Streetsblog USA

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.

Recommended Study: Bicycling Generates $365 Million in Economic Activity in Iowa Angie Schmitt January 26, 2012

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.

• Apparently downloading music is more important to some drivers than not killing people, because researchers found that traffic deaths rose by about 15 percent on the release dates for major albums, and the trend was even more pronounced among young people. (CNN)
• A University of Minnesota study found that cheap infrastructure like bollards and curb extensions made drivers more likely to slow down and stop for pedestrians.
• Drivers have killed 28 people in Washington, D.C. already this year, topping last year’s number of 25 for all of 2025 (DC News Now). In Maryland, motorcycle deaths are up, but overall traffic fatalities are trending lower than last year’s (WTOP).
• Despite “near universal” support among visitors, Seattle is scaling back car-free hours at Pike Place because some merchants perceive that sales will drop over the winter. (The Urbanist)
• Kansas City needs to find a stable source of funding for transit instead of bailing out its transit agency at the last minute over and over. (KCUR)
• Tailpipe emissions in Utah have fallen by 73 percent since 2011, even as the population and miles driven have grown, thanks to a cleaner type of gasoline. (KUER)
• Nashville is committing another $100 million to Choose How You Move transportation projects. (Fox 17)
• A Nebraska fund is offering loans to businesses affected by Omaha streetcar construction. (KMTV)
• Charlottesville officials and cyclists are calling for safer conditions. (Right Now)
• Florida wants cities to get rid of their rainbow crosswalks, but apparently faux brick is fine. (Suncoast Searchlight)
• Villanova students are using virtual reality to study how drivers would behave before going through the expense of building new infrastructure. (NBC Philadelphia)
• An Outside contributor writes about how her Denver family became a one-car household.
• The U.S. could’ve had high-speed rail 120 years ago. (CT Mirror)

The following submission was in response to “Waymo Speaks: We Have More In Common With Urbanists Than You Might Think” by Arielle Fleisher, Waymo’s Policy Development and Research Manager.

The Deadheading Problem

Ride-hail services such as Uber and AV operators such as Waymo share a structural problem: a large share of the miles are driven empty between drop-off and pick-up. A recent piece by a Waymo representative cites a figure that roughly 40 percent of ride-hail and AV miles run empty. Those miles add to vehicle miles traveled (VMT), congestion, and pollution. Even electric cars still generate brake and tire particulate and contribute to traffic.

Fleisher’s proposed fix is staging: letting AVs park at the curb between rides instead of continuously circling. Staging is already allowed, as cars can pull over to the nearest empty curb space while waiting for the next ride, as long as they follow existing parking rules and fees. Fleisher argues cities should create a specific permitting standard to formalize staging, similar to how taxi stands work.

The centerpiece of the argument is a study, funded by Waymo, by researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine modeling how staging affects VMT for a simulated San Francisco AV fleet. The model simulated roughly 1,700 AVs and found that banning staging and forcing vehicles to circle instead increased daily VMT by more than 200,000 kilometers. That’s a strange comparison, since staging isn’t currently banned in San Francisco. Waymo notes it self-restricts to one staged car per block, but the real concern seems to be a lack of available curb space, not any city law banning staging.

Who Pays for the Curb?

One question the op-ed never answers is whether Waymo wants free curb space or is proposing to pay for it. The premise of modern curb policy, based on Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, is that curb space is a scarce public asset that should be priced to increase turnover. San Francisco already runs a dynamic-pricing meter pilot on that logic. There’s no reason one of the most valuable companies should get free access to a public right-of-way that residents pay for.

The Local Business Claim Doesn’t Add Up

The op-ed also claims staging is a net positive for local businesses: “the cumulative value generated by staging far exceeds that of a curb space occupied by a privately owned vehicle.” For a commercial district, staging could supposedly mean eight to ten times as many potential customer visits compared to space reserved for private vehicles.

I don’t see how an empty Waymo idling outside a storefront generates more value than a parked private car, whose owner at least has some chance of being a customer. The argument rests entirely on total curb turnover, as more vehicles cycling through a spot, in theory, means more potential trip origins and destinations nearby. But that’s a claim about vehicle throughput, not foot traffic to any specific business the AV happens to be parked in front of. An AV staging on a block isn’t necessarily dropping off or picking up passengers on that block, it might just be the nearest available spot. Treating idle Waymos cycling through a space as a proxy for customer visits seems unsupported.

Who Uses the Staging Spaces?

Another question underlies both of the above: are staging zones meant to be exclusive to Waymo and other AV operators, or could locals park there too? I’d assume the former, since the pitch depends on reliable curb availability for the fleet. If so, the “benefit to local business” argument gets weaker: the city wouldn’t just be adding turnover to a general-use curb, it would be converting public spaces into a private company’s dedicated spot. That sounds less like curb management and more like a request for exclusive use of a public asset.

None of this means staging is a bad idea, but a version of this proposal centered on effective curb management would focus on pricing a scarce resource appropriately. A priced staging system could still cut deadheading substantially, since a modest curb fee is likely cheaper for an operator than driving empty, while generating public revenue instead of giving away space for free.

The op-ed’s argument for staging access reads a bit like an ultimatum: “deadheading can never be fully eliminated, so the real question is how many empty miles the public should tolerate in exchange for AVs’ benefits.” That framing positions the VMT and congestion increase caused by AVs as a necessary price for a service that seems to mostly exist to give relatively wealthy people another option to get around in a private vehicle. It also avoids the more obvious lever for cutting AV-generated VMT: limiting how many AVs are on the road in the first place.

