Streetsblog USA

• Intercity buses are back: Since Flix acquired Greyhound five years ago, the company has upgraded its fleet, improved on-time performance and added 37 new lines. Cities are also investing in bus terminals after many shut down. That’s more important than ever in an age of high gas prices and the demise of discount airlines. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Stephanie Nakleh gives you all the ammunition you need to argue about induced demand on the internet. (We Can Have Nice Things)
• Even People picked up on the ridiculous “DEI bike lanes” story.
• Public transportation is one of the few places where people from different backgrounds still mix. (Northeastern Global News)
• Chill out, Bellevue residents, Sound Transit’s Crosslake light rail connection didn’t bring in criminals. (Seattle Times)
• Homeless individuals in Seattle make up 27% of the people killed by drivers, even though they’re just 1.2% of the population. What is the city doing to address that discrepancy? (KIRO)
• Pittsburgh Regional Transit’s bus redesign is threatened by a looming budget deficit in 2028, unless the Pennsylvania government comes up with a long-term funding solution (Public Source). In Philadelphia, SEPTA is facing similar uncertainty despite better-than-expected revenue (Inquirer).
• Los Angeles, which promised a car-free 2028 Summer Olympics, is reserving 369 miles of roadway specifically for athletes, coaches and officials. (CBS)
• Two L.A. cemeteries spent $500,000 to lobby California lawmakers in Sacramento to halt an L.A. bike lane project. (L.A. Times)
• Charlotte sales tax growth is flat, endangering future transit projects. (WFAE)
• The Houston Metro is proposing as-yet-unspecified service hour cuts to deal with a budget shortfall. (Chronicle)
• Denver’s Regional Transportation District launched a new strategic initiative called Building a Better RTD. (Mass Transit)
• Lexington, Kentucky started fining drivers who park in bike lanes. (Herald-Leader)
• New Delhi built a world-class subway system larger than New York City’s for less than the cost of one NYC subway line. (NY Times)
• The Chinese city of Chongqing opened a farmers market next to a subway station. (China Daily)

This week on Talking Headways, we’re joined by Joshua Schank to talk about his book, “New Tricks for Old Bureaucracies: Improving Policy Outcomes in the Public Sector.” In a broad-ranging discussion about urban dysfunction, Schank talks about the inner workings of LA Metro, the benefits of openness and transparency, and, of course, the importance of strategic planning.

Of course, no one gets away easy; we also share frustrations about meetings, transit board structures, and agency fiefdoms.

You know the drill. On Talking Headways you can:

• Read an excerpt of our exhilarating conversation below.
• You can read the entire text (with some transcription typos) here.
• Our you could do the right thing and put on some headphones and click “play” in the player below:

Here’s the edited portion:

Jeff Wood: What was it like when you got to LA Metro? I read the section about the “Board staff,” and I wanted to throw the book at the wall! But I also then thought, “You’re in LA, why don’t we make a ‘Parks and Rec’-type TV show about this group of folks who control, but don’t control, but do control, but don’t control the whole process of creating policy and moving things through the line at LA Metro?”

Joshua Schank: Yeah, it was quite the shock — “Board staff” definitely being one of the examples of a thing that was a big shock to me.

I’d obviously had worked around public agencies my whole life. I started my career at MTA in New York. I knew something about how agencies functioned, but I didn’t quite understand how bad it could be. I imagined in my naive mind that most people working in the agency shared the goals that I had. Like, basic things, like improving public transportation or reducing the number of trips by car — you know, the types of things that you would assume if you’re working at Metro, you care about.

But there’s a whole swath of people working in and around Metro, or any public agency, who just don’t care about those things because that’s not why they got into it.

The person running HR is unlikely to be passionate about transportation. The person running procurement is unlikely to be passionate about transportation. And then the Board staff are the most egregious example, because the Board staff is essentially political people who are now put in a position of dealing with transportation experts at this big agency.

So for those who don’t know, the “Board staff” is essentially support staff for the elected officials who run Metro, who sit on LA Metro’s board. They’re the equivalent of congressional staff (and I was a congressional staffer one time). I understand how that works. The difference is that as a congressional staffer, you get to make really important decisions behind the scenes that lead to legislative change, right, and you help inform your boss about how to vote on those decisions, what amendments to put in, et cetera.

In this case, the people are in the job themselves because the electeds have another job. The elected’s job isn’t to be on the board of Metro. The elected’s job is to be the county supervisor, be the mayor of Los Angeles, be whatever that role is, which also includes sitting on the Metro board. So that you wind up with these staff who have an outsized role and outsized influence, and that’s one thing that makes it unusual.

The second thing is that because of the Brown Act, the Board staff can serve as a proxy sometimes for responding to Metro board items, because the Brown Act says that if you’re going to have all the board together in a discussion, that you have to have it be a public meeting.

You can’t do that behind closed doors, except under a special set of circumstances. So Board staff briefings at Metro were created so that the Board staff could hear Metro items before they go to the board, and give the likely reaction of Metro board members behind closed doors. And those Board staff briefings are where a lot of policy gets made and people hear and discuss what’s going to happen. You essentially have staffers who are 25 or 30 years old, or maybe they’ve been there 40 years, but they’re political people who are reacting to transportation experts who have come up with answers to solutions.

So it becomes a very challenging situation that when I got there, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening.

Jeff Wood: I imagine that’s how it’s like at a number of agencies, and it’s all structure upon structure upon structure upon structure. I mean, you have the Brown Act, you have the requirements of the legislators, you have all this stuff that has to happen, but then it creates this convoluted way of communicating with each other, which then itself doesn’t make sense.

The structures make sense from trying to protect the public, right? But then when you put them all together and mash up, it’s a recipe that doesn’t taste good.

Joshua Schank: That’s right, and I think the fundamental issue is that elected officials serving directly on the board of a regional agency can be very problematic, and it’s problematic because they are primarily serving their constituents, and the agency is a second job.

In California, almost all the agencies are structured that way. You almost always have elected officials on the board, or sometimes in a couple of cases, they’re elected directly to the board, which I’ve heard is even worse. But if you’re an elected official serving on a board of a transit agency, everything that the transit agency does is going to be put through that hyper-political lens, and it’s gonna be much harder to have the regional perspective.

I would argue, based on my experience at Metro, that strong governance reforms are necessary in California if we’re going to have public transit agencies that are successful.

• Cities first started installing bollards after 9/11. Since then, they’ve been used to stop drivers from using their vehicles to ram into pedestrians on the sidewalk. The New York Times calls them a sign of the militarization of cities that have become just another part of urban life.
• Architecture and urban planning have a role to play in keeping people moving and healthy, rather than just telling everyone to get more exercise (Arch Daily). This has a lot to do with cars, because they take up much more space in limited public right-of-ways than people do (Princeton University Press). Plus, climate change won’t be solved by individual choices, but only by public policy and collective action, according to author Leah C. Stokes (MIT Press Reader).
• Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron has some practical tips for going car-free.
• More U.S. cities, including Seattle and St. Louis, are putting up gates at light rail stations to increase their farebox revenue. (Mass Transit)
• Richmond leaders want the state of Virginia to drop the legal limit for DUI from a 0.08 blood alcohol level to 0.05. Drinking was a factor in 37 percent of the city’s crashes. (Axios)
• The Minneapolis Blue Line is still short $224 million. (Minnesota Public Radio)
• U.S. DOT officials spent two days in Atlanta looking into transit agency MARTA’s safety and security. (AJC)
• Nashville is developing a tool to measure how new development affects traffic. (Fox 17)
• After a recent court ruling in its favor, Doug Ford’s Ontario government is already starting to rip out Toronto bike lanes. (CBC)
• A new report frames high-speed rail between Toronto and Quebec City as essential for Canada’s economic development. (The Whig)
• A German company invented a tire that’s made out of 43 percent recycled materials and allows electric vehicles to get more out of their batteries. (Auto Next)

