By Max Markham

On a chilly day in January, Jose Alvaro, his wife, and their three kids piled into the family car to grab some baby formula at the grocery store. It was a routine trip. But when police in Lubbock, Texas, pulled them over — reportedly for a license plate issue — their lives took a catastrophic turn. Alvaro, 29, was undocumented. Though he had no criminal record and though he was in the process of applying for a green card, the officer contacted ICE. Soon, immigration officers swarmed the car and detained Alvaro for deportation, his four-year-old son sobbing in the back seat.

The criminalization of minor transportation offenses — and their enforcement through discriminatory stops — has wrought havoc among Black, brown, and immigrant Americans for years. These communities have long understood that seemingly routine stops can lead to arrest, police violence, or deportation proceedings, sowing distrust and endangering the person stopped, as well as making it harder for law enforcement agencies to keep residents safe. Alvaro’s stop shows how immigrant communities must now also contend with the heightened fear of a minor stop leading to rapid deportation, perhaps without the protection of due process.

Reform is badly overdue. By decriminalizing minor violations or deemphasizing their enforcement, state and local leaders have the opportunity to address the longstanding discriminatory effects of these policies and protect families from cruel and inhumane separation — while also improving relationships between police and the communities they serve.

Minor Stops, Major Consequences

Routine traffic stops are the most common police-initiated interactions Americans have with the police. They happen at the discretion of individual police officers, and evidence shows persistent inequities in how they’re employed. Compared to white drivers, Black drivers in America are 20% more likely to be stopped for traffic violations, and stops of Black drivers are 151% more likely to result in a search.

Though different experts draw different divisions, we can broadly classify traffic stops into two categories: safety stops and investigatory stops. Safety stops, as the name suggests, address moving violations like speeding, running a red light, and erratic driving. Investigatory stops are prompted by more minor, typically non-safety-related violations — expired registration stickers, broken taillights, and issues with license plates. A relic of the broken-windows policing movement, investigatory stops are often used by police as an excuse to search for more serious criminal activity and to raise revenue from fines.

The over-enforcement of investigatory stops among communities of color has had massive consequences. Fines can bury already poor drivers in cycles of debt. Stops risk pulling individuals into the justice system and exposing them to violence. At the societal level, discriminatory overpolicing degrades trust between communities of color and the police, potentially lowering neighbors’ willingness to report crimes — a problem that has been compounded by the government’s recent decision to roll back police accountability measures. The emphasis on investigatory stops also diverts resources from a more beneficial focus on traffic safety, including improved roadway design.

Not only are traffic stops damaging to communities, recent research suggests that they are largely ineffective. When the Policing Project examined the effects of traffic stop policing in Nashville, Tennessee, we found that stop rates had no impact on long-term vehicular crime trends. We also found that of all non-moving violation stops, only about 2% led to an arrest or the recovery of contraband such as firearms. This is consistent with research showing that finding contraband during traffic stops is like locating a needle in a haystack.

This is far from the first time the federal government has leveraged minor stops as a gateway to immigration enforcement. Advocates have decried this phenomenon for many years, dubbing it the “traffic-stop-to-deportation pipeline.”

What’s novel is the current enforcement fervor, which has struck terror into the hearts of immigrants — documented and undocumented alike — as they use public roads. Fear has now spread even to tourists and green-card holders who have been detained for paperwork problems, and international students who must now worry that traffic violations may lead to the revocation of their student visas. Beneath it all is the well-founded concern that an immigration proceeding would not go forward according to the constitutional guarantee of due process.

Capricious deportations stemming from traffic stops are causing serious and irreversible harm, endangering individuals, tearing families apart, and further deteriorating trust between immigrant communities and police.

Stops Impact Walkers and Bikers, Too

Drivers aren’t the only road users impacted by overzealous and unnecessary enforcement of minor violations. A suite of laws criminalizes people walking and biking as well, such as bans on biking on the sidewalk, not wearing helmets, evading fares, and jaywalking. These, too, have discriminatory impacts.

Take jaywalking — a textbook minor offense, which, until recently, could be punished with a $250 fine in New York City. Yet, like many other laws, jaywalking enforcement was applied unevenly across City precincts. While officers patrolling wealthier, whiter neighborhoods did not enforce the ban on jaywalking, officers in neighborhoods of color did so regularly. Over the last few years, anywhere from 77% to 90% of all jaywalking summonses were issued to Black and Hispanic residents, putting these New Yorkers at risk of police violence, detention, or deportation. Though New York City recently decriminalized jaywalking to address this inequality, the disproportionate and discriminatory enforcement is well-documented across the country.

In addition to their discriminatory effect, these laws, pushed by the automobile industry, have cemented a bias in favor of cars and against pedestrians and bicyclists in American cities over the last century. Amid an ongoing crisis of roadway fatalities, these laws continue to cast blame for traffic deaths on the victims and the most vulnerable, rather than altering the underlying conditions that lead to fatalities in the first place, like the overwhelming prevalence of dangerous vehicles and the disinvestment in road safety infrastructure in predominantly Black and low-income communities.