San Francisco has no legal permitting authority over AVs. Fleet size, operating hours, and where AVs can drive are all decided by the DMV and the California Public Utilities Commission, not City Hall. In the wake of the July 4th Waymo meltdown, Mayor Lurie called on the state to tighten restrictions on AVs. Maybe it’s also time to give cities authority to manage them.

***

Chris Kucera is a climate and transportation advocate based in San Francisco’s Alamo Square neighborhood. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Solutions.

• Bad press about the threat of e-motorbikes is threatening the broader mobility movement in general, with the fast vehicles getting lumped in with e-scooters and ordinary e-bikes. While some regulation is needed, over-regulation could put the brakes on a fast-growing mobility mode that often replaces driving. Meanwhile, the real threat — cars — gets less media attention. (The Guardian)
• The Federal Transit Administration awarded Amtrak $5.3 billion for 43 projects, including bridge and track repairs, new trains, locomotives, double-tracking in Massachusetts, North Carolina and San Diego, and a Chicago maintenance facility. (Trains)
• NPR‘s “All Things Considered” explored the U.S. DOT’s war on “DEI” bike lanes.
• Air quality in Manhattan improved slightly since congestion pricing started, and it didn’t get any worse in the outer boroughs. (New York Times)
• Oren Hadar writes about how Los Angeles caters to drivers, to the point that pedestrians have to wait a frustratingly long time for a crosswalk signal so that cars don’t have to stop. (The Future Is L.A.)
• California rideshare drivers are on the verge of forming a union. Now can they negotiate a contract? (L.A. Progressive)
• Light rail service to West Seattle has been delayed for another three years. (KIRO)
• Jarrett Walker is encouraged that a transit referendum passed in a right-leaning town like Spokane. (Human Transit)
• Doubts are growing in Charleston that the Federal Transit Administration will come through a $374 million grant for a bus rapid transit line. (Post and Courier)
• The Utah Transit Authority is expanding its microtransit service area. (KSL)
• Public comment on Utah’s new five-year transportation plan overwhelmingly favored rail over highways. (Salt Lake City Weekly)
• Pittsburgh closed a loophole in its longstanding law banning parking on sidewalks and in bike lanes. (USA Today)
• Joe Cortwright argues that the Rose Quarter Freeway widening project in Portland is turning into a fiscal black hole. (City Commentary)
• The Cincinnati Enquirer profiled a mother who’s been advocating for safer streets since losing her daughter in a hit-and-run eight years ago.
• A Daily Tar Heel column in favor of light rail also gets in a few digs at Duke.
• The Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that Premier Doug Ford can rip up Toronto bike lanes, overturning a previous ruling. (National Newswatch)
• Bus trips in Ho Chi Minh City are up 44% since 134 routes went fare-free. (Vietnam Plus)

This week we’re finally doing it! We’re going to Kingwood, Texas, and talking about the greenbelt trail system I’ve been telling everyone about for years. This is a storytelling episode, featuring guests John Walsh, Jerry Lunow, and Bill Neuhaus, so I hope folks enjoy hearing about NASA, timber companies, bike trails, and Houston’s bayous. But also, stick around to hear how a suburban development in Texas from the 1970s mirrors and pre-dated Dutch bike planning with special guest, Steve Vance from Streetsblog Chicago.

Now, as you know at Talking Headways, we offer you three ways to enjoy our fine content:

• Read the full transcript (with a few AI typos) by clicking here.
• Reading an edited segment below the player on this page.
• Or simply putting in those AirPods and clicking the audio player below to get the full dulcet tones of our host and his guests:

Here’s the partial excerpt:

Steve Vance: I did not think about the benefit of living in Houston when we moved there. It only came to light when we moved away from Kingwood in 1996 to Batavia, Illinois.

And then my perspective and appreciation for the design of Kingwood changed again when I visited Houten in the Netherlands in 2011, where I recognized some of the design principles in Houten were actually present in Kingwood. And I was shocked that somebody in the ’70s had this idea that has been replicated 4,000 miles away at around the same time, but also I think in Davis, California, there are some parallels between Kingwood and their bike path system and Davis’s bike path system.

Jeff Wood: Throughout the production of this episode, I couldn’t shake thinking about how the United States and the Dutch diverged in the 1970s. In 1973, an oil crisis hit and prices spiked. To many people, this is a line of demarcation. Gary Nelson notes that 1973 is the year that petroleum killed America, and auto-oriented sprawl clearly won out over communities designed for active transportation like walking, biking, and transit.

Some countries, such as the Netherlands, made deliberate choices, moving towards less energy-intensive modes as the United States shifted further towards auto dependence. In 1979, with more oil embargoes and the election of Ronald Reagan, auto dependence and urban sprawl were set in stone for another generation.

Steve and I enjoyed a rare Texas bubble, a place where you could bike everywhere if you wished.

Steve Vance: Growing up there, I was a free-range kid before that phrase even existed. And I had a bicycle, and I was able to ride my bicycle to any of my friends’ houses in other subdivisions and ride it to the grocery store, which I think was called Randall’s at the time, and the library and school and the pool in my subdivision or in my friend’s subdivision because there was a greenbelt trail system, a network that was grade separated through the forest.

And then when I moved to Batavia, like, I was put on lockdown. I was not allowed to bike to certain parts of Batavia or Geneva. There’s a road in that part of Illinois called Randall Road. It probably has a state highway number. But I was not allowed to cross that road. And the thing is, the grocery store was on the other side of that road, and thus I was severely restricted.

Things that were normal for me to do in Kingwood, I was not allowed to do in Batavia because Batavia had very little bike infrastructure, had almost no on-street bike lanes, although Kingwood didn’t have any because it had such a robust trail network. And then the middle school that I attended in Batavia was built on a greenfield site at the edge of town, and so I either had to take a bus or one of my parents had to drive me

Jeff Wood: Steve wanted to bike and walk. But as kids, we didn’t know why we couldn’t or what was really different aside from the fact that one place had accessible transportation and the other really didn’t.