• About three in 10 U.S. drivers think there’s nothing wrong with speeding, according to a AAA poll. The reality is, there’s plenty wrong with it, like the fact that it kills people. Nearly a third of traffic deaths involve excessive speeds. (Jalopnik)
• Miriam Pinski argues that one reason transit projects take so long and cost so much is because we ask them to do too much — beautify the neighborhood, save the environment, create jobs, etc. — when the most important thing is to create a reliable system people will choose to ride (Works in Progress). Meanwhile, Reece Martin went into even greater depth about the same topic (The Transit Brief).
• The Federal Railway Administration is loosening a lot of train safety regulations. (Trains)
• The California legislature sent Gov. Gavin Newsom a bill cutting red tape for high-speed rail. (EIN Presswire)
• Maryland’s $22 billion, six-year transportation budget includes just $100 million for Red Line planning (Daily Record). Meanwhile, an audit found that the state failed to collect more than $800 million in tolls (Maryland Matters).
• West Virginia groups asked a federal court for an injunction to stop the last phase of the Corridor H freeway project. (WDTV)
• The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy opposes Florida’s plan to use federal funds for EV chargers for flying taxis instead.
• Pittsburgh is replacing its 30-year-old light rail cars. (WTAE)
• Portland is considering offering city government employees free transit passes while Interstate 5 is closed for construction. (Willamette Week)
• Colorado has become a national leader on clean transportation, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
• Governing magazine honored Randy Clarke as one of its public officials of the year for revitalizing the D.C. Metro.
• Riders on Charlotte’s Gold Line now have to request a stop when they want to get off the light rail train. (Queen City News)
• The European Union wants member states to make the default urban speed limit 30 kilometers per hour, or about 20 miles per hour (Euro Cities). Birmingham, England has already beat them to the punch (BBC).
• Piggybacking on the discourse Streetsblog NYC stirred up over bike helmets, Belgium has made them mandatory for scooters that go over 20 kph. (Zag Daily)

• The New York Times devoted 2,000 words to bike lanes and the politicians who ridicule them, never once considering whether they make streets and all of their users safer.
• The Trump administration is appealing a federal court ruling barring it from withholding funds for a $16 billion Hudson River rail tunnel. (Trains)
• The U.S. DOT is weakening rules governing fuel economy for heavy-duty commercial trucks. (E&E News)
• West Coast leaders from British Columbia to Baja are looking to create the infrastructure for electric semi trucks along Interstate 5, one of the busiest freight corridors in the country. (Government Technology)
• A motorist drove onto a sidewalk in Fort Collins during the popular Tour de Fat parade, killing one person and injuring five others. (Coloradoan)
• Austin is seeking public input on East Riverside Drive, a major thoroughfare between to highways that will host five future light rail stations. (KVUE)
• As in many places, cyclists in Minnesota are worried about getting doored. (Star Tribune)
• New automated cameras in Philadelphia started warning Route 13 speeders on Monday and will start issuing tickets after 60 days. (Inquirer)
• Pittsburgh’s annual Pedal PGH fundraiser drew 3,000 people. (WPXI)
• Northern Virginia voters will decide on a 1% sales tax for schools and transit in November. (Mercury)
• Dollywood holds lessons for urbanists due to its roots in East Tennessee history and culture. (Fast Company)
• Even though it’s good policy, Sarasota residents are not happy about having to pay for parking at night and on Sundays. (Herald-Tribune)
• A Florida Uber driver was cleared of stealing $3,000 worth of cinnamon rolls bound for a farmers market. (Local 10)
• Why don’t people complaining about high housing costs in the city just move out to the middle of nowhere? McSweeney’s wonders, satirically.

Starting on Monday, Aug. 31, Streetsblog USA is on hiatus for a week of internal strategy sessions, planning meetings, professional development and personal soul-searching punctuated by the occasional Martini olive.

We’ll still be publishing our daily headlines, by Blake Aued, but for the last week of August, we’re mostly just putting our heads together to soon roll out the best damned Streetsblog you’ve ever seen, with some shiny new bells, blaring new whistles … and deep investigative pieces into our nation’s ongoing struggle with car dependence.

If you are trying to reach us, please email Editor Gersh Kuntzman at gersh@streetsblog.org. We’ll all be back the day after Labor Day, when we’ll also welcome back Streetsblog USA Editor Kea Wilson.

• Amtrak has seen record ridership for two years in a row, carrying almost 24 million passengers in fiscal 2026. This is largely the result of a $22 billion investment in tracks, tunnels, stations and new trains through the Biden administration’s infrastructure law. New service on the Gulf Coast and in the Midwest has been successful. All of this means that congressional Republicans would be shortsighted to cut funding for passenger rail now. (Frontier Group)
• Climate change causes extreme heat that can damage overhead wires and warp train tracks, as well as floods that wash away tracks and inundate subways. (The Conversation)
• Motorists in states that voted for Donald Trump are feeling the most pain at the pump from the Iran War. (NOTUS)
• Even though Tesla’s Autopilot feature isn’t truly autonomous, more and more Tesla drivers are deciding to take a nap behind the wheel. (NBC News; paywall)
• People in the Sun Belt are spending way too much money on cars, according to WalletHub. In one Texas town, the median auto debt is almost equivalent to a year’s salary. Americans’ total debt from auto loans now stands at $1.7 trillion.
• The Nashville Scene goes inside the city’s Vision Zero process as it works to reverse a years-long trend of rising traffic deaths.
• A budget shortfall is leading the Jacksonville Transportation Authority to reconsider plans for autonomous shuttle buses. (Daily Record)
• A new Illinois law requires the owners of high-speed e-bikes to have a driver’s license and insurance, and to register the vehicle like a car. (NBC Chicago)
• A year after putting Hemphill Street on a road diet, Fort Worth is removing bike lanes and returning it to five car lanes. (Star-Telegram)
• I-37 split San Antonio’s Eastside and downtown in the 1960s, and now residents are thinking about how to reconnect them. (Report)
• An anti-bike Washington, D.C. official was arrested stemming from an altercation with a constituent over a bike lane project. (Reddit)
• Seattle is stepping up Vision Zero efforts as the goal of ending traffic deaths by 2030 approaches. (KUOW)
• The new Crosslake Connection in Seattle is helping University of Washington students get to class. (The Daily)
• Omaha unveiled new renderings and a name, Oscar, for the streetcar currently under construction. (WOWT)
• One big question about driverless cars has been, if they get a ticket, who pays it? China is considering a law assigning responsibility for autonomous vehicles’ traffic infractions to the manufacturer or importer. (China Daily)
• Brazil has developed a plan to improve its transit system, which has been stagnant for decades. (Transport Matters)

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is no stranger to how Washington works, having served in Congress since the mid-1970s. But in a interview-on-a-bus earlier this week with StreetsblogMASS, Markey acknowledged that he and his colleagues on Capitol Hill need to do things differently.

“Democrats have to try. They have to work hard. They have to fight harder. It’s a transition that we have to make. It doesn’t happen by accident. You have to have people who are worried to put themselves on the line,” Markey told StreetsblogMASS Editor Christian MilNeil and reporter Meghan Volcy. “Because that’s what the communities want. They don’t want more highways. They want more affordable public transportation, safer roads, safer ways in which they can be riding their bikes.”

