect on driver behavior. (Report)
• Amtrak is adding cars to its Missouri River Runner route to accommodate additional riders traveling to the World Cup in Kansas City. (Mass Transit)
• Construction on Baltimore’s long-awaited Purple Line is complete, but service won’t begin until late 2027 at the earliest. (Maryland Matters)
• An Omaha traffic reporter is still out of work after having been hit by two different drivers in separate crashes; one as a pedestrian, one while she was behind the wheel. (KETV)
• Cincinnati’s Red Bike bikeshare had a record number of users in 2026. (CityBeat)
• Kansas City opened a new bike and pedestrian bridge on Grand Boulevard. (Fox 4)
• Lime introduced a new type of bikeshare bike in Seattle that looks like a scooter with pedals. (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Pending the governor’s signature, South Carolina recently became the first East Coast state to adopt the “Idaho stop,” allowing cyclists to proceed through a yield sign or red light when it’s safe to do so. (Palmetto Walk Bike)
• A lot of people like to ride the D: The new Metro line in Los Angeles opened last weekend to great fanfare. (Streetsblog LA)

What does a protected bike lane have in common with a hot glue gun, a lawn mower and a refrigerator?

That’s not the set-up to a bad joke — it’s a powerful lesson in safe systems.

For this week’s Friday Video, we check in on one of our favorite TikTokers Jon Jon Wesolowski — aka “The Happy Urbanist” — who just posted an explainer on “forcing functions,” or design features that force better behavior and prevent bad things from happening.

And whether that’s an automatic kill switch on a household appliance or a barrier that separates a driver from cyclist, these features should be a no-brainer — if we can stop playing the blame game and start getting to the root causes of why people get hurt.

Check it out:

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Injury rates for e-bike and scooter users are plummeting in Europe even as the use of those devices has exploded since 2021, according to a new study that debunks the myth that roadways are getting less safe as a result of the micromobility boom.

Between 2024 and 2025, total bike and scooter mileage of the four mobility companies in the report grew by 14 percent, while the risk of injury declined by a little more than 1 percent. Bike safety seems even greater: e-bike trips increased by 72 percent in the same period yet injuries per million trips fell by around 18 percent compared to 2024.

The data was analyzed by Micro-Mobility for Europe, an industry group comprising the European operations of Bolt, Dott, Lime and Voi. The 2025 data is based on more than 353 million shared e-scooter trips and 136 million shared e-bike rides in the 27 European Union member states, plus Norway, Switzerland, the UK and Israel.

The companies collaborated to form Micro-Mobility for Europe to push back on the notion that e-bikes and scooters are a threat to safety. Its mission calls for joint effort to “develop a framework that ensures micro-mobility solutions flourish in cities in full respect of all road users and to revolutionize urban transportation toward a shared, electric, and carbon-free future.”

One expert said the preliminary findings show that micromobility only gets safer as the devices reach broader use.

“This indicates that with technological advancements, responsible operation, and better urban infrastructure, safety can be boosted even as micromobility network expands,” said George Yannis, a professor at National Technical University of Athens, which is working with the coalition to further study safety outcomes. “Continued monitoring and increased availability of micromobility data as well as evidence-based policies by both the [companies] and [local officials] will be essential to sustain this positive trend and further support Europe’s Vision Zero ambition of reducing road fatalities.”

And in the long term, risks continue to trend downward even as use continues to grow. Between 2021 and 2025, the injury risk per million km for shared e-scooters decreased by around 20 percent. And for bikes, overall injuries per million kilometers fell by almost 6 percent between 2024 and 2025, even as the number of trips increased by around 72 percent in 2025, evidence that the sector is getting safer as it scales.

The short report attributes the decrease in injury risk to an increase in safety features, like speed caps, on devices, geofencing in busy pedestrian areas, and regular maintenance of bikes and scooters.

“A 24-percent reduction in the risk of shared e-scooter injuries per million trips since 2021 shows that safer vehicle technology, rider education, sensibilisation [sic] measures by operators and continued investments in infrastructure are delivering measurable results,” said Micro-Mobility for Europe Co-Chair Marc Naether, who is also head of public policy at Bolt.

