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)

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by SFMTA’s Director of Transportation, Julie Kirschbaum, who oversees San Francisco’s public transit system, Muni. She discusses system improvements, rising customer satisfaction, lessons from the pandemic on ridership and operations as well as Muni’s cultural connection to the city.

Listeners can enjoy the audio with the player embedded below, scroll a little further for a partial edited transcript or peruse an AI-generated transcript of the entire episode.

Jeff Wood: Muni was at the front of a lot of innovation during the pandemic across the country, and I’m curious, since you were on the front lines of that, if there’s anything that you or your agency learned specifically from that time period, about what transit agencies can do, what they can’t do — or what we tell ourselves that we can or can’t do.

I’m interested in that kind of story because it’s interesting to think about then and now, and this is different than that ridership discussion. It’s more about operations and thinking about what agencies are set up to do well — or what is harder for us just generally.

Julie Kirschbaum: We learned to learn, I think. COVID allowed us the space to try a lot of different things. Some worked better than others, and being willing to stick with what was working and walk away from — or have some clear parameters for calling it — things that were not working, was a big part of our success. We really used the fact that we had to so significantly change the way our system looked during COVID, to bring service back in a much more deliberate way.

Prior to COVID, we really had more service on paper than we were set up to deliver every day, and that essentially represented a broken trust with our customers because if we could fill all the trips on a route each day, you might have a 20-minute wait time. But on a bad day, you might wait 40 or 50 minutes. But if, if you have to get to your job or an appointment or school, you’re planning that extra time whether you end up needing it or not, and so it can be really frustrating. So it was hard, and we had a lot of really strong policymaker support.

But bringing back the service only at the pace where we could hire operators to deliver every single trip was a huge key to our success, and then trying new things like new transit lanes, using technology instead of a traditional paper schedule to deliver the service, shutting down the subway early one week every quarter so that we could do all the hard maintenance jobs, all proved to be key to our success. But underlying all of that was just not being overextended.

Jeff Wood: Can you tell me a little bit more about that maintenance? The system is old. It’s been around a long time. There’s a lot of little things that can go wrong or need fixing before they do go wrong, and so I’m curious about that process of going in and making sure the system is maintained so you’re not having a computer that could operate Pong on it operating the subway.

Julie Kirschbaum: In a typical weekday night, our window to do maintenance is only about two and a half to three hours long. And then, if you add into that the amount of time it takes to safely power down the system so you can do the work and then have time to power it back up, that two and a half to three hours becomes 45 minutes to an hour, and 45 minutes to an hour is not a lot of time to do deep maintenance work.

We found, through our Fix It Week program, that we could take that same concept of overnight work, but instead of having 45 minutes to an hour of work time, we could get hundreds of labor hours in just a very short time period by having an eight-hour work window instead of a three-hour work window by bringing all of our day crews to work overnight.

And by planning out the work so that every part of the tunnel, and the stations, and the fan rooms all have work going on simultaneously. It’s been a great opportunity for us to do proactive maintenance work on our infrastructure, which mirrors what we do on our buses. But because our buses are modular, it’s always been a little bit easier to plan that.

Another year, another blow to Pennsylvania transit riders.

Keystone State Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the annual budget into law last Sunday, and for the fifth year in a row, public transportation has been left to financially starve. The approved budget contains no funding for transit operations, continuing a streak that forces every agency to scrounge for its own money, to varying degrees of success.

“We’ve been left out for far too long,” remarked Connor Descheemaker, Statewide Campaign Manager for Transit for All, PA! The organization rallied transit riders to send more than 50,000 letters to state representatives and the White House-eying governor calling for transit funding, reaching every legislative district in Pennsylvania.

Those calls went largely unanswered. Riders in Lehigh Valley are now bracing for route eliminations and trip cancellations, despite already paying increased fares. Lancaster County paratransit riders will pay more as well, beginning next month.