But Markey has given up on getting any of those priorities through a Republican-led Congress. The senator, who faces a challenge from U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton in next Tuesday’s Massachusetts primary, discussed that, his push for more non-highway transportation funding and more.

Watch below, or check out an edited transcript here.

• People get a visceral thrill out of driving, according to a study by a company that makes motor oil. (Jalopnik)
• The cost of a new car keeps rising, and more and more motorists are putting themselves into dangerous amounts of debt to own one. Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon is worst in the sprawling Sun Belt exurbs, where drivers in eight states between Georgia and New Mexico are most likely to be overspending on cars, going into debt equivalent to at least half their income. (Wallet Hub)
• Climate change is ruining a lot of the natural sites along a cross-country road trip (Grist), which, ironically, is partly because people are taking 9,000-mile road trips by car.
• Volvo has developed technology allowing cars to warn drivers in other cars about hazards ahead. (The Verge)
• The Nashville Scene took a deep dive into the city’s efforts to dig itself out of a deadly hole in regards to street safety.
• For a limited time only, Oregon residents can get a rebate on an electric vehicle. (Oregonian)
• Pittsburgh’s guerrilla crosswalks are a cry for help. (City Paper)
• In lieu of actual pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, Las Vegas is using AI to detect when people want to cross the street, and it’s working about as well as AI usually does. (Jalopnik)
• St. Louis is considering demolishing a vacant parking garage as part of an urban revitalization effort. (STL NPR)
• In Phoenix, 80 percent of crashes between cars and light rail trains are the drivers’ fault. (Fox 10)
• In Seattle, Sound Transit is moving forward with a fare gate pilot program at 14 light rail stations. (KING)
• Converting the Jacksonville Skyway to buses would cost almost $300 million. (Times-Union; paywall)
• Richmond is dramatically broadening its approach to Vision Zero. (Axios)
• The European Union estimates that transportation noise contributes to 12,000 premature deaths per year. (Brussels Times)
• Bogota is proof that traffic calming works on arterial roads. (The City Fix)

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Karen Seto at Yale University and Zhe Zhu at the University of Connecticut to talk about their new study, The Urban Pulse. We talk about using granular satellite data to measure change in cities and the processes of urbanization.

Longtime listeners know the deal: Hit play on the audio player embedded below, read a full albeit AI-generated transcript here, or check out the edited excerpt at the end of this post.

Jeff Wood: How did you all collect the data, and how frequent was the pulse that you measured?

Zhe Zhu: It’s from Landsat and Sentinel-2. This data came from the NASA Harmonized Landsat Sentinel-2 data. It’s a NASA program that combines medium-resolution images into a 30-meter-by-30-meter resolution cell and removes all the sensor-to-sensor differences. It’s very good at detecting clouds and obtaining a clear observation.

About every three days, you’re going to get an observation based on how cloudy your locations are. And the data removes these atmospheric influences ands bi-directional differences when you view the same vantage point from different locations. The images are very consistent if there’s no change. When there’s change, we can see it based on this time series.

Jeff Wood: How do you see it? There’s so much data and information — how do you actually measure that change? You can see it if you look at one satellite image and another, but how do you systematize that so that you can actually, over time, collect this information?

Zhe Zhu: We built a time-series approach with two components. The first component is the code algorithm, which continuously monitors land disturbances. It basically drills through the time series. You can model what the surface will look like if nothing changes. Take the phenology of trees, which measures their seasonal life cycles. Phenology is going to have up and downs for different kind of conditions: the solar angle, the solar elevation, the topography, and so on.

The second component is where deep learning, machine learning comes in. We need to classify these breaks and the changes we observe. We need to make sure what is real: construction instead of deforestation or some other kind of non-construction related change. We use deep learning because the human patterns are very unique, so we need to combine the time series data and spatial pattern data in order to classify whether something is really a construction-related change instead of, for example, a fire or some other change that occurred on the land’s surface.

Karen Seto: One thing that is so novel about the methodology that Zhe developed is that it departs from the more conventional way of using satellite data, where you take the raw data and classify it into classes, right? Roads, buildings, agriculture — you do it to the next one, and the next one.

Zhe’s method takes the ostensibly raw data with minimal correction to see the signal, and then once there’s a change in the signal, you can say, “Oh, what is that class, given that there’s this big jump?” The methodology treats change as an inherent part of the signal.

Jeff Wood: When you looked into some of the changes, was there anything that was really interesting or jumped out at you? Like, maybe they’re building a subway in Shenzhen or they’re making these changes in Lagos? What are some of the things that popped out to you?

Karen Seto: Well, Zhe and I looked at the data for Dubai right after COVID, and we said, “Oh, this neighborhood in Dubai has no effect. There’s no COVID effect. There’s no drop in activity.” Whereas in other places in Dubai and in other parts of other cities, there was a clear drop. COVID happened, and there were shutdowns — but in this one neighborhood, everything stayed the same. So we, we did some research on that neighborhood, and it certainly corroborated what the data showed. It was surprising.

Jeff Wood: What was happening in that neighborhood? I’m curious.

Karen Seto: Continued development. People were still out and about.

Jeff Wood: Just going around, doing their thing.

Karen Seto: Yep.

Zhe Zhu: Yeah. And the spikiness of the urban development is also something I’m quite surprised about. I always thought of urbanization as something you do steadily, whether increasing or decreasing, but it is not. Lack of development can dominate for a few years, and then you get a big spike, and then nothing happens for a few years.  We see that in a lot of places.

• Angie Schmitt wrote about how the big-box retail model is killing smaller stores and thus walkable neighborhoods, forcing everyone who lives downtown to drive miles to the suburbs just to pick up a tube of lipstick. Sure, Costco is cheaper, but in the long run how much are you saving if you need to buy an SUV to get there? (Love of Place)
• Meanwhile, shopping malls are becoming more like downtowns in that they’re starting to charge for parking — which, as Donald Shoup taught us, is never actually free. (USA Today)
• Sprawl has been the key to the Sun Belt’s success because cities can keep building more cheap housing without any opposition from existing neighborhoods. Now that temperatures are rising, they have to figure out how to cool down all those asphalt ovens. (We Can Have Nice Things)
• This just might be a conflict of interest: More than 300 local governments seeking federal funding to recover from damage caused by climate change hired lobbyists who also work for the fossil fuel industry. (The Guardian)
• The Trump administration’s justification for building roads on remote federal lands is to fight forest fires, but bringing more people into those areas is likely to cause more fires. (Heatmap; registration required)
• Two programs in California and Denver show that people really like e-bike rebates. (Government Technology)
• South Carolina and the Federal Highway Administration are spending $2.7 billion to fix one freeway interchange. (The State)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit could use a value capture tool called tax increment financing to pay for the Ballard Link. (The Urbanist)
• Bus rapid transit on Maryland Parkway in Las Vegas has cut commuting times by 20 percent. (Sun)
• Columbus is still tweaking its bikeshare and e-scooter policies. (Axios)
• Wichita is testing a Douglas Avenue road diet for six months. (KAKE)
• The Transit Brief takes a look at what Montreal could have built if construction costs in Canada were as low as Europe’s.
• Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers are the big winners of Trump’s war on Iran, which has lifted EV sales everywhere but the U.S. (Yale Climate Connection)

Mayor Mamdani will not tear down the deteriorating triple-cantilevered stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and instead pursue his own version of long-stalled plans to rebuild the segment over 10 years using a bypass structure that city officials say will be temporary.