• During President Trump’s first term, the administration dragged its feet on distributing transit funds approved by Congress. The problem has gotten worse in his second term the U.S. DOT has not funded a transit project in more than a year, using new strategies to stonewall projects as the U.S. falls further and further behind the rest of the world. (Transportation for America)
• Not including children, at least 30 percent of Americans are non-drivers, according to a study out of Washington state. By far their biggest barrier to travel is a lack of fixed-route transit service. (Cities)
• An Atlanta City Council member wants to put a bike lane on the crowded Beltline to reduce conflicts between cyclists and scooters on one hand, and walkers and joggers on the other. (Atlanta News First)
• Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill making it illegal to block a bike lane. (Denver Gazette)
• The Pittsburgh Department of Mobility and Infrastructure is asking residents to fill out a survey about street safety. (Pittsburgh Magazine)
• Detroit is spending $8 million to repair 5,400 sidewalks. (Free Press)
• Cincinnati bikeshare Red Bike is now integrated into the city’s transit app. (CityBeat)
• Amtrak canceled a controversial third vent to save money on a West Baltimore rail tunnel. (Banner)
• Charlotte is planning on expanding its regional light rail system, but doesn’t have enough skilled construction workers to build all the projects. (Observer)
• Northwest Arkansas is planning its regional growth around the 40-mile Razorback Greenway. (CNU Public Square)
• The Kansas City streetcar turned 10 years old on Wednesday. (Axios)
• Observer names seven scenic Amtrak trips that are worth taking the time.

Metro’s new D Line subway extension will open tomorrow. The transit riding public can get on “the D” starting at 12:30 p.m. on Friday, May 8. The entire Metro rail/bus/bike-share system is free from Friday through Sunday. Read more about tomorrow’s opening celebrations.

The $3.5 billion four-mile D Line Extension Section 1 will travel from Wilshire/Western in L.A.’s Koreatown all the way to La Cienega/Wilshire in the city of Beverly Hills. The project includes three new stations: Wilshire/La Brea, Wilshire/Fairfax, and Wilshire/La Cienega.

The 4-mile D Line extension (mapped in purple) runs below Wilshire Boulevard with stations at La Cienega, Fairfax, and La Brea Map of Metro B and D Line heavy rail subway – from Metro timetable. The B and D Lines form a Y; they share tracks in downtown and MacArthur Park, and split up at Wilshire/Vermont in Koreatown

When Metro broke ground on what was then called the “Westside Purple Line” at a ceremony at the L.A. County Art Museum, section 1 was expected to be completed in 2023. Among several obstacles causing delays, Metro encountered and overcame challenging tunneling conditions.

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Streetsblog has been covering the progress of the D Line for more than a decade. Below are a couple of D Line facts that you may or may not already know.

It will be fast

In L.A. County, most rail trips are not faster than driving. Metro buses and light and heavy rail move fairly fast. Every day, transit gets a million Angelenos where they need to be. There are exceptions, but when comparing trip times today, driving is almost always faster than transit.

Detail of Metro D Line timetable – click to enlarge

There are great reasons to take Metro transit – driving stress, parking, gas prices, health, environment – but comparative travel time typically is not where Metro comes out ahead.

The D Line is different.

Metro has already posted the new timetable for the D Line and it’s so fast it seems almost unimaginable for Angelenos.

Riding the D Line from the L.A. County Museum of Art (LACMA) to City Hall will take just 15 minutes. The nine-mile trip from one end of the D to the other – from La Cienega to Union Station – will take just 23 minutes.

At less congested times of day, those same trips might run 30-40 minutes in a car. At rush hour, you’d probably want to budget an hour to be safe.

There are lots of factors that influence overall trip time for various modes – e.g. congestion, parking, reliability, transit frequency, first/last mile walk/bike facilities, etc.

The D Line is remarkably fast; for many trips, fast enough to compete favorably with driving.

It will improve the lives of transit riders

If you read comments sections, you will find some people complaining that there’s no point in providing a subway to Beverly Hills, because rich people live there and rich people won’t ride transit. The residents of Beverly Hills, which long ago (meaning until ~2018) bitterly fought the D Line, likely do ride transit less often than folks living in less tony areas.