Recommended Rural and Disabled Pennsylvanians Fighting For Transit As Keystone State Budget Nears Late Deal Ren Zaro Fitzgerald July 6, 2026

Low-income, disabled, and rural Pennsylvanians will lose access to jobs, healthcare, and loved ones. That reality hasn’t stopped their governor from declaring victory.

In a speech at last week’s budget signing ceremony, Shapiro uttered a total of three words about the state-sponsored mobility crisis: “There’s more I want to do – like raising the minimum wage, funding mass transit, and expanding access to affordable housing,” he said.

Shapiro seems to understand the need for well-funded transit. Last year, he sent $220 million to Philadelphia to boost SEPTA’s barren maintenance fund following a series of onboard fires.

One-time relief won’t keep buses running, though.

SEPTA’s aging Silverliner IV fleet caught on fire multiple times in 2025, prompting new state funding for fleet repair.

Shapiro has failed, and failed, and failed again to pass his landmark transit policy. His initial proposal would increase the share of sales tax revenue going to public transit by 2 percent. The blame isn’t all his: Even after he watered down his proposal to a 1.75-percent increase, statehouse Republicans failed to support it.

Even if it had succeeded, it’s too little, too late: The sales tax change would still be $92 million short of the $384 million that Transit for All, PA! estimates is needed to prevent further service cuts in public transportation across the state.

Transit for All, PA! has previously lobbied for its legislative package, which would have increased taxes on car rentals and leases, and raised a new tax on ride shares.

Like Shapiro’s plan, that failed, too.

“The General Assembly has deferred action to invest fully in public transit,” state Sen. Nikil Saval (D-Philadelphia), who had authored the ride share component of the legislative package. “Despite the continued activation and involvement of tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians … we will once again face this issue in 2027.”

Recommended Doomsday For SEPTA Is Bad News For Everyone Kathryn Xu August 27, 2025

Pennsylvania’s last semblance of adequate transit funding ended in 2021 with the expiration of Act 89. The 10-year allocation covered statewide transportation expenses, including roadway maintenance and transit operations. 

As soon as Act 89 money dried up, agencies turned to Covid relief grants to stay afloat. Those grants, provided through the American Rescue Plan, ended in 2024. Several agencies have gone so far as to pillage their own fixed-route budgets to continue federally mandated paratransit services.

Call it luck, a Band-Aid, or a bad omen; riders on Philadelphia’s SEPTA and Pittsburgh’s PRT are momentarily safe from service cuts and fare hikes. Following last year’s budget disaster, Shapiro permitted the two agencies to raid their own maintenance funds to temporarily pay for operations.

Recommended Transit Funding in Pennsylvania Can’t Wait Alex Milone November 10, 2025

Now, both are pausing upgrades, deferring basic maintenance, and reckoning with the realities of operating – but not fixing – a large-scale transit system.

State highways, on the other hand, received $775 million in new funding from Shapiro’s budget deal.

Transit advocates in Pennsylvania are shifting strategies to preserve essential transit services. A June decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, allowed slot machines to be taxed at a higher rate.

Both Democrat and Republican lawmakers have shown interest in using revenue from the so-called “skill games tax” to fund transit. The legislature must agree on a tax rate and structure, but declined to do so before finalizing the budget.

“Anytime that there is a discussion of new revenue in Pennsylvania, it needs to include public transportation,” Descheemaker said. “We are losing public transportation actively, right now in Pennsylvania. Public transportation needs to be at the center of those conversations.”