Mamdani’s plan, which he will unveil on Monday, differs from previous plans for a temporary highway structure by not expanding the highway’s footprint through the Brooklyn waterfront. Construction will start in 2030, wrap up in 2040 and extend the structure’s lifespan to 2080, city officials told reporters at a closed briefing last week.

Past attempts to rebuild the city-owned “BQE Central” segment of the highway fizzled out under mayors Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, who attempted to get federal funding for the effort.

The city spends $160 million a year maintaining the structure in lieu of a long-term solution, the administration said. DOT bean counters insist that any shutdown would risk diverting a “significant portion” of the 130,000 daily car and truck trips onto local streets.

“For decades, prior administrations have failed to deliver urgent long-term repairs to BQE Central — but we can no longer afford to wait for the perfect solution,” Mamdani said in a statement. “This plan allows us to safely fix the BQE without slowing our city down or wasting decades more on magical thinking. The cost of inaction is too high, and the risks to New Yorkers are too important to delay any longer.”

We're done kicking the can down the road. Here's how we're fixing the city-owned section of the BQE. pic.twitter.com/ln0it98s1w

— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) August 24, 2026

The Department of Transportation plans involve building a temporary two-tiered bypass highway next to the 0.4-mile cantilever along Furman Street, between Atlantic Avenue and Columbia Heights. The detour road will continue over the Brooklyn Bridge approach at Vine Street to connect back into the rest of the BQE, though its exact route near the bridge is still under consideration.

Mamdani and his team vowed not to increase the BQE’s footprint, and to keep it at two lanes in each direction, after his predecessor Eric Adams proposed rebuilding the highway as a three-lane road. But officials who briefed the media last week reiterated the city’s longstanding position that tearing the road down entirely would unleash its traffic onto local streets — despite growing calls for the city to seize the chance and phase out the BQE.

“While the city and the state must right the wrongs of Robert Moses with the BQE and other infrastructure plowed through urban communities, decades of political paralysis have left us out of options,” DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn said in a statement. “Confronting the reality of cracked concrete, exposed steel and extensive rust damage simply cannot wait for another blue-ribbon commission.”

In another statement, Deputy Mayor for Operations Julia Kerson warned the highway’s collapse would force “cars and heavy trucks…onto local streets” and disrupt “key freight transportation networks.”

“We must and will act now,” Kerson said.

If realized, the decade-long project will cost $4 billion and effectively lock the highway in place for the next half-century, but Mamdani will likely encounter local resistance.

In 2018, the de Blasio administration faced stiffed resistance to its plan to build a six-lane replacement highway atop the popular Brooklyn Heights Promenade. De Blasio ultimately kicked the can down the road, making patchwork fixes and converting the highway segment from three lanes to two to lighten the load on the aging structure. His successor Eric Adams unsuccessfully pitched the federal government to rebuild the BQE to last for another century and flirted with rewidening the highway to six lanes at the behest of car-first Brooklyn Democratic Party bigwigs, but never got sign-off from Uncle Sam.

The Mamdani administration’s plan seems designed to reduce the backlash this time by building the interim structure lower than the promenade — about at the height of the northbound upper roadway of the cantilever.

DOT will close portions of the scenic walkway for the repairs, however, but officials promised to keep it partially open at all times. DOT also plans to reconstruct the adjacent Columbia Heights overpass during the work as well.

The project will impact a long list of park space, including Squibb Park, Hillside Dog Park, Anchorage Plaza, Clumber Corner, Bar and Grill Park, Adam Yauch Park, and part of Harry Chapin Playground, according to City Hall.

The temporary bypass along Brooklyn Bridge Park will be within Furman Street’s right-of-way, but officials insisted that access to Brooklyn Bridge Park from that road will remain throughout construction.

DOT plans to ask the state to alienate parkland as part of the project, but officials vowed to tear down the temporary roadway and restore the green spaces after the work wraps.

Brooklyn Heights residents and other civic and environmental groups formed a coalition in 2024 calling on the city and state to reimagine the entire BQE corridor, from the Verrazzano Bridge and the Kosciuszko Bridge, and move away from a highway.

There are plenty of successful examples of highway removal projects, like the Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, which officials in the Korean capital turned into a river walk. Closer to home, there’s the removal of Alaska Way Viaduct in Seattle where traffic “just disappeared,” the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and, of course, the collapse of the West Side Highway in Manhattan.

Gov. Hochul also recently called off an expansion of the Cross-Bronx Expressway following pushback by residents and extensive coverage by Streetsblog.

DOT leaders said such an effort would need buy-in from the state, which controls most of the BQE, to scale back its portion of the expressway as well, along with support from the federal government, since the thoroughfare is also part of the interstate highway system.

DOT took over the cantilever project from the state during the de Blasio era; planning for the project goes all that way back to 2006. The city only owns the 1.5-mile portion of the roadway between Atlantic Avenue and Sands Streets, while the state owns and operates the remaining stretches. Albany has shown no interest in taking down the highway.

Despite DOT’s stated fears of spilling highway traffic to local streets, that already happens with motorists getting off the highway and taking shortcuts around the trenched section in Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, before getting back on at Atlantic Avenue.

Experts have for years recommended the city close off the Atlantic Avenue interchange to discourage the cut-through traffic and calm the chaotic on-ramps near Brooklyn Bridge Park. DOT has been studying closing the on-ramps as part of a redevelopment of the nearby Brooklyn Marine Terminal, but any work on interchanges would trigger a federal review, officials said.

The city will launch an environmental review by mid-2028, and start construction in 2029, before moving traffic onto the bypass the following year, officials said.

On his first day in office, Mayor Mamdani told New York City that his administration would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism” and promised that City Hall would “use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.”

More than seven months later, Mamdani announced that would he start wearing a bike helmet on his frequent rides across the city, apparently in response to the pleas of his constituents. “You’re right, I’ve gotta do better,” he said in a video published on Aug. 18. “Safety first, New York. See you out there.”

The video garnered 26 million views on X. New Yorkers heaped praise on Hizzoner’s announcement, while reporters gushed over the mayor’s message. The New York Times lauded the mayor for “finally” donning the protective headgear, while the Department of Transportation advertised one of its routine free helmet giveaways.

The announcement combined everything that Mamdani loves about the city with everything that the city loves about Mamdani: cycling, safety, vertical video and a sense of protectiveness around their globally famous mayor.

Yet the same announcement further entrenched a persistent narrative that assigns responsibility for road safety to individual cyclists while downplaying the government’s role in designing safer streets.

That narrative is completely false. The chief culprits of traffic violence are car drivers who terrorize the city’s streets, maim and kill its residents and evade any punishment for doing so.

This became painfully clear when three drivers — none of whom Mamdani’s NYPD has arrested or even identified — slaughtered three cyclists in three separate crashes in less than a week. At least two of those cyclists were wearing a helmet. But helmets are no match for three-ton motor vehicles.

Mamdani’s focus on helmets distracts from that reality. It paints deadly crashes as the failure of vulnerable road users to protect themselves, rather than as the failure of government to stop completely avoidable carnage.

“We are as a nation eternally distracted by the idea that personal responsibility can save us so that we can excuse widespread preventable death,” said Jessie Singer, who wrote the book about car crashes and has critiqued helmet campaigns in the past.

“Helmets are great,” Singer added. “Helmets serve a practical function of protecting your head if you fall off your bike and hit the asphalt — [but] even the manufacturers of helmets will tell you that they’re not made [to protect cyclist from] cars.”