True as that may be, Beverly Hills is also destination. For workers who often struggle with expensive and/or time-consuming commutes. For visitors who want to have the full experience of Los Angeles. And for other Angelenos who might otherwise not be able to access a community that has made a point of making itself less accessible – including by opposing effective transit, and by targeting of Black and Latino drivers and pedestrians.

A lot of people who are not wealthy enough to live in Beverly Hills work there: domestic workers, restaurant workers, janitors, teachers, etc.

Even if wealthy folks in Beverly Hills ride infrequently, plenty of working class folks already take transit to commute to their Beverly Hills jobs. Even if the D Line never attracts a new rider, when it cuts a 40-60 minute bus commute down to 20-30 minutes, it will give workers more time to spend with their loved ones. It will get transit riders more places more punctually and more reliably. It will improve transit rider access to more places – more jobs and other destinations.

It’s in the right place

Wilshire Boulevard is one of the best places to improve Southern California transit – because of its existing concentration of population and jobs. Author/scholar Ethan Elkind notes (including in D Line coverage at the L.A. Times today) that Wilshire is the most densely populated corridor west of the Mississippi River.

Transit agencies often get political pressure to invest in high quality transit that serves less dense parts of the region. No Metro rail line is empty, but some Metro rail has been built in relatively low population density areas, where it struggles to attract large numbers of riders. Transit riders are already plentiful on Wilshire, which sees 30,000+ weekday daily boardings on Metro 20 and 720 buses.

The D Line is Metro is greatly improving service exactly where it is most needed.

Even more D Line Subway in the near future

This week’s opening is the first of three new D Line segments, all under construction and expected to be open by 2028.

Metro map of three-section nine-mile Metro D Line extension project

Very soon, the D Line will extend about 14 miles – from Westwood to Union Station. Take a peek at the next section’s new stations nearing completion.

Read more more about the D at Metro’s The Source, LAist, L.A. Times, and the Beverly Press.

SBLA will be putting the D Line to the test later this month. On May 19, Streetsblog will host a commuter race: the D Line Dash. The event pits three racers – a transit rider, a cyclist, and a driver – getting from Beverly Hills to Downtown Los Angeles.

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Tune in to Streetsblog, especially SBLA social media, to follow the great race! Contact Streetsblog if you’re interested in sponsoring and/or volunteering.

This post is sponsored by Find The Right Bike.

While Find The Right Bike paid the freelancer’s fee for this article, I was confident this was a topic that would interest Streetsblog Chicago readers. I appreciate the support, as well as FTRB’s new weekly ad on this site. We’ve still got about $17K to raise to meet our 2026 budget goal. If you haven’t already, please consider making a tax-deductible donation here. Thanks! – John Greenfield, editor

In 2024, Viktor Köves began a project of interviewing and photographing Chicagoans of all walks of life with their bicycles. His goal: demystify city riding for everyday needs and get more people on bikes. The Instagram and YouTube channel for Chicagoans Who Bike is filled with personal stories of families, children and elders from all corners of the city about why they ride and what they enjoy about it.

Now Köves has a new website to further nudge Chicagoans onto two wheels. Findtheright.bike uses a very short survey to recommend a style of bike according to the user’s needs, from e-cargo bikes to good old fashioned commuter bikes. The site includes brief guides on basic gear and maintenance, and links to product reviews. Find the Right Bike also makes a compelling case for the cost savings of bike versus car, all in Köves’ affable, encouraging tone. We spoke with Köves about the new tool and how things are going so far.

Screenshot from FTRB.

Sharon Hoyer: What gave you the idea for Find the Right Bike?

Viktor Köves: I’d been working on Chicagoans Who Bike for a while and I’m about to close out that project. I want to stop when I hit 100 interviews and I’m at about 92. I wanted to do more educational content about how to bike in the city. I keep hearing people say, “There’s no bike for me because I have kids or I need to haul things.” A lot of people don’t know what options they have. I wanted to distill the knowledge I have and the knowledge of the bike community into something really simple.

The other thing was integrating some financial data. One of the values of the site is showing people just how expensive cars are. I have two e-bikes – one that was about $4,000 and one that was about $6,000. When I tell people that they say, “That’s so expensive!” But I don’t own a car. One is my minivan; I haven’t needed to take a car-share for cargo since I bought that bike. If you’re interested in riding but know nothing, you can jump in my site and find something pretty reasonable. And before I show you models of bikes, I show price breakdown. 