Steve Vance: So later the Dutch Consulate sent planners to come to Chicago to work with the Chicago Department of Transportation’s bike lane designers and planners.

And some events were open to the public, and so I attended one where one of the Dutch planners explained this layered network system. So there’s a network of roads for cars and vehicles, and there’s a separate network for biking, and they will intersect at certain points and you make certain treatments so that those intersections are safe.

But between points, you have completely separate networks. They don’t have to be the same network with the bike path and the road in the same alignment. You can separate them. It was neat to learn in like 2010 that there was a name and a concept and a process for doing what I had experienced as a child in Kingwood for five years.

These Dutch planners would say, “Get a map out. Mark the points of interest that you’re trying to promote cycling to, and draw straight lines between them.” So you can see the beginning of a network. Obviously, you can’t build bike trails in a straight line because there are buildings and natural resources in the way, and so then you try to draw the straightest line possible between the two points.

And so if you look at a map of Kingwood and you mark all the playing fields and the schools and the pools, it’s, it’s basically the whole bike path or multi-use path, the Greenbelt Trail, was designed to just connect all of those things. It hit every point that someone like me or my sister needed to go to frequently on our bikes.

The network was there for that.

A recent study from Open Plans and the Transportation Research Program at Hunter College argued that AVs will generate excessive “deadheading,” or empty vehicle miles, in New York City. The concern is fair, but the conclusion was based on a false equivalence: it treats the density of California as directly comparable to New York City. The literature is clear that deadheading depends on demand density. There are fewer empty miles when cars don’t have to travel far to find their next passenger.

Nonetheless, the report raises an important question: how can AVs avoid creating more congestion? It’s a fair question, given the rapid introduction of tens of thousands of personally owned for-hire vehicles more than a decade ago was a shock to the system. While AVs will have a much smaller footprint, there are lessons we all can learn from mistakes made by companies such as Uber and Lyft.

I walk and bike everywhere and I want the same for my kids. That’s why I was thrilled that after a year of advocacy and organizing, the City of Oakland is redesigning one of the city’s most dangerous streets to prioritize bicycle and pedestrian safety. It’s also why I work at Waymo. In my personal advocacy and in my role as the Policy Development and Research Manager at Waymo, I often think about the trade-offs required to build a safe, vibrant, and efficient transportation system. Whether it is bike or bus lanes, curb management, or parking, there is rarely a perfect solution. The conversation about how to most effectively deploy AVs is no different, and curb management is an important place to start.

Cities become more delightful when there are fewer cars circling and less curb space devoted to vehicle storage. Right now, roughly 40 percent of ride-hailing miles are empty, a figure that generally holds for AV fleets. But as a fleet operator, Waymo is incentivized to minimize deadheading because we bear the cost of every single empty mile driven. Every unnecessary mile means additional operating costs, energy consumption, vehicle wear, and risk exposure. Traditional ride-hailing platforms don’t internalize these costs; they are pushed onto the drivers. Waymo, like cities, wants to reduce empty miles as much as possible.

One solution to reducing empty miles is parking between rides. Taxis do this at taxi stands, and the San Francisco County Transportation Authority found ride-hail drivers park an average of 10 minutes between hails. When Waymo asked researchers from UC Berkeley and UC Irvine to model the impact on VMT from AVs staging at the curb, they found that it reduced empty miles by more than 60 percent. And the magnitude of the reduction was striking, particularly because the model strategically accounted for moving empty AVs into off-street lots during low-demand periods.

Staging is also a highly productive use of curb space, according to the researchers. Because AVs spend much of their time providing trips, the cumulative value generated by staging far exceeds that of a curb space occupied by a privately owned vehicle. For a commercial district, this means that local businesses could receive eight to 10 times as many potential customer visits than if the space were designated for private vehicle storage only.

None of this means AVs should have unrestricted access to the curb. Waymo already prioritizes parking in off-street lots, limits itself to one staged vehicle per block face, and avoids cycling through the same spot repeatedly. In a recent report, Open Plans and the Transportation Research Program at Hunter College argued that New York City’s “constrained curb space” makes staging infeasible, leaving AVs with little choice but to drive empty between trips. But the curb isn’t constrained by the laws of physics, it’s constrained by policy. As the Berkeley and Irvine researchers suggested, establishing permitting standards can formalize curbside staging. Deadheading can never be zero, so the real question is how many empty miles will we accept in exchange for the safety, accessibility and other benefits of AVs. Curb management is exactly how cities can organize that tradeoff with clear rules.

Encouragingly, New York is having these conversations at the highest level. Mayor Zohran Mamdani created an Office of Curb Management this year to bring more order to how the city allocates curb space. Officials are weighing ideas from metered spots to residential permits to dynamic pricing. Each plan differs, but the premise is one we agree with: curb space is valuable, and managing it inconsistently doesn’t serve anyone well.

Waymo, city officials, and urbanists have common cause, and we don’t have to wait to start having these conversations. Open Plans has in fact been a leader on reimagining curbs. New York is the first and only city in the nation to implement congestion pricing, which has been a resounding success. Though controversial, there is renewed interest in more visibly holding drivers accountable for blocking street cleaning.

At Waymo, we believe AVs can play a valuable role in making transportation safer and cities more livable. Conversations about curb management and other policies that help responsibly deploy AVs are key to our work with the city officials, advocates, and communities we hope to serve.