Some advocates praised Mamdani for putting safe and affordable transportation at the top of his agenda and normalizing cycling as a prominent public figure.

“I thought the mayor’s video was cute and I actually see it as his mainstreaming of bicycling,” said Ben Furnas, executive director of Transportation Alternatives.

And Singer concurred, adding, “As much as I see all of the problems with the helmet discourse, I appreciate that Mamdani is willing to say, ‘I’m listening to what you all are complaining about.’”

But the mayor’s video, with its focus on individualistic talking points, perturbed other street safety activists. “I’d rather he’d keep the focus on institutional solutions to this public health crisis,” said Doug Gordon, who co-hosts the War on Cars podcast and co-wrote a book about building a post-car society. “There’s almost never good timing for an elected official to post a helmet video in a city where you have an average of one or two cyclists or pedestrian fatalities every other day.”

Helmets aren’t entirely useless, and they reduce the risk of head injury by up to 88 percent. Furnas pointed out that the gear is especially useful for electric mobility devices that can achieve much faster speeds. “In those types of crashes a head injury is a real risk,” he said. “The bottom line is it’s never a bad idea to pop on a helmet when you’re riding a bike.”

Still, some cyclists question the efficacy of helmets and wonder if other factors — like people riding more safely or better infrastructure — more accurately explain their alleged correlation with lower injury rates.

“It’s a mistake to focus your narrative on ‘wear your helmet,'” said Kevin Montgomery, who penned a provocative essay that argued helmets are useless and still believes their benefits are questionable. “It’s a bad faith argument a lot of the time, spoken by people who don’t necessarily have any interest in cycling themselves.”

Changing the story

Helmets shift the narrative away from government’s role in protecting people on the road toward one of personal responsibility. Singer compared helmet campaigns to the signs that some cities hang near highways to instruct drivers to slow down — even though the highways encourage high speeds.

“They’re looking to comfort themselves,” Singer explained. “It’s a way of saying, ‘This couldn’t happen to me, I know better.'”

Academic research supports this line of thinking. Studies have found that more people don protective gear in countries, like the United States, where it is less safe to bike. The authors of a 2017 study argued that American cities routinely tie helmet campaigns to car-first policies that “hamper efforts to actually improve bicycle safety” and uphold a culture of “unfettered automobility.” Canadian provinces that mandate helmets do not register lower injury rates.

When governments design streets to protect everyone — such as in the Netherlands or cycling-friendly cities like Copenhagen — people rarely wear helmets and their crash and injury rates remain low.

“What distinguishes them is a really high quality street design,” said Furnas. “My sense is the Mamdani administration understands this and is really focused on having a high-quality protected bike lane network.” However, the rise of much faster e-bikes has driven an increase in injuries — even in the Netherlands, where acoustic bike crash rates have otherwise remained flat.

Here in New York City, the post-pandemic explosion of e-bikes and other battery-powered devices has brought about more emergency room visits. But cars still account for the vast majority of road deaths, and recent studies continue to reinforce that better street infrastructure as the primary means of curbing traffic injuries and deaths.

A spokesperson for Mamdani emphasized that the administration has championed both helmets and safer street design. Under the new mayor, DOT relaunched several bike and bus lane projects that were abandoned by the more car-focused predecessor Eric Adams.

“New Yorkers shouldn’t have to choose between wearing helmets that help protect against head injuries and infrastructure designs that reduce fatalities and ensure that everyone is protected when using our roads,” said Jeremy Edwards. “This administration is providing both, and we will continue to do so.”

Known dangers

On the same day Mamdani posted his video, two New York City drivers killed two cyclists and fled. Within a week, a motorist mowed down a third cyclist and fled. The three wrecks took place on streets with car-dominant infrastructure that endanger New Yorkers — a reality made clear by the many people whom car drivers injured in collisions in the same places.

Paulina Tec Choc, 29, was waiting at the corner of Jamaica Avenue and Cypress Hills Street in Brooklyn on her e-bike around 5:50 a.m., when a motorist struck her from behind and ran her over before fleeing.

Tec Choc, who was wearing a helmet, suffered “severe trauma to the head and body” and died at a nearby hospital. “She always wore a helmet,” said her boss, Osman Cevallos. The intersection where she died recorded 57 reported crashes that injured 29 people, including three more cyclists and four pedestrians, over the last five years.

Cypress Hills Street is supposed to include a protected cycling lane, according to the Department of Transportation‘s bike map, but the path only has paint at the corner where a driver murdered Tec Choc. The remainder of the intersection is a typical New York car sewer: wide roadways with slip lanes and two-way traffic. All of these features encourage fast and dangerous driving.

Jamaica Avenue and Cypress Hills Street is a car sewer.

The second fatal crash occured just before 9:30 p.m. at Bruckner Boulevard and Longwood Avenue in the Bronx, where a speeding motorist blew through a red light and initiated a chain-reaction crash with multiple vehicles, killing 51-year-old father-of-five Angelo Camero, who was cycling home, and injuring another 37-year-old woman in a car.

The intersection features a two-way bike path on the sidewalk, but it is completely surrounded by wide roadways that induce fast, unsafe driving. 120 people have been injured there in 139 reported collisions since 2022, including another three cyclists, a pedestrian, and 113 people in cars.

The third cyclist, 40-year-old Brooklynite Mamadou Diallo — who was also wearing a helmet — was making a left turn at East 54th Street and Avenue I when the driver of a BMW sedan slammed into him.

Although this intersection saw fewer reported crashes than the other two — five collisions, including two that injured a cyclist and a pedestrian over five years — its design still lacks safety infrastructure for people outside of cars, despite the nearby school. This pattern persists across much of Brooklyn’s southern half.

Transportation Alternatives called on Mamdani to come up with a comprehensive plan in response to the spate of deaths, and the group plans to stage a “die-in” at City Hall Park at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday.

“Overwhelmingly, the threats for cyclists are from cars and there’s a very limited amount of things a helmet can do when you’re struck by a driver,” Furnas said.

Additional reporting by Poppy Wilkinson

Double parking and loading zone violations are down in Center City Philadelphia after local officials implemented automated enforcement and payment cameras — offering inspiration to other cities struggling to enforce parking rules.

In the 15 months since the state-run Philadelphia Parking Authority introduced automated enforcement and payment for loading zones in Center City, traffic speeds increased from 7 to 10 miles per hour, the Inquirer reported earlier this month.

At the same time, the new enforcement has kept private vehicles out of commercial loading deliveries, and the number of freight vehicles using those dedicated spots increased 97 percent, parking authority officials said.

The parking authority now plans to expand the program to more locations in Center City.

“We are making substantial progress in our effort to reduce congestion on Center City streets, which in turn improves public safety and the quality of life in Philadelphia,” said Acting Philadelphia Parking Authority executive director Gabe Roberts in a press release.

Rather than deploying police to catch violators in the act, the camera-based program reduces illegal parking by making it easier to follow the law. Curb users complete a one-time enrollment that links their license plate to an online account, where they are automatically charged 10 cents per minute parked. In other words, the city isn’t asking drivers to follow the law — drivers follow it by design.

That ease of compliance, experts said, can exponentially improve the quality of cities’ streetscapes.

“Loading compliance typically goes from single digits to the 90s because the rules are easy to follow,” said Gabe Klein, the Head of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation under the Biden Administration.

City crash data isn’t up-to-date enough to show safety impacts, but locals say they’ve observed an increase in safety since the automated enforcement program started getting illegally parked cars out of the way of cyclists and crosswalks.