I kept sharing the site with the bike community for feedback. I added the gear guide: Okay, you’re getting a bike but you don’t know about locks and helmets so I share links to the best resources for those. I added the basics on maintenance. The other thing was storage. Every time I talk about cargo bikes, people say it’s going to get stolen immediately. That’s not true, there are strategies to prevent that. I worked a lot with Bunch Bikes [electric cargo cycles], which has many articles about theft prevention.

Screenshot from FTRB.

The central idea is giving people a way of seeing that a bike can fit into their life and that it’s not a big expense, but a big money saver.

A lot of sites get into frame sizes. I don’t care. What are your life needs? And go from there.

SH: The tone of the site is that this is not for gear heads, that biking is really approachable. You don’t have to measure or research anything before you take a quiz about what bike is best for you and how to get started. How did you structure the quiz?

VK: I have a lot of bikes, so I have a decision-making process for which bike I take outside. It’s a privileged position; I have a lot of experience with it. And I’ve had a lot of conversations with other people where they walk me through their needs. What problem are you trying to solve? If it’s just you riding into the wind, that’s a very different problem than moving you plus another adult. It’s a totally different class of bike. It’s my experience owning these different bikes and knowing what they’re good for, and consulting with other people. 

The other aspect was storage – some people might need a cargo bike but have to carry it upstairs. We offer a lightweight alternative but offer a storage guide for keeping it outside.

SH: You avoid endorsing any particular brand. Was that tricky in any way?

VK: Commuter e-bikes are easy, there’s so many at different price points. The one I struggled with was e-trikes because there are a bunch of cheap alternatives with mixed reviews. My goal is to build trust but not saying a specific bike to buy, but to say, “go try these, here’s some third-party reviews.” Leaning on existing resources and reviews. I give you a class of bike, but it’s not meant to be definitive. I don’t provide a purchase link. 

SH: How much traffic has the site received and what has the response been so far?

VK: The feedback has been fantastic. The most reassuring thing I’ve heard is people who already have e-bikes pulling it up and saying I recommended the type of bike they have, so it’s working well. We’ve had about 850 users over the last month and a half. I’m working on some cross-promotion with bike shops to be listed on the site. One of the cool things is that its unaffiliated so I can do partnerships like this. My goal is to play nice with everyone so everyone can promote this tool.

SH: What do you feel is key for convincing more Chicagoans to try out riding a bike or replacing more of their car trips with biking?

Screenshot from FTRB.

VK: Honestly, I think hands on stuff is the most powerful. Last year in the 40th Ward [on the Far North Side, represented by Ald. Andre Vasquez] we hosted an e-bikepalooza that was really successful. It was in partnership with my project Chicagoans Who Bike. We had J.C. Lind [Bike Co.] doing Urban Arrows. When people try out a nice e-bike and see what it can do, it opens their mind a bit. 

I think storytelling is key too. Other people just like you are doing just fine with their bike. And maybe they still have a car for weekend getaways, but they’re saying, “It’s way easier to drop off my kids at school in this Bunch Bike or Urban Arrow than sit in the car line.” If you are dropping your kids off at school in an SUV, and you see four or five of the cool parents roll by on an Urban Arrow and drop their kids off and leave before you can drop your kids off, you’re going to think about it. There’s adoption, there’s infrastructure, and there’s tools like this, that make it easy and approachable. 

I don’t think my website will get people to buy a bike, but my goal is to get them in the funnel of trying out a bike and seeing how freeing it can be.

SH: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

Screenshot from FTRB.

VK: One thing is I talk about car-free living FAQs. The most common thing I hear is, “What if I need to move a couch?” Yeah. You can rent cars. I think it’s so important to use the financial lens. Look, if you use a car to haul a couch once a week, then a bike is probably not going to be sufficient for your needs. But once a year? Price that out. How much does a rental cost you? The other thing is when I talk about car ownership, people just look at the sticker prices, but that’s not the full price of a car. On my site, I use $25,000 as the initial purchase price for a used car. The five-year cost of car ownership is twice that. The bikes are more expensive upfront and then almost free to run. We forget about insurance and fuel. I talk about retirement savings a lot for my work, so I’m pretty financially literate. It was key to me to mention the investment – is your retirement funded? If you have the money for a new car that’s great for you, but put it in a 401k for ten years, my sense is you’ll have about $1.1M. I think that’s the question we should be asking people.