• Congressional Democrats are accusing the Federal Transit Administration of intentionally stonewalling transit projects. The Trump administration has yet to issue any grants from a multibillion-dollar capital investment program since the president’s second term started. It’s also tried to cut off funding for already-approved projects in blue states, like the Gateway Tunnel. (New York. Times)
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy believes bike lanes cause traffic congestion. In fact, the opposite is true. (Bloomberg Government)
• Despite tariffs, demand for new transit buses in North America remains strong as agencies replace their aging fleets. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Safety and comfort are just as important as distance when it comes to walkability. (The Conversation)
• The privately owned cross-country passenger rail line AmeriStarRail has yet to materialize because the company hasn’t been able to reach an agreement with Amtrak. (USA Today)
• Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’ campaign promise to make the L.A. Metro free would cost $1 billion and possibly prevent the agency from improving service. (LAist)
• A Washington, D.C. cycling group is pushing for better walking, biking and transit access around the new RFK stadium. (Greater Greater Washington)
• Portland residents who bought an e-bike using the city’s rebate program say the purchase changed their lives. (Mercury)
• Kansas City is using water-spraying trucks to keep extreme heat from warping streetcar tracks. (Axios)
• The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority has three finalists for CEO. (Saporta Report)
• A Vision Zero plan in the Seattle suburb of Lynnwood is getting pushback from people who say the city doesn’t need to spend money on traffic safety because it already has relatively few road deaths. (The Urbanist)
• Ann Arbor transit agency The Ride is starting a shuttle service for University of Michigan football games. (MLive)
• Heavy electric vehicles are tearing up China’s roads. (Techy 44)
• A proposal for high-speed rail in Australia would save a lot of jet fuel and help solve Sydney’s affordable housing crisis. (B1M)
• Japanese cities are so livable because everyday needs are within walking distance, and there’s an excellent transit system for longer trips. (BBC)

The year is 2036. Connected Autonomous Vehicles comprise 25 percent of the cars on the nation’s streets and roads and fleets of robo-cabs crisscross cities. But after one such CAV blows a stop sign and kills a pedestrian, federal cybermarshal Dana Grant starts asking questions — but can Grant get to the bottom of the “accident” … or undercover a plot to use these connected AVs to kill thousands? That’s the plot of “Autokill” (Open Road Media) by “Gridlock” Sam Schwartz and playwright Cary Pepper. To purchase the full book, click here. But for now, curl up with Chapter 3, “What Was Wrong?” in this exclusive excerpt.

After staring at the computer screen for several minutes, Dana Grant sat back and slowly shook her head. She wasn’t happy and she didn’t know why.

The case seemed simple enough. Last week, a Connected Autonomous Vehicle killed a 35-year-old woman in California. She was sitting in a park, set back from the road some 50 feet, when she was struck by the vehicle. According to local police, the car ignored a stop sign, which was one reason the case landed on Dana’s desk. That, and of course, the fatality.

Dana Grant was a federal cybermarshal assigned to the National Transportation Safety Board’s Portland-based CAV unit, Western Sector. With thousands of robo-cabs, trucks, and buses on the nation’s roads and streets, the National Transportation Safety Board had created a new branch to investigate CAV-related accidents. It was similar to the division that investigated aviation incidents, but only two offices had been opened so far (Eastern Sector was head-quartered in Boston), its operating budget was smaller, its staff had not been provided with the in-depth training that allowed agents in the aviation division to effectively probe air-transport events, and, unlike the aviation division, the CAV unit had no NTSB Training Center.

The marshals had been promised such expertise, but the agency, despite being in existence for six years, was still getting “up to speed” and Congress (swayed by the powerful CAV lobby) had repeatedly failed to adequately fund it, leaving many marshals to obtain any special training they felt they needed on their own, at their own expense. Dana had overheard several of her colleagues proudly vowing not to “go all tech” as long as they had to pay for it themselves.

Not Dana. If she were doing the job, she wanted to be as good at it as she could be. Just as she’d gone the extra distance as a cop in Phoenix. Since joining the unit, she’d been taking workshops and reading as much as she could to educate herself on the intricacies of CAVs. When she needed help, she didn’t hesitate to reach out to the small network of advisors and consultants she’d slowly assembled around her during the five years she’d been on the job.

Influenced by those advisors and consultants, Dana had stopped using the word accident when talking about her cases. She investigated crashes.

An accident is an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, an event that happens by chance or that is without apparent or deliberate cause. But CAVs, obeying algorithms designed for maximum safety and free of road-rage-inducing ego, didn’t do things unexpectedly or take potentially-dangerous risks. So when a CAV collided with anything, it wasn’t an accident. It was a crash.

Dana also quickly learned that crucial to investigating and understanding any incident involving a CAV meant knowing how to read and interpret the information gleaned from its black box, which included every decision, maneuver, and change the vehicle made during a trip. It included interactions with passengers. It included everything the car did, saw, and heard. And because this data was all in computer code, it required knowing how to understand what you were looking at.

Even with all the time Dana had spent learning about this arcane corner of the universe, she still had large gaps in her knowledge of it. But she was light years ahead of every other agent in her office, and she knew it.

Now Dana sat pondering why the CAV ignored the stop sign. Programming error? Software failure? Faulty sensing equipment? If any of those were the issue, did the problem lie with Relyable, the company that manufactured the car? Or was it a matter of a repair, similar to fixing the brakes on a human-driven car? And if that were so, was the root cause a failure by the company that operated the vehicle to properly maintain it?

Or, if it was a programming or software error, did that signal a failure by the engineers at the company that made the car? Which would mean Dana had to see if the same company created both the computer code and the software, because it was possible that correct computer code had been negated by faulty software.