“These changes have probably shown a lot of safety improvements,” said Cody Cowper, who chairs the Complete Streets Committee for the Washington Square West Civic Association, which represents an area included in the program. “You don’t have somebody … swerving around a car and they can’t see the pedestrians in the intersection.”

Recommended Should Streets Be Designed for Easy Double-Parking or Safe Bicycling? Ben Fried March 20, 2014

Of course, dangerous illegal parking nuisances isn’t limited to Center City, or even to Philadelphia.

The quick rise of e-commerce has handily outpaced expansions of curb capacity across the nation. Cities aren’t able to handle the influx of Amazon and Doordash drivers and trucks, who also compete for space with traditional freight. The Philadelphia Parking Authority’s approach may be the closest yet to a practical solution.

“It’s really exciting,” said Giacomo Dalla Chiara, an urban freight management researcher at the University of Washington. “[Philadelphia is] really trying something new.”

Dalla Chiara worked on a recent study analyzing loading zone management systems across 13 different US cities. Few control commercial loading at all, or call it a day after painting a curb yellow. But the key is to integrate three strategies in tandem, Dalla Chiara said: infrastructure, including painted loading curbs; policy, such as time limits in loading zones; and regulation through pricing and enforcement.

That third element, Dalla Chiara said, is where Philadelphia stands out and others fall short.

“A lot of cities are scared of changing regulations,” he said.

Recommended Opinion: We Must Price and Manage The Curb Before Robo-Taxis and Other AVs Scale Up Jordan Justus May 7, 2026

Philadelphia’s program includes more than 50 cameras, and more on the way, which scan the license plates of vehicles in loading zones. The cameras do not track faces or any other identifying features, according to parking authority officials. Parking enforcement officers review each filmed violation before the authority issues a ticket.

Drivers do not have to operate a commercial vehicle to use the zones, but are required to register with the CurbPass app. The first three minutes of parking are free, and drivers pay 10 cents each minute thereafter. Drivers are fined $51 if they stay in the spot for over an hour or do not register on the app. Drivers who double park must pay a heftier $76 fine.

A loading zone violation ticket with identifying information redacted.

Automating enforcement helps to distribute penalties evenly and promote fairness, according to supporters.

“Our enforcement shouldn’t be selective,” Cowper said. “The things that people are being ticketed for were always illegal. We just didn’t have a good means of enforcing it.”

But Dalla Chiara warned that it’s too early to call the program an unmitigated success, since it only launched in May 2025 and continues to grow.

Curb management data is fairly limited in the US, making it hard to draw conclusions about a single city’s pilot program limited to a few blocks.

“We know very little about curb behaviors,” he said.

Recommended This Tech Could Stop Drivers from Double-Parking and Blocking Bike Lanes Kea Wilson September 21, 2020

Still, Philadelphia officials are nonetheless motivated by the results.

Several US cities already implement some form of automated street enforcement. Los Angeles, New York, Washington, DC and Oakland all join Philadelphia in using bus and trolley-mounted, AI-assisted cameras to issue tickets to cars parked in bus lanes.

Several more use automated cameras to catch speeders and red light-runners with lifesaving outcomes.

Loading zone enforcement could revolutionize street safety on the nation’s busiest commercial corridors, but Philly officials advise other cities to take it slow.

“Any city looking to implement the program, should do a strong public outreach, it will take a while for the public to be aware,” a Philadelphia Parking Authority spokesperson advised other cities’ offficials in an email to Streetsblog. “Build in a warning period, so drivers have a chance to change behavior. You should also build in a grace period for those dropping off passengers, have an internal team review all images before a violation is created to make sure all violations being mailed out are accurate and clear.”

• Federal funding has a greater impact on transit systems in smaller communities than big cities, according to a new study. That doesn’t mean big cities don’t need federal funding, but each dollar spent on cities with populations under 200,000 generates three times the ridership growth. (Futurism)
• Technology is making cars even more expensive as they continue to turn into iPads on wheels. (The Atlantic; paywall)
• The U.S. DOT finally released Sean Duffy’s road trip reality show. (The Guardian)
• A Tennessee driver apparently didn’t even try to stop before plowing through a college cycling team, killing two people and hospitalizing seven others. (Jalopnik)
• A study found that Oakland drivers slowed down substantially after the city installed automated traffic enforcement cameras on dangerous roads. (San Francisco Chronicle; paywall)
• Nebraska is building more roundabouts because they’ve cut crashes by three-quarters. (Nebraska Public Media)
• About two-thirds of pedestrian deaths in Nevada happen in places where there are no crosswalks, according to a UNLV study. (Fox 5)
• Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson personally helped paint a new bus-only lane on Denny Way (The Urbanist). She also issued an executive order to speed up Vision Zero projects (Capitol Hill)
• Massive cuts to TriMet bus service took effect on Sunday. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• Phoenix’s Valley Metro is moving forward again with a stalled Westside light rail extension. (Axios)
• A prominent Atlanta developer wants to bring back the Peachtree Street streetcar. (Urbanize Atlanta)
• The family of Iryna Zarutska, who was killed aboard a Charlotte train, has sued the city. (Spectrum News)
• UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham plans to revive the HS2 passenger rail line between Birmingham and Manchester in Northern England. (Coventry Live)
• Dutch regulators fined Uber almost $1 billion for automatically deleting drivers’ accounts without informing them. (Reuters)
• Canada is building a lot of transit-oriented housing. (The Transit Brief)
• Children’s lungs grew faster after London established its Ultra Low Emissions Zone in 2019. (Yale e360)

• Omaha is a bit late to the streetcar trend, which started to die out when Obama-era funding did. Some, like Kansas City and Cincinnati’s, have been successful. Others, like those in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, lacked enough density or didn’t go far enough to be useful. A lot of times new streetcars are better at spurring development than actually moving people. (Nebraska Public Media)
• How did the public right-of-way become synonymous with cars? (Gary’s Substack)
• New Urbanism cofounder Andres Duany named his 25 favorite American cities or neighborhoods, and the thing almost all of them have in common is that they’re laid out on a grid. (CNU Public Square)
• Cities’ ambitious long-range plans are often disconnected from the sprawl-encouraging zoning that’s actually on the ground. (Smart Growth America)
• “Enshittification” doesn’t just apply to the internet. Cory Doctorow’s apt phrase for the worsening experience of going online can describe urban environments as well, David Levinson writes. Think about ugly bus wraps, blocked sidewalks and shared e-bikes scattered on the ground. (Transportist)
• New tire efficiency rules in California will save drivers gas and keep millions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. (Grist)
• Portland is banning right turns on red at 30 particularly dangerous intersections, and could add 200 more if it works. (Oregonian)
• An overhaul of Florida property taxes could result in eliminating more than half of Pinellas County bus routes. (St. Pete Today)
• A Nevada committee appointed by state legislators did not answer the question of how to fund regional mass transit. (Current)
• Montgomery County, Maryland is upgrading its red-light cameras to catch drivers who speed up to catch a green light. (WTOP)
• Without explanation, officials in Jackson County, Missouri decided not to call for a referendum on a tax to support transit, walking and biking in Kansas City. (Star)
• The University of Pennsylvania created a digital version of Roosevelt Boulevard to test solutions for the deadly conditions on the Philadelphia road. (Penn Today)
• Minneapolis released a new interactive bike map ahead of the possible return of bikeshare. (Mpls St. Paul)
• Ride Bellevue is a service that delivers bikes to the Washington city’s downtown hotels, enabling visitors to explore without a car. (Momentum)
• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a gallery of transit photos dating back to the 1960s.