• An analysis of Smart Growth America data by CityNerd found that American roads are getting more dangerous, with pedestrian deaths rising by 72 percent compared to population growth and vehicle-miles driven. In the cities where the problem is worst, like Memphis and others in the Sun Belt, roads were designed during the height of the car era to emphasize speed over safety. (The Cool Down)
• At a recent American Public Transportation Association conference, transit leaders emphasized the need to seek other funding sources besides the federal government, as well as bringing down procurement costs. (Railway-News)
• Utility companies are working on ways to alleviate concerns about electric vehicles’ impact on the power grid. (Government Technology)
• Economist Noah Smith urges people not to give up on the suburbs. (Noahpinion)
• Cincinnati made a questionable decision to sell a rail line for $1.9 billion, and now finds itself constrained on how to spend the money. (The Guardian)
• In a counterpoint to a previously highlighted headline, MinnPost contributors argue for bus rapid transit on the Blue Line.
• The Port of Los Angeles is offering $75 million in incentives to purchase electric trucks.
• Atlanta drivers are complaining about protected bike lanes because they can’t stop hitting the barriers (WSB-TV). Would they rather hit cyclists instead?
• Chattanooga approved a plan to achieve Vision Zero by 2050. (News 9)
• Omaha adopted Vision Zero in 2023. Deaths keep rising, but city officials say they’ve only begun to start implementing safety improvements. (KETV)
• Somerville, Massachusetts has gone three years without a traffic death. (Governing)
• Montgomery County, Maryland is offering transit riders a free Capital Bikeshare membership while the Red Line is shut down. (WUSA 9)
• The world needs more bike lanes, but some of them are so poorly designed as to be useless at best. Momentum Mag gathered some of the worst.
• The French city of Grenoble is reallocating public space from advertisers to people. (Reason to Be Cheerful)

In 2024, the Santa Barbara Council of Governments won a grant from Caltrans to use artificial intelligence to design a countywide bike map in collaboration with UC Santa Barbara and Simon Fraser University. The grant promised to teach AI to map bicycle infrastructure and develop a universal, regional wayfinding plan and would “revolutionize bicycle infrastructure mapping” according to a statement.

Now that revolution will be put to the test.

This week, the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) launched the map in English and Spanish and is seeking feedback from bicyclists to test the map’s accuracy.

“The map is only as good as the information behind it,” SBCAG Transportation Planner Peter Williamson said in announcing the project. “The people who know our streets and neighborhoods best are the people who live, work and ride here.”

The interactive map uses artificial intelligence trained on Google Street View imagery and OpenStreetMap data to estimate how comfortable people will feel bicycling on roads throughout Santa Barbara County. Riders are being asked to review the map and report missing bike lanes, incorrect route information, inaccurate comfort ratings, and other errors before the public comment period ends on August 14.

Unlike traditional bicycle maps that simply show where bike facilities exist, the AI model attempts to classify streets based on rider comfort by analyzing roadway characteristics including bike infrastructure, traffic volumes, speed limits, lane widths, and other features visible in street imagery and mapping data.

For transportation planners, that could make the tool useful for identifying where riders are likely to feel comfortable—or where they are likely to avoid riding altogether. But only if the model matches reality.

As transportation agencies increasingly experiment with artificial intelligence, Santa Barbara’s project may become an early test of where AI can genuinely improve bicycle planning—and where it still needs human judgment.

The SBCAG project is expected to wrap-up, including publishing its final maps, in summer 2027.

Drivers who don’t move their parked cars for street cleaning are getting in the way of New York City’s viral new hobby: picking up trash. 

Even a state Assembly Member is following the trend, and complaining about scofflaws who refuse to move their cars when the Department of Sanitation drives street sweepers down their block. 

“The amount of garbage under this car lets me know that this car does not move,” said Assembly Member Chantel Jackson (D-East Tremont) in an Instagram video documenting her neighborhood cleanup on June 27. Jackson’s camera panned to a black sedan with trash caked around each wheel. 

View this post on Instagram

“They have not been able to clean this street, so let’s get this done,” Jackson narrated before using her trash picker and broom to try to clean the accumulated litter. “I don’t see any tickets on it, so I’m really not sure what the situation is with this car, if it’s abandoned or if the ticket agent is just skipping this one. I tried to clean it as much as I could but it’s really better if the cars move to get this done.”

Facts on the ground

Ninety-seven percent of New York City’s street parking is completely free. All the city asks of drivers is that they move their cars a few times a week for approximately 90 minutes so that DSNY’s street sweepers can vacuum up debris.