Visit Find the Right Bike here.

Read Streetsblog’s previous story on Chicagoans Who Bike here.

On November 12, SBC launched our 2026 fund drive to raise $50K through ad sales and donations. That will complete this year’s budget, at a time when it’s tough to find grant money. Big thanks to all the readers who have chipped in so far to help keep this site rolling to the end of 2026! Currently, we’re at $32,696 with $17,304 to go, ideally by the end of May.

If you value our livable streets reporting and advocacy, please consider making a tax-deductible gift here. If you can afford a contribution of $100 or more, think of that as a subscription. That will help keep the site paywall-free for people on tighter budgets, as well as decision-makers. Thanks for your support!

– John Greenfield, editor

This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by Stephanie Dockery of Bloomberg Philanthropies to discuss the foundation’s third Public Art Challenge. Dockery considers how bus art gains cult followings, how artists use temporary installations to attract attention in their respective cities, and what happens after those projects disappear.

Listeners have three ways of following the conversation: The audio player embedded below; a full (albeit AI-generated) transcript; and further down the page, a partial, human-edited transcript.

Jeff Wood: Thinking about the Hawaii bus, one thing that was interesting to me is that a lot of agencies are having trouble with their funding, and a lot of times for the buses, they’ll try to do wraps, and the wraps are advertising.

And I find it really great that instead of just putting advertising on your bus, you could actually put an art installation on your bus. There’s some frustrations with covering the windows, which I know a lot of transit advocates have. But the Hawaii bus was actually done very tastefully in terms of not covering up all the windows.

Stephanie Dockery: Yes, we follow all parameters with bus shelters and buses on not covering the windows, not covering the sides of the glass panels in the case of our Houston project. With our project in Philadelphia, which is a poetry project that’s responding to gun violence, Healing Verse Germantown, they are working not only with the Department of Transportation, but with the advertising agency and putting art in the panel of the bus shelters where advertising typically goes.

So now we have murals in a space where there’s typically advertising. So to your point —yes, we should absolutely be using art, and it was so smart of the teams to identify that as an opportunity for them.

Wood: I just find it very refreshing just because everything seems to be commoditized these days. A lot of folks are trying to advertise, and, and for good reason, obviously. The transit agencies need money. But at the same time, maybe that’s why the buses have maybe a little bit more of a following — because it isn’t the typical bus covering that you usually see.

I’m wondering how much of the art we should expect people to understand right away versus how much should be explained. I’m curious about how people come to it or how they experience it when they see it.

Dockery: That’s a great question. People absolutely happen upon the work. People go to the work on purpose. We are doing so much work with all of the teams to help promote [the art], whether it’s on their website, on our guide. We have created maps for all of the cities so they can share those with their constituencies, so they can actually see all of the sites. We have signage at all of the sites that explicitly talks about what the project is, what the installation is.

We have to be really deliberate and not expect or assume that people know what the work is, and that’s kind of the great thing about public art, especially if it’s in a vacant lot in a place where you’re not expecting to see anything, let alone something beautiful. And people get arrested by the installations and question why they’re there and, you know, start questioning why we don’t have more, which is a great question.

Wood: Excellent question.

Dockery: We do a lot of communications both on the press side and the onsite marketing, and then with social media to help let people know that the work is there because it’s for a pretty finite period. Some work is a performance, so that’s quite fleeting. Some work is up for a year.

So we’re just really communicating those timelines, what the work is, who the artists are, and expressing that this is a collaborative team. People should know that this is great work that their cities have done for them. So the cities are behind us and have brought together these nonprofits and artists. We also have an app called Bloomberg Connects, which is a free digital guide available to cultural organizations.

And on our Public Art Challenge guide, we have all of the cities listed and have built out their projects, both images and descriptions. So that’s a place where the projects can live in posterity since they are temporary in nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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