Some cities and states are making progress by dismantling jaywalking laws. Recognizing their harmful effects — and that they have not been shown to improve roadway safety — cities including New York City, Denver, and Kansas City, and states including Virginia, Nevada, and California have all moved to decriminalize or deemphasize enforcement of jaywalking violations. More localities should follow their lead.

A new class of laws that too strictly regulate and specifically target traditional bike and e-bike riders also has the potential to further this harmful legacy. In an attempt to target the “impression of chaos and disorder,” police in New York City have begun issuing criminal summonses instead of traffic violations, requiring anyone breaking a traffic rule like running a red light or riding on the sidewalk to appear in criminal court. These heavy-handed penalties against bikes and e-bikes are more strict than penalties levied against drivers of multi-ton motor vehicles. These incredibly severe consequences risk the legal status and safety of immigrant delivery workers, who have to enter criminal court despite delivery apps’ role in pushing them to speed and make unrealistically fast deliveries.

Other regulations, which have been passed in Honolulu, statewide in California, and are under consideration in New York City, among other places, set e-bike equipment specifications, speed limits, and registration requirements. While many transportation safety advocates support such laws, it is possible that the current nationwide patchwork of e-bike regulations may disproportionately affect Black, brown, and immigrant residents, who are less likely to own cars and more likely to rely on e-bikes for delivery work.

Criminal Enforcement Is Not The Only Choice

Criminalizing low-level stops for people walking, biking, and driving misses the forest for the trees. We have tried criminalizing our way out of systemic problems before; it has not worked, and it has harmed the very communities we claim to support.

More policing does not equate to safer roads. Adding unnecessary criminal penalties and pushing for heavy-handed enforcement of existing penalties points the finger in the wrong place. There are lower-cost and lower-risk solutions to holistically address safety, like investing in equitable road infrastructure, adding secure and private vehicle technology like intelligent speed assist devices, and piloting civilian alternatives to armed enforcement for low-level traffic offenses. Steps like these would also avoid exposing more people, and especially immigrants, to the criminal process, and would return time and resources to strained police departments.

Addressing road safety holistically would also help to reverse the astonishing growth in criminal penalties in general, which had been derided by advocates and lawmakers from across the political spectrum. Shockingly, there is no formal count of how many federal crimes are on the books, let alone state and local penalties. In addition to being overly cumbersome, this makes it impossible for the average citizen — and even police officer — to keep track of the many laws, and creates a free-for-all discretionary enforcement landscape with discriminatory impacts.

American cities need to eliminate laws that serve no purpose but to entrap and criminalize the most marginalized. We must put an end to discriminatory traffic stops and allocate resources to where they are better served, including initiatives that will, in fact, improve roadway safety, efforts to revitalize the urban fabric, and new commitments to uphold the dignity, belonging, and well-being of all residents.

Max Markham is the executive director of the Policing Project. Max has served in leadership roles at national nonprofits since 2020 and across local government in New York prior to this. He is an experienced campaign operative, managing or advising candidates for mayor, district attorney, borough president, state legislature, and city council. Max’s work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Data for Progress, Vital City, Newsweek, and NPR. Max received his J.D. from NYU School of Law and his B.A. from Stanford University. He is a native New Yorker and lives in Harlem.

In the Era of Mass Deportations, Traffic Reform is More Important Than Ever. was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Mike Wilson

Across California and the nation, a paradox is developing around the relationship between street safety advocates and the fire service. On one hand, firefighters and paramedics have dedicated themselves to serving their communities, and they do so every day with skill and care, without hesitation, even under the most trying circumstances. On the other hand, street safety advocates are finding themselves at odds with fire departments and local firefighter unions over efforts to protect pedestrians and cyclists through the redesign of streets. In Los Angeles, for example, the United Firefighters of Los Angeles Local 112 opposed the 2024 Healthy Streets LA (HLA) ballot initiative, which called for the installation of hundreds of miles of new bike lanes, bus lanes, and other improvements on designated boulevards. After voters approved the measure by a wide margin, California Assemblymember Chris Rogers doubled down, introducing AB 612, the “Increase Fire Department Authority Bill,” which proposed giving greater veto power to fire departments if street design changes could potentially affect response times. The bill failed, at least in part due to the opposition of street safety advocates, but it will likely reappear in a coming session. Conflicts between fire departments and street safety advocates have occurred in other cities, including Oakland, San Francisco, Baltimore, and New York City, to name a few.

On one level, the opposition of the fire service is understandable. Their job is to reach people quickly and help them, so they may be skeptical of roadway redesigns that deliberately encourage slower travel. Certain lane redesigns, hardened bike lanes, and pedestrian bulb-outs, for example, might invite this criticism.

On another level, however, this opposition is at odds with the fire service’s own remarkable legacy of prevention. Fire prevention emerged as a