This arrangement has firmly lodged itself in city folklore. New Yorkers romanticize the “street-cleaning shuffle,” in which motorists wait in double-parked cars until sweepers come through and then quickly reclaim their parking spot. Documentary filmmaker Jon Wilson devoted an entire episode of his popular HBO series “How To” to the practice. 

In reality, free street parking encourages drivers to use the public curb as long-term car storage. The city’s meager fine for failing to move for the street sweepers — just $65 — is far less than the cost of a dedicated garage. Drivers leave their cars on the street and gladly pay the fines because parking in a garage is oftentimes far more expensive. This allows trash to accumulate underneath cars, adding to the buildup of filth in the city.

“I think there’s some deep problems in the system, and I do think that tickets would have to [increase] if the city actually wants the behavior to be changed,” said David Clarke, who grew his Instagram account @TrashTalkNYC to 45,000 followers in just 48 days by posting a daily video cleaning up city streets with little more than a picker and a broom.

View this post on Instagram

Based on his experience cleaning streets across the city, Clarke said the city’s official street cleaning system doesn’t work at all. On his block on 171st Street, he has never once seen the street sweeper make it down without any cars in the way. 

“On my street, the street sweeper only makes it to the curb once every ten times,” he told Streetsblog. “I have strong feelings about it, because to me, at that point, you might as well just have someone with a broom come through. Like, why are we paying for a system that we can’t use?”

Clarke recently began using a car to transport gear for his volunteer meetups. Looking for parking in a safe lot revealed the financial pressures at play.

“The tickets have to be proportional to the cost of parking in the area,” Clarke said of current alternate-side parking penalties. A local garage asked him to pay $400 per month to park his new ride. From his close observations of his block, he estimates he would get a $65 ticket around twice a month if he left it on the street for free — far less than the monthly garage rent.

“The city is just occasionally enforcing tickets, but not really solving the problem,” he said. 

Put a sticker on it

Both DSNY and the NYPD can ticket cars for staying put during street cleaning. NYPD issues around 1.5 million tickets per year, while DSNY issues around 500,000 per year, according to DSNY.

Some lawmakers want the city to adopt a more confrontational approach when discouraging drivers from blocking street sweepers. The city council recently passed a bill, sponsored by Council Member Gale Brewer (D-Upper West Side), that reinstates the practice of applying hard-to-remove stickers on the windows of law-breakers’ precious vehicles. 

View this post on Instagram

In May, the City Council passed a resolution that called on Albany to allow the city to install automated enforcement cameras on street sweeper vehicles. Under the relevant legislation, S1891A, those cameras would catch the license plates of cars blocking the way and issue a ticket automatically. The pending bill, sponsored by state Senator Robert Jackson (D-Upper Manhattan) and heralded by DSNY, cleared the State Senate in early June but didn’t get a vote in the State Assembly before the year’s legislative session ended.

In the absence of effective enforcement, DSNY has resorted to public shaming. Beyond the resurrected stickers, the department publishes a “Hall of Shame” of “Sidewalk Slobs” — the agency’s term for property owners and businesses who neglect to keep the sidewalk outside their buildings clean, as required by law.

After all, the department told Streetsblog the city doesn’t give out enough tickets to deter the practice. Under two million parkers are ticketed per year for not moving their cars, but you probably don’t remember the last time you walked down an entirely compliant block.

“Nearly 500,000 car owners disregard street cleaning regulations every week, keeping us from cleaning more than 3,000 miles of streets,” DSNY Commissioner Gregory Anderson said in a statement. “Our goal here is not to issue more summonses, but to send a message that if you decide that your convenience is more important than clean neighborhoods, then yes, you will receive a summons. And if Albany lets us send that message loudly and clearly to all neighborhoods, people will finally start to move their cars. We don’t want to issue summonses — we just want to clean the streets.”