A third possibility was that someone tampered with the stop sign, which happened often in the 2020s, when kids defaced traffic signs or anti-AVers tried to demonstrate the weakness of autonomous infrastructure. Then came the 2029 Topeka School AV bus crash. A couple of teenagers out for kicks turned a 30-mph sign in to one reading 80 mph by making the three an eight. The bus raced around a sharp curve doing 80, left the road, and plunged 35 feet down an embankment, killing 21 children and the bus attendant.

For the next three years, all AV school buses had to have a human driver. Meanwhile, every inch of roadway in the United States was minutely mapped: every traffic sign, signal, lane marking, and channelization. And the federal government required any change, no matter how small, to be immediately entered in the central Geographic Information System Command file, the huge database where all this information lived. Failure to do so resulted in states and cities losing as much as billions in federal highway dollars. Now, any discrepancy between what an AV saw and what was in the GIS database, was detected by the CAV’s Command Center (all the companies that operated CAVs had command centers that controlled their fleet) in a nanosecond, and the GIS Command Center threw the vehicle into fail-safe mode, choosing the safest available option for its next action.

If a vehicle saw “80 mph” but the database listed “30 mph,” the GISCC would send an alert, slow or stop the vehicle, and a remote driver would take over the CAV. In addition, all other vehicles from that company would be alerted and a post-mortem would be conducted.

The system worked almost flawlessly in cities and on state roads; the only gaps now were the small towns and rural areas that didn’t have the ability to update the GIS files, or the few places where locals believed that routinely updating their files was an infringement by an overbearing government. Since 2033, there had been only nine instances of minor crashes due to un-updated traffic devices, and none due to vandalism. Could this be the first?

Maybe. Yet Dana had a gut feeling it was something else. There were thousands of Relyable delivery robos operating in the county and there hadn’t been similar incidents. Which suggested that the computer code, the software, and pretty much everything else in the vehicle was operating properly. So what else could it be?

Relyable had already responded to the police-finding that the car went through the stop sign. Company spokespeople maintained that the sign had been defaced with both a hole and grafitti, so the fault lay not with the vehicle and its sensing equipment, but with the town for not repairing the sign. Relyable also noted that the town had been cited four times for not complying with GIS Command. The company could not be held responsible, it reasoned, for signage or traffic signals that were not repaired or replaced in a timely manner.

Dana studied pictures of the sign; there was no question that it had been vandalized. A tagger had gone to work on it, and there was a hole dead center in the middle of the O. If it was a bullet hole, someone was quite a shot.

Did that mean the CAV had not seen the sign? Or had it seen the sign but was no longer able to identify it as a signal to stop, perhaps interpreting it as nothing more than a lamppost or structure designating street parking? Why did the Topeka fail-safe protocol fail?

“Oh, you caught that California thing.”

She hadn’t heard Kyle coming up behind her. But now there was that soft wheezing through his seemingly-always-clogged nasal passages. Perhaps if he lost some weight… The thought ran through her head almost every time she saw Kyle. He wasn’t obese. Just unnecessarily overweight, all in his belly, which hung over his belt in a loose fold.

Kyle Beaumont would always be overweight, always breathe heavily through his nose, always be, in Dana’s mind, one nasal breath away from a heart attack. Which of course she hoped would never happen. She didn’t hate Kyle or wish any bad would come to him. She just wished he wasn’t her boss.

Not because he was overweight and breathed through his nose. Because he was always hovering, and he wasn’t thorough. He’d been with the NTSB 20 years to her 5, and was more interested in clearing cases than conducting competent, thorough investigations.

So, rather than encourage his people to spend as much time as they needed to properly run a case, he’d be satisfied with a preliminary finding, even one still open to questions, if it added to the “Case Closed” log he submitted weekly to the head of the Portland bureau.

As a result, Dana’s unit had a high closure rate, which Kyle was determined to maintain. But given how they were achieving it, she wasn’t sure that was something to be proud of.

Their findings tended to hold the vehicles or companies blameless, and Dana sometimes wondered about that. But the truth was, in crashes involving CAVs and human drivers, it was almost always the human driver at fault. CAVs had proven themselves to be more consistent, more stable, and less erratic than human drivers. They were not distracted as easily or as often, never tried to beat a changing traffic light or speed past an approaching train, and had no interest in pushing themselves to test their power, speed, or endurance.

So the fact that Kyle’s long list of closed cases often found in favor of the CAV wasn’t surprising. Nevertheless, Dana often found herself wishing he didn’t reach that conclusion quite so fast.

Standing behind her looking over her shoulder, he’d moved closer. She knew, without turning, because the heavy breathing was now only inches from her ear.

“New perfume?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“You smell different. New shampoo?”

“Nope.”

“Different soap, maybe?”

She pictured him sniffing the air around her. Or, worse, sniffing her.

“Same soap.”

“Something about you is different. Are you …?”

It was time to end this. She shifted in her chair, sending it backward into his foot, then turned around and was “surprised” to see the wheel of the chair pressing on his shoe and the edge of her seat against his leg.

“Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were that close.”

“No harm done,” he assured her, reaching down to lightly rub his knee. “You still working on that?” he nodded toward her computer.

“Hmm-hmm,” she muttered, studying the screen again to indicate she was too distracted to talk.

“Stop sign was vandalized. The town didn’t update its GIS records. Like the company says, it’s their fault. Can’t you close it?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she started. “I—”

“You have ‘a feeling,”’ he finished for her. “Here we go.”

She hated when he did that. But it had been years since she took him seriously when he said those things in that tone of voice. That had stopped after working with him for two months, when she almost caved in the wake of his response to her first “feeling.”

That first time, still new to the unit and trying to find her way, she’d almost let him intimidate her because she was half-doubting herself: Had she really been on to something, or was it more an attempt to prove she could do the job?