A new report from the city of Oakland shows that speed cameras are reducing speeding by 70 percent across locations where they are installed. This is consistent with results from other cities and countries.

More from Oakland DOT:

To test the efficacy of speed cameras, OakDOT conducted a before and after evaluation of vehicle speeds at camera locations in the summers of 2024, 2025 and 2026. Vehicle speeds were measured with pneumatic tube counts — an industry standard tool used to measure how fast vehicles are traveling.

Findings from that evaluation include:

• Compared to 2024 baseline data, 2026 tube counts show that drivers are slowing down at every speed camera location. The number of vehicles traveling 11 MPH or more over the speed limit dropped by an average of 70% across all 18 camera locations. That’s about 20,000 fewer speeding vehicles every day.
• The speed camera location with the greatest decline in speeding was 7th St. between Adeline St. and Linden St. In 2024, 1,700 vehicles passing the speed camera location were traveling 11 MPH or more over the speed limit. In 2026, that figure dropped to 150. This represents a 90% reduction.
• Traffic speeds are decreasing at all speed camera locations, as measured by the 85th percentile speed, a key traffic engineering metric. The 85th percentile speed is the speed at which 85% of vehicles are traveling at or below. Hegenberger Rd. saw the steepest decline. In 2024, 85% of vehicles were traveling at or below 57 MPH. In 2026, the 85th percentile speed dropped to 47 MPH.

A July 4, 2020 crash in West Oakland. It’s hoped speed cameras can help reduce such outcomes. Photo: Tim Courtney

The Oakland results echo similar results in San Francisco. Given the success, the East Bay Times is reporting that Oakland DOT director Josh Rowan wants to take another look at red light cameras, which were phased out in 2014.

“It is important to remember why Oakland is installing cameras, lowering speed limits, and adding speed bumps,” said Bryan Culbertson, representing the group Traffic Violence Rapid Response. “23 people were killed by drivers in Oakland last year, and 10 people have been killed so far this year.”

Despite the promising results from speed cameras in both San Francisco and Oakland, it’s clear more cameras and more safety infrastructure are still needed. An earlier report this month found that the number of serious and fatal crashes continues to climb in San Francisco and is even higher than it was in 2014, when that city first signed its pledge to reduce such crashes to zero in ten years.

Bike East Bay’s Justin Hu-Nguyen was pleased to learn of the speed reductions, but had concerns about an overreliance on cameras and funding. “We hope to see revenue and budget info included in future versions of Oakland’s speed camera program reports. For the program to be sustainable, it must be self-funded, and not detract from opportunities for proven infrastructure investments,” he said, adding that “…if the program generates a lot of revenue, this means it is writing many tickets, and therefore is not achieving its goals of adequately reducing speeding.”

The report states that “for the first six months of operation, Oakland issued 526,000 violations consisting of 194,000 citations and 332,000 warnings.” And that’s from just the 35 cameras that are part of the pilot. Readers who ride a bike should remember those numbers the next time someone says something akin to “cyclists are the real law breakers.” No, actually, it’s motorists—and with far more deadly consequences.

But advocates agreed that the most important part of cutting that down, and saving lives, isn’t speed cameras: it’s physical infrastructure. “Physical changes to streets like concrete corners on Telegraph, traffic circles on 8th, and plastic posts on International have saved lives by reducing deaths from multiple times a year down to nearly zero,” said Culbertson. “Physical changes to dangerous streets such as San Leandro, 73rd, San Pablo, etc will also be needed to stop people from being killed there too.”

“As always, speeding cars are deadly, and we need to be treating traffic violence as the public health crisis it is,’ said Hu-Nguyen. “The most effective and proven way to make our streets safer is through traffic calming, which physically prevents speeding from happening in the first place.”

Read the report here.

This week, we’re chatting with Dallas developer, DART board member, and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about his recent publication, “An Atlas of Intercity Highway Impacts.” We discuss the tax base that highways removed from cities, what we could have done for cities with federal transportation funding, and the long term value we lost.

You know the drill: we provide three ways of enjoying the podcast: The full, AI-generated transcript; an edited excerpt at the end of this post; and the embedded audio player below.

Jeff Wood: What was the process like for putting together all these maps, all these data points, and making sure that you were on the right track in terms of the story that you were trying to tell?

Patrick Kennedy: It was an iterative process because I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I had a plan that I wanted to write a book on the history of the Interstate Highway System and how we got to this place, and a lot of it centered on Eisenhower and the person he appointed, General David Bragdon, to keep the interstate system on time and under budget.

Megan Kimble was working on her book, City Limits, and I talked to her about that. She ended up going to the Eisenhower Library and digging through the notes for that book. I was talking to a friend, Scott Polikov, about this, too. He was like, “Nobody cares about history. Focus on the actual data. What was the impact? And focus on the future.”

And that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m gonna focus on the data. I had been talking to some book publishers, and they were more interested in black and white text than images. So I was like, that’s not what this can be, right?

This has to be maps, and this has to be data. I’m just going to go my own way, just do it, and just do it for free and post it. I just focused on the real world impacts to every city. I started on every city in the Yellow Book, but I realized that was not enough. There were something like 90 cities. I expanded it to 142 because no cities in North Carolina were in the Yellow Book.

Phoenix might have been in the Yellow Book, but San Diego wasn’t. I just wanted to keep adding cities. And I just was assembling data and data and data. I was interested in what happened to population density since 1960 once we started building in earnest, what happened to population since 2000 to present.

I found an inflection point in demographics where millennials were entering the workforce and looking to come back to urban environments and walkable environments. I started keeping this huge database of these things. During the pandemic, I came across a report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve — their study suggested that within three-mile radius of downtowns, highways become a disamenity and devalue property up to about a half mile away.

That was the key point where I started building these databases and said, “OK, real estate values in most cities is generally not as valuable in a three-mile radius.” So I built a one-mile radius and a three-mile radius, and I used that to collect population data points and my real estate data points regarding how much recent development is worth on the assessed tax rolls in all these cities.

I went through, found new development, looked it up on the tax rolls, and aggregated the total amount of highway right of way in each of these cities, in those geographies, the one-mile to three-mile radius, and said, “OK, if I developed these highway right of ways at 50 to 55 percent efficiency,” you’d have tax-exempt surface roads and schools and whatever else.

55 percent of private development, what would that be worth to the city? And I said, “OK, every city then has this value multiplied by the amount of land that highways take up in those one-mile and three-mile geographies.” And that’s what I used to determine the economic development potential of removals, and how much theoretical tax base was removed from each of these cities because of the development potential those cities lost by building highways.

Another book that was kind of the impetus to this was The Elephant in the Bedroom, which was a book about California highway building from the early 1990s. It was written by a couple of engineers. And when I was researching, thinking I was doing the book on the history of highways, came across a line where they said the 210 freeway through Pasadena wiped off 10 percent of the property tax rolls right off the map. I thought, “Oh, okay, there’s a number for every city,” and I wanted to know what it was.

Jeff Wood: I guess I have to disagree with Scott a little bit. I think the history is really important. I think it’s good to know.

Patrick Kennedy: No, me too. But the story was being told, you know? I was like, yeah … I’m just retelling the same story.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. We talked with Megan Kimble about Bragdon and what she found in the archives from Eisenhower’s library. But I think that’s really important to think about all the places where we could have gone in a different direction. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in the 1970s with the oil crisis — kind of what we’re in now with the Iran oil situation.