Fill a government vacuum

DSNY has a complicated relationship with do-gooders like Clarke and Assembly Member Jackson, in part due to burdensome bureaucratic process that requires official city approval for volunteer clean-ups.

To officially organize a street clean-up in NYC, volunteers must plan it at least two weeks in advance. The department only approves clean-ups on streets and sidewalks, not in other public places like parks or beaches. The organized clean-ups are intended for the department to share supplies, but New York’s Strongest won’t stop people like Clarke from venturing out on their own, the agency said.

However, trash pickers still risk fines if they leave bagged trash in the wrong spot. DSNY recently established a rule that forbids any entity that cleans the streets — including business improvement districts and neighborhood associations, but also random groups of volunteers — from placing “any amount of refuse or recycling next to or against any public litter basket.”

“They make it very difficult for grassroots efforts,” said Samantha MacBride, who worked at DSNY for nearly 20 years in sustainable waste management and now teaches at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs. “The type of spontaneous community groups, like this sort of newest generation, that doesn’t work for [DSNY], because it’s very bureaucratic.” 

MacBride works in an academic field known as Discard Studies, which examines and critiques popular assumptions about waste, including those related to volunteers who pick up litter.

“Even though I critique individualizing environmental problems in the area of recycling, with litter it’s different, because it is very close to actual individual behavior and individual daily life and individual outcomes,” she said, adding that social media accounts like Clarke’s “really show the ingenuity and how much further ahead socially and technologically these groups are than large city agencies.” 

But for all the positives, MacBride cautioned against an outcome where people are picking up the government’s slack. 

“When any type of voluntary effort starts to substitute for basic provision of services,” she said, “there is reason to be concerned.”

Correction: An earlier this story incorrectly stated that Clarke had used his GoFundMe money to purchase a car. He already owned the car.

The federal government would be required to set aside a portion of future transportation funding for high-speed rail under a new Congressional bill aimed at countering a Republican-led bid to just keep building highways.

Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) has re-introduced the American High-Speed Rail Act, which authorizes $205 billion over five years to boost high-speed rail and, most important, would make funding for high-speed rail development automatic rather than subject to normal annual appropriations.

“America deserves the same world-class high-speed rail system that other countries have had now for decades,” said Moulton. “This isn’t just about improving convenience, it’s about creating smart, business-driven investment that will create millions of good-paying jobs, connect communities big and small, fight climate change, and ensure America leads the way in the infrastructure of the future.”

The bill puts an emphasis on transit-oriented development, expanding incentives to ensure that new rail hubs catalyze affordable housing and commercial growth in surrounding areas. It also has provisions that would encourage private investment through grants and loan eligibility and increase funding flexibility for the timing and sources of the non-federal costs.

“This legislation marks a transformative step toward creating a more connected, sustainable, and prosperous future for all Americans,” said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), a co-sponsor. “By investing in a national high-speed rail network, we are not only alleviating strain on our highways and airports and creating safer communities, but we are also strengthening productivity and lowering carbon emissions.”

The bill would be a necessary counterweight to the BUILD America 250 Act currently making its way through negotiations.

As Streetsblog USA has reported, the House’s proposed infrastructure legislation would be uniquely bad for passenger rail. Unlike Moulton’s proposal, it does not fund any specific funding beyond what’s secured by the Highway Trust Fund.. The proposed bill also contrasts the robust Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, expiring on Sept. 30, that secured record amounts of funding for rail projects.

Crucially, roughly $475 billion of the $580 billion that the BUILD American 250 bill would allocate over its five years is automatically set aside for highway funding without requiring annual appropriations. Meanwhile, the remaining $106 billion for transit will be subject to the give-and-take of the annual appropriation process, which, as NACTO put it in a statement, “makes it more challenging for local agencies to plan and build transit projects, as funding is not guaranteed.” 

Never a better time

The guaranteed high-speed rail funding would come as crucial high-speed rail projects — such as the California High-speed rail project between San Francisco and Los Angeles and another between Chicago and St. Louis —  are struggling to get off the ground.