But she stuck with it, and it paid off. Driver vs. CAV, and the driver swore the robo had swerved into his lane. There was activity to the right of the CAV that might have made it swerve toward the driver, but a check of the black box showed it swerved no more than a foot and did not cross the double yellow line that separated the vehicles.

On a hunch, Dana checked the driver’s cell-phone records and found that he’d been on the phone at the time of the accident. It was him, not the robo, that had swerved across the
double yellow line.

Two lessons learned: Always trust her gut, and never listen to Kyle about such matters.

It took her a while to stop railing at herself for letting him come as close as he did to shutting her down, but she finally landed in place of self-understanding: she was navigating new territory with insufficient training. She was allowed a few missteps; she could forgive herself. Afterward, she did more than that, using the episode to redefine their relationship.

Never one to be intimidated (easily or otherwise), not even as a child, she would never again be bullied by a bureaucrat now that she was 35, carried a badge, and believed (knew) that she was better suited for this work than he was.

“Here I go,” she corrected him. “It’s not gonna affect your life much.”

“Except what it’s gonna do to our clearance rate.”

“You mean my clearance rate?”

“Ours includes yours. You slow up, we slow up.”

“I’ll work this extra fast.”

“Work what? The cops confirmed the CAV went through the stop sign. No one’s contesting that. The cops confirmed the stop sign was vandalized. No one’s contesting that. The town didn’t update its GIS file. You wanna blame the robo? It’s like, someone blindfolds you, then blames you for walking into something. How much more open-shut can you get?”

“Looks that way.”

“Except you know better.”

“I just want to leave it open a little longer so I can—”

“You can have a little more time on this. But don’t take too long. And don’t neglect your other cases.”

“I never do,” she answered, fingers busy on her keyboard, focusing on her screen, as a way to end the conversation.

Finally sensing their talk was over, Kyle walked away, triggering a new train of thought for Dana: What kind of ratings was he getting on his quarterly evaluations? But why go there? For years he’d been part of a federal bureaucracy that valued meeting quotas and demonstrating its own skewered sense of “efficiency.” She knew exactly the kind of evaluations he was getting. And he knew exactly how to keep getting them. And keep his job.

She peered at the screen for real now, hoping to find something new. Kyle was right about one thing: It did seem like an open-and-shut case. The CAV had functioned perfectly until it encountered the vandalized stop sign.

So what was bothering her? What was wrong?

• Even accounting for manufacturing, swapping out a gas-powered vehicle for an electric one results in 50 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions. The break-even point is about 18,000 miles, which the average person drives in a year and a half. The benefits are greater for older cars built under less stringent environment standards and in places with green electric grids. The only exceptions are for plug-in hybrids that run mostly on batteries or a second car that isn’t driven much. (Grist)
• Rail projects are still moving forward despite the Trump administration’s animosity toward them. (Quartz)
• Robotaxis seem to be getting glitchier as Waymo grows, and the cities it’s expanding into are unprepared. (New York Times)
• Cities too often ignore medium-density “missing middle” development that encourages walking. (CNU Public Square)
• Walking to school has gotten a lot harder than many adults remember. (Upworthy)
• A town just outside Boston prioritized safety over speed, and the result has been zero traffic deaths over the past three years. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Richmond announced plans for quick-build safety improvements at 700 intersections as part of its Vision Zero program. (WRIC)
• Gov. Mike Braun may have been on shaky legal ground when he extended Indiana’s gas tax holiday. (Indianapolis Star; paywall)
• A Houston developer is building a 12-story, 2,000-space parking garage that takes up an entire city block. (Chron)
• The increasing popularity of giant U.S.-style trucks and SUVs in Australia has led to an uptick in pedestrian deaths, even as driver and passenger fatalities continue to decline. (The Conversation)
• In Bogota, bike advocates are fighting back against the gender stereotype that cycling is only for men. (The Guardian)
• The massive Grand Paris Express metro expansion will feature 68 new architect-designed transit stations. (Arch Daily)

• If the chicken is biking and the egg is building bike infrastructure, new research shows that the egg comes first. Bike lanes and bike parking both lead more people to cycle to work, according to a French study in the journal Transport Policy. (Momentum)
• Road usage charges like Hawaii’s that rely on annual odometer readings are simple and non-intrusive, but they don’t take into account where and when those miles were driven. (Traffic Technology Today)
• Modern, connected urban transportation systems commonly leave out parking garages, resulting in a lot of unnecessary cruising around looking for parking. (Route Fifty)
• Planetizen is running a three-part series on traffic congestion.
• European right-wingers are just as in love with cars as their American counterparts. (The Loop)
• A bike- and pedestrian-friendly extension of 15th Street in Midtown Atlanta is set to open by the end of the month. (Urbanize Atlanta)
• The Atlanta Beltline, often blamed for gentrification, is building more affordable housing and starting a down payment assistance program. (WABE)
• Indiana Gov. Mike Braun is opposed to a lane reduction on a bridge connecting the state to Louisville. (WDRB)
• Cuyahoga County, Ohio is considering raising parking rates for the first time in a decade. (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
• Signal Cleveland has lots of details about pending transit cuts.
• A pickup truck driver intentionally ran down two people on a Memphis sidewalk. (News 3)
• A Philadelphia state representative is introducing a bill to ban self-driving buses. (Billy Penn)
• A public transit YouTuber exposed massive cost overruns on the L.A. people mover project. (Hollywood Reporter)
• A Denver man is tracking down all of the stamps left by his grandfather, who poured the concrete for many of the city’s sidewalks. (Rocky Mountain PBS)

Donald Trump’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rolled into Santa Monica today to hold a hearing on the federal government’s plans to open up California’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, floating nuclear power plants (really!), rocket testing, and other questionable uses. Trump is using NOAA to challenge California’s – and only California’s – right to protect its coastlines.