But there’s all these off-ramps that we could have taken over time, and we continue to go along the route that we’ve chosen. I feel like this is a negative way we’ve taken to building infrastructure in the country. But those inflection points are really fascinating.

I’m wondering how the Bragdon information spoke to you. You talked about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. There’s a lot of little things that, in the past, kind of shaped how you’re thinking, but also kind of shape the politics of the way that things are going now.

Patrick Kennedy: To me, Bragdon was the most influential person. I’m drawn to those sort of Cassandras that fight the righteous battle, but then ultimately lose and are forgotten to history. But I also kind of wanted to tell that story because he was right and he fought the Bureau of Public Roads and all of the Robert Moses acolytes that worked there.

If people are this wonky and interested, his 1960 interim report is kind of fascinating because he argued that the interstate highway system was for interstate commerce. It was not to serve local traffic. If we were to build highways to serve the traffic projections in 1980, some of the highways through the bigger cities would have to be 40 lanes or more.

He said that it’s far better to use our dollars for actual high-capacity transit. And part of his job was to keep the entire interstate system under budget. It ended up going about five or six times over the original budget. I calculated that in today’s dollars: the interstate system ended up costing something like $750 billion.

He said the inner city highways, which were one-tenth of the lane mileage of the system, cost ten times per mile to build. And so it was the most expensive part. Roughly half the cost of the entire interstate system was just the property acquisition and construction of the inner city highways.

Montreal was building the first legs of its subway in the 1960s. We could have built the equivalent of 36 Paris Metros for that $375 billion at the cost that Montreal was building its subway. And so part of this is just creating like an Earth 2 in my mind. What if we had gotten it right?

We could have a Paris Metro system in Cincinnati and in Kansas City serving local traffic and not devaluing the downtowns and basically wrecking a lot of the local economies around the country.

• The Trump administration is repealing a ban on roads in millions of acres of public land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Allowing greater access by motor vehicles could disrupt numerous environmentally sensitive habitats. (Field and Stream)
• Traffic engineers could take advantage of aviation technology to detect and deter conflicts at intersections. (ITS International)
• The CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority blames increasing regulation for slow progress on the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line, 20 years in the works. (Fresno Bee)
• As the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority electrifies its trains, should it go with tried-and-true overhead wires or cutting-edge battery technology? (Commonwealth Beacon)
• A spike in serious crime on Charlotte Area Rapid Transit last year coincided with a drop in ridership (WCNC). Meanwhile, North Carolina’s state auditor is calling for gates or turnstiles at every light rail station to improve security and fare collection (Queen City News).
• Atlanta transit riders want the same impeccable service MARTA offered during the World Cup to continue on. (Appen Media)
• Amtrak’s Mardi Gras line along the Gulf Coast has served 150,000 passengers in its first year, twice the initial projection. (Transportation for America)
• Seattle shattered a record for bike and scooter trips across the Fremont Bridge in July, a sign that the pandemic dip is over. (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Stephanie Nahkleh argues that a car-centric zoning code, not greedy developers, is to blame for Santa Fe’s ugly sprawl. (We Can Have Nice Things)
• Smart Growth America highlights a quick-build road diet in Winchester, Kentucky.
• Lloyd Alter says he expected a Canadian appeals court to overturn a ruling calling Doug Ford’s anti-bike lane policy unconstitutional, but he didn’t expect the judge to sound like such a car-brained jerk. (Carbon Upfront!)
• A Dutch town built a chain-driven ferry for cyclists and pedestrians to pull themselves across a river. (Core 77)
• In Tokyo, visitors can ride on one of the few streetcars that survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima. (Japan Today)

You can’t win them all, but a new bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario is winning pedestrians and cyclists on both sides of the US-Canada border.

The bicycle and pedestrian path on the brand new Gordie Howe International Bridge opened on Aug. 5 — nine days after the bridge itself opened, and despite President Trump’s threatening to hold up its opening earlier this year amid deteriorating relations and trade disputes with the country’s northern neighbor.

“It is quite the game-changer,” remarked Chris Palmer, one of more than 3,400 visitors of the path on its opening day. “It is … a remarkable political phenomenon. It was a great experience.”

So great, in fact, that bridge officials temporarily closed the path to manage the massive inaugural crowd.

Drivers must pay to cross the 1.5-mile span, but access to the car-free portion is free and open to the public year-round. Visitors can explore scenic trails and protected bike infrastructure at both ends of the trip — neatly documented in an online map created by the Detroit Greenways Coalition, a Michigan-based bike advocacy organization.

The Gordie Howe Bridge has one of the only bikable crossings between the US and Canada.

The president, meanwhile, spent the better part of the year leveraging the Gordie Howe in US-Canada relations — and succeeded in delaying its opening by a month. The Canadian government, which funded the entirety of the project, disinvited US officials from the bridge’s opening.

All that drama failed to put a damper on the thrill of a new bike connection for Detroit-Windsor locals.

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

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Todd Scott, the executive director of the Detroit Greenways Coalition.

Scott has advocated for the inclusion of bike and pedestrian access on the bridge since 2009, when the Gordie Howe Bridge — named for the Canadian-born star player for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team — was little more than a hypothetical. But when Canada first sought public input on the bridge’s design, the two most common responses were requests for biking and walking access.

“I have to imagine that [the bridge’s planners] are super glad with their decision,” said Scott.

The cable-stay bridge contains a twelve foot pedestrian and bike pathway, connecting the US and Canada.

Seventeen years later, both sides of the border have significantly upgraded their waterfronts to include bike routes, protected lanes and car-free trails.

On the Detroit side, the under-construction Joe Louis Greenway circles the city with nearly 30 miles of car-free routing. Pedestrians and bike riders can use the greenway to connect virtually anywhere in the city upon its completion in the early 2030s. Six new miles are expected to open by the end of this year. The route will connect directly to the Gordie Howe Bridge, extending its benefits across the border.

“‘This is one, I think, of the most important urban trail projects in the country,” said Scott.

The Gordie Howe Bridge has spurred infrastructure investments throughout Detroit.

The ride across the Gordie Howe rivals the extensive infrastructure upgrades on each of its ends.

“You’re riding over a piece of art,” Scott said. “It just looks stunningly beautiful.”

Americans aren’t the only ones celebrating the newly-opened link.

“It was absolutely thrilling,” said Lori Newton, the former executive director of Bike Windsor Essex, which spearheaded advocacy for the bike trail on the Canadian side. “It changes the whole view and the whole feeling of the neighborhoods that it goes through.”

Pedestrians and cyclists have advocated for nearly two decades for a path across the Detroit River.

The ride across was particularly impactful for Newton, who has spent several years advocating for the path alongside Scott and whose cyclist husband passed shortly before the bridge’s opening.

“He would be so excited that I was going up there for a ride with Todd,” she said.

Newton and Scott’s longtime partnership reflects one of the more extraordinary benefits of the newly-established car-free route. Windsor and Detroit have long celebrated a close relationship, but after the US tightened border security following the Sept.11 attacks, the two cities’ relationship weakened.

The new bridge represents a new day for the two cities. The inclusion of a car-free lane on the Gordie Howe promises immense economic benefits for the entire Great Lakes region — which won over otherwise bike-skeptical politicians and business leaders.

“There wasn’t a fight … it was building a business case,” Newton said.

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And the largest benefits of the trail are those still yet-to-be seen.

Local advocates hope to see new tourism and local investment as a result of the bridge. Newton hopes bridge will bring a wider array of people onto bikes, particularly seniors searching for an accessible way to stay mobile.

“Cycling is more than 20 guys in Lycra on bikes zooming past,” she said.