The latter proposal, in particular, could use the funding guarantee after commissioners of the Illinois High Speed Rail Commission objected to the most recent cost and ridership projections.

The Commission has focused on the route that has the highest projected ridership of the options and is uniquely well-positioned for development because it’s wholly contained in Illinois. The line is projected to see over 2.8 million riders annually, almost five times the current annual ridership. The journey would be two and a half hours, a dramatic improvement from the four-and-a-half-hour car ride and the five-hour Amtrak offering.

Questionably, the projections did not account for any future transit-oriented development, underestimating the broader effects of the project. Their projections also don’t consider positive effects on the greater Midwest region. 

The High Speed Rail Alliance’s vision for a network in the Midwest hinges on Chicago as a core driver of intercity ridership in the network, with lines branching out to other midwestern hubs like Minneapolis-St. Paul, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati. 

Also overlooked in the projections is induced demand — the principle that increasing the supply or quality of something makes consumers want more. It’s often applied to “one more lane” highway expansion that leads to something like the 26-lane Katy Freeway in Houston.

The same logic applies to high-speed rail. Building it will make taking the train more attractive — it will then be faster, cheaper, and more convenient — leading to higher ridership.

For example, the Amtrak Borealis line between St. Paul and Chicago debuted in May 2024 and it beat projected ridership by nearly 60 percent even though it is just regular passenger rail service,. 

The line’s success shows that demand for safe, reliable transportation options for Americans is there and is often underestimated. A frequent and reliable high-speed option would only make the offering that much sweeter for passengers.

Americans are ready for a high-speed rail network.

In a survey conducted for the U.S High Speed Rail Association, 72 percent of registered voters say that they support creating a nationwide high-speed rail network.

The survey tells us that Americans are tired of lackluster rail options. 

Rail investment in the most-densely populated regions in the country is a no-brainer. High-speed rail connections in cities like Chicago and San Francisco that already have robust public transit networks would eliminate many car trips and lead some residents to abandon the costs and hassles of car ownership entirely.

For more information, visit the High Speed Rail Alliance.

We’ve been busy at Sound Transit. We’re in the midst of one of the most-ambitious transit expansions in the country. We set all-time records for daily and monthly ridership during the World Cup during our region’s moment as host to visitors from around the globe. And our board just closed a daunting gap in the agency’s long-term financial plan, setting us on a sustainable trajectory to continue building and operating a world-class transit system for decades to come. 

We’ve done all this while growing our light rail ridership beyond that of systems in L.A., Boston, and San Diego to claim the top spot nationally, and while we’ve driven down our monthly hours of unplanned service disruptions to a new low since we started tracking that metric in 2024. 

In March, we took a giant step forward in our system expansion when we opened the Crosslake Connection, a new light rail segment linking Seattle to the tech-oriented communities of Bellevue and Redmond on the east side of Lake Washington. The feat required groundbreaking engineering — it is, after all, the world’s first passenger rail on a floating bridge. And the support Sound Transit received on the day we cut the ribbon is something none of us at the agency will ever forget.

Getting to that moment, however, required overcoming major challenges. There were pockets of community opposition. There were lawsuits. There were thorny engineering problems to solve. The opening was ultimately delayed by almost three years. 

At a high level, what got us to that ribbon-cutting was an abiding commitment from all who worked on the project to see it through to completion. Beyond that, there are several discrete lessons we took away from the Crosslake opening that I believe can be applied to just about any ambitious public works project. Following are three of them:

Lesson 1: Know and uphold your values

Part of how we overcame project obstacles was by adhering to a clear set of values that guided our decision-making process. These longstanding agency values of safety, integrity, collaboration, and quality were not abstract principles, but pillars in the practical framework that allowed us to navigate each challenge we encountered.

In our planning of the Crosslake segment, some residents in a nearby jurisdiction were unhappy with a change in highway lane configuration due to the addition of light rail onto the bridge. In response to a lawsuit they brought — one that would have delayed permits — we eventually reached an agreement to carry out some mitigation measures.