Needless to say, California is not taking this lying down. Tribal leaders, environmental groups, local political leaders, and others gathered in the courtyard for a noon rally before the 2 p.m. meeting to tell the Trump Administration that California’s coast is not for sale.

“We know what is best for Los Angeles County, for California, and for our nation,” argued Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, after arguing that the Trump Administration is intentionally pushing policies that hurt Californians. “If they wanted to really help our communities, they would release billions of disaster aid to help our coastal communities desperate to rebuild their lives after the Palisades Fire.”

At the rally before the hearing, speaker after speaker took to the podium to denounce not just the idea that politics is clouding California’s environmental regulations, but just the opposite: that political concerns were pushing the administration’s attacks on California to the benefit of Trump’s political donors.

“We’ll keep fighting, but we know what’s going to happen today,” stated Congressman Dave Min (D-Irvine). “A bunch of you are going to go in and give your testimony, and this rigged review is going to come to the conclusion that has been preordained.”

Trump’s Plan

The Trump administration is reopening a federal review of California’s Coastal Management Program, raising the possibility that the state could lose some of its longstanding authority to protect its coastline should he succeed.

The program, which has been federally approved since 1978, operates under the federal Coastal Zone Management Act. It gives California a role in reviewing federally regulated projects that could affect the state’s coastal resources, including projects in federal waters. The California Coastal Commission, State Coastal Conservancy, and San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission all play roles in implementing the program.

That authority has allowed California to challenge or modify projects ranging from offshore oil development to pipelines, desalination facilities and rocket launches. Despite Trump’s claim that the state should lose its rights because of “environmental extremism,” the Coastal Commission has reviewed thousands of federally regulated projects over the decades, but has opposed only a small percentage of them.

NOAA is conducting a new review of the state’s coastal program after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick accused California of using its coastal authority to obstruct projects favored by the administration for political reasons.

Among the examples cited by federal officials is California’s opposition to expanded SpaceX rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. SpaceX has been firing test rockets from the base for the last half dozen years. But, the state has asked for more oversight of all rocket launches marines from Vandenberg accidentally fired 155-millimeter artillery shells over a major freeway in Southern California.

State officials, however, argue that the review is part of a broader effort to remove obstacles to the Trump administration’s plans for the coast, particularly its push to expand offshore oil and gas drilling.

Speaking at today’s hearing, Wade Crowfoot, California Secretary for Natural Resources, noted that after states were given greater purview in enforcing environmental standards for projects nearly six decades ago, the states participating in the Coastal Zone Management Act have approved 95% of the federally requested projects. In that same time, California had approved 96% of the projects.

Crowfoot continued with the theme that the federal review is more about politics and Trump’s feelings towards California than about policy.

“Americans across the country share the concerns we do about the health and safety of our coasts. The Trump Administration proposed expanded offshore oil drilling in the states of Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and California. When leaders of three states expressed strong concerns on behalf of their constituents, the federal government backed off those proposals…Yet they continue to target California,” he testified. Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina all voted for Trump in 2024.

The administration has proposed opening federal waters off California to new oil and gas leasing, something that has not happened in decades. It has also sought to restart the Sable pipeline, which has been shut down since the 2015 Refugio oil spill. Recently, the government spent billions of dollars to stop wind farms and other renewable energy projects from being built.

California’s coastal program was already reviewed under the previous administration. NOAA’s 2024 review included public meetings and stakeholder input, and a draft report completed in 2025 found that California had successfully implemented and enforced its federally approved program. The Trump administration nevertheless ordered another review.

If the federal government ultimately determines that California’s program does not comply with federal requirements, it could seek changes to the program or move toward decertification. That could weaken the state’s ability to challenge federal projects and put federal funding connected to the program at risk.

The confrontation is unusual enough that legal experts told the Los Angeles Times they were unaware of another instance in which the federal government had stripped a coastal state of its rights under the Coastal Zone Management Act. What happens in California could therefore establish a precedent for the relationship between the federal government and coastal states elsewhere.

Gabrielino Tongva & Chumash activist and singer Tina Orduno Calderon sings a welcome song at the Rally to Protect the California Coast. To listen to the song, click here. You Can Still Submit Comment

Californians who want to push back against the Trump administration’s effort to weaken the state’s coastal protections have a relatively simple place to start: tell the federal government what you think. You can submit your own comment electronically, here.

While the only in-person meeting was held (or is being held depending when you’re reading this) today, there are virtual meetings tomorrow and Wednesday, August 11 and 12. For more details on those meetings, click here.

“Trump is threatening California’s coast in pursuit of reckless offshore oil and gas extraction to pad the wallets of his corrupt oil cronies,” Newsom said in a statement. “We won’t stand by while Trump sidelines the people who rely on and care for California’s coast. Now is the time to make our voices heard. Give the Trump administration an earful.”

You can read the state’s official comments, here.

A woman was killed on Market Street on Friday. A recent report shows a higher number of severe and fatal crashes in San Francisco than when the city first took its Vision Zero pledge over a decade ago.

A new study from a coalition including the Vision Zero network and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety concludes that the core problem is that cities take the pledge to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero, but then don’t integrate it into all aspects of planning. The “Safe System Success Stories: Proactive Injury Prevention in Transportation” evaluates projects in 13 cities by their ability to reduce crashes. It’s a template for how all cities should look at all projects.

“Across the board, across the city, cities need to make changes and align decision-making and all their funding decisions, all policy decisions, with traffic safety priorities,” explained the Vision Zero Network’s Leah Shahum. “Most cities are not doing that yet; San Francisco is not alone in that.”

More from the study:

Put simply, speed kills. Kinetic energy is the central driver of injury in road collisions. As the amount of kinetic energy in a crash increases, whether through higher velocity or greater mass, the human body is less able to tolerate the forces released. Kinetic energy risk can be managed by reducing how often and how far people drive (exposure), limiting operating speeds and vehicle mass (severity), and reducing how often road users are placed in conflict (likelihood of a crash).

The three levers from the study

According to Shahum, those three safety levers need to be considered in every bit of planning. New York City’s congestion pricing was one successful planning example cited in the study. By charging drivers to enter the city’s most congested area, it reduces the number of cars and vehicle miles traveled, reducing exposure. It encouraged a switch to bicycles. And of course it reduces how often users are placed in conflict “by enabling street space to be repurposed for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. Such infrastructure separates pedestrians and cyclists from motor vehicles, reducing opportunities for conflicts.”

Closer to home, San Francisco’s Van Ness BRT also pulled all three levers because it created…

…dedicated, center-running transit lanes, reduced general-purpose lanes from three to two in most segments, narrowed lane widths, added median pedestrian refuges, programmed signals with leading pedestrian intervals, and restricted left turns for private vehicles at most intersections. These changes reduced conflict points, shortened pedestrian crossings, improved transit operating speeds and increased person throughput without roadway expansion.

Projects that don’t meet the safety criteria, she explained, simply shouldn’t be built. Shahum cited an example from Santa Rosa, which nixed a long-planned road-widening because it clearly increased exposure. “It’s not just about a project there or a project here, it’s about changing how we make decisions about widening,” she said. “If a project fails on delivering on safety, you can’t use it as an excuse that something’s been in the pipeline for a long time.”

Shahum confirmed there’s a parallel with equity-based planning, where cities require themselves to ask whether a project exacerbates disparities before it can proceed. Unfortunately, Caltrans and county departments of transportation continue to build projects that are in conflict with Vision Zero goals. Think of all the ramp widenings, which increase speeds and exposure to wrecks.

“City planners need to be unafraid and unapologetic about taking things off their plan and off the funding cycle if it’s not going to improve safety,” said Shahum.

Be sure to check out the report.

• Flock had a plan to turn hundreds of thousands of Uber, Lyft and delivery vehicles into rolling, easily hacked surveillance cameras to collect data that it could turn around and sell to repo agencies. (404 Media)
• A study published in the Journal of Transport and Sustainability came to the surprising conclusion that places where people drive less have fewer traffic deaths.
• Transit agencies should be more willing to take on loans to met pent-up demand for service, particularly automation and electrification, which save money in the long run, says the Center for Public Enterprise.
• On a party-line vote, U.S. senators approved four of the Trump administration’s transportation appointees before leaving town for their August recess. (Eno Center for Transportation)
• Ride-hailing services grew GDP in cities where they launched in the 2010s, but the gig-economy jobs created mostly replaced more traditional permanent jobs, according to a Carnegie Mellon study. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Debate is reopening on Reddit about whether cyclists are safest with protected infrastructure or riding with cars, as the late John Forester believed. (The Cool Down)
• A 12-year, $90 billion Pennsylvania infrastructure plan includes $13 billion for transit in the first four years. (PennLive)
• Utah’s Frontrunner light rail double-tracking project took another step toward receiving a $1.3 billion federal grant. (KSL)
• With gas prices of more than $4 per gallon, few Utah drivers even noticed that the state’s six-cent gas tax was suspended. (Salt Lake Tribune)
• The downtown Oklahoma City streetcar will remain fare-free indefinitely after a pilot program boosted ridership 74 percent. (Free Press)
• An Oregon transportation committee is looking to other states for inspiration on how to fill a $200 million funding gap. (Capital Chronicle)
• Dozens of countries are using the video game Minecraft to educate children about urban design. (New York Times)

• Albuquerque and a bunch of other Sun Belt cities are the most dangerous for walking, according to an analysis of walk scores and pedestrian death statistics. The study shows a regional divide between the car-dependent sprawl and wide streets of the South and Southwest, and the rest of the country. (Momentum)
• Breaking news: The data is at odds with the Trump administration’s claims that transit is dangerous. (Washington Post)
• Speed traps are an ineffective way of slowing down drivers, writes Beth Osborne. If you want drivers to stick to 25 mph, don’t just lower the speed limit, design the road differently.
• A study out of California suggests that Flock cameras misread license plates 70 percent of the time. (CNET)
• A combination of social service outreach and law enforcement cut homelessness on L.A. transit by more than half. (Metro Magazine)
• In addition to a referendum in Wayne County that stops inner-ring Detroit suburbs from opting out of transit service (Bridge Michigan), Spokane voters narrowly renewed a sales tax funding transit (Spokesman-Review).
• Asthma rates in Philadelphia are measurably higher near freeways and industrial areas. (The Conversation)
• Amtrak is adding a second train connecting New York City, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. (Patriot-News)
• King County is adjusting bus lines in a way that will add a net 3,000 bus trips each week for the Seattle area. (The Urbanist)
• Twin Cities officials are scrambling to find $200 million for the Blue Line. (KSTP)
• San Francisco has already outpaced last year’s number of serious injuries from car crashes. (SFist)
• Nashville is considering banning right turns on red. (WSMV)
• Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett announced eight new sidewalk and other transportation projects. (WRTV)
• West Memphis — a separate city in Arkansas across the river from Memphis — is starting a new transit system. (Local Memphis)
• Almost 90 percent of Kansas City streetcar riders are satisfied with it. (KCTV)
• A Los Angeles man is trying to bike all 7,500 miles of L.A. public streets, and he’s about three-quarters of the way there. (L.A. Times; paywall)