When we made it to the Crosslake opening years later, city leaders from this community praised the new segment, even calling rail on the bridge “one of the most beautiful public train routes anywhere.”

Light rail on the I-90 floating bridge.

What started as a contentious legal battle eventually evolved into a productive relationship. Over time, we built trust with this community by adhering to our values — by being transparent and collaborative in response to both local and regional needs.

Lesson 2: Iterate, refine and test

Being the first to do something comes with difficulties and risks. Our capital delivery team and partners faced a tall order when asked to run rail across a floating bridge. There was of course no blueprint from elsewhere to reference, so it required ingenuity, resolve, and a willingness to challenge our own thinking.

To ensure we developed a piece of rail infrastructure that could move in six directions and accommodate changing water levels, wind and waves, and vehicle traffic volumes, we designed a novel track bridge inspired by systems used to retrofit large buildings for earthquakes. We then put our design to the test using full-scale models at the Transportation Technology Center in Colorado, with about 10,000 sensors placed on the trains and tracks to collect data. See this video for an in-depth technical look at the bridge project.

Once we entered the construction phase, we again had to lean on our values of safety, accountability and adaptability in navigating fabrication challenges so we could deliver not only a system that worked, but one that will function reliably and safely for generations to come. 

Lesson 3: Connect the big picture to the details

When I started as CEO, one of my first requests of staff was to hand me a delivery schedule for the Crosslake project. The project team and I then reviewed it step by step, line by line, to identify any place where we could compress the schedule without compromising safety or system resilience. In doing this, we were able to draw clearer lines between how specific steps were being carried out and related impacts to the overall schedule. 

The exercise bore fruit, as it enabled us to move up the previously assumed opening date by several months. This demonstrated how an organization’s leader is often uniquely positioned to coordinate efforts in service of a primary objective, encourage those working seemingly intractable issues to stop “suffering in silence,” accept an appropriate level of risk, and seek collaborative solutions to the toughest questions. 

After opening the Crosslake segment, our agency and region were immediately rewarded. New riders begin using the newly-expanded system to commute to and from work, attend events, or simply enjoy a trip to one of the many destinations now accessible via a $3 train trip.

• How would the BUILD America 250 Act affect your state and congressional district? In terms of raw dollars, New York and California have the most to lose from House Republicans’ five-year transportation funding bill. However, rural red states would also lose a substantial portion of their transit funding. (Urban Institute)
• Two-thirds of Americans say they would pay more to live in a walkable neighborhood, but fewer support the types of development that make walkable neighborhoods possible. (Realtor.com)
• Salvage yards are having a hard time selling used EV batteries to recyclers because it’s often cheaper to mine more minerals straight from the ground. (NPR)
• Lloyd Alter, age 73, argues that states should be testing drivers in their 70s, but most are going in the opposite direction. (Carbon Upfront!)
• Climate change is going to make highway construction even more expensive. For example, it will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to protect just one short stretch of Northern California highway from increased flooding. (Grist)
• Drivers kill eight people a day in Florida at least partly because, unlike European countries with far lower traffic death rates, the state is not serious about punishing speeders. (Florida Politics)
• Denver built, widened or repaired 41 miles of sidewalk last year, which only leaves another 1,400 miles to go. (Denver 7)
• Only a quarter of Kansas City streetcar riders were attending a FIFA fan festival, which suggests a recent extension had as much to do with record June ridership as the World Cup. (Star)
• Columbus, Ohio has finished installing the city’s longest protected bike lane, two-and-a-half miles on North 4th Street. (WOSU)
• Omaha is redesigning Ames Avenue as part of its Vision Zero plan. (3 News Now)
• Watch Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo name-drop his way out of a traffic ticket. (MeidasTouch/X)
• Portland cyclists are looking to break the world record for largest e-bike ride. (Momentum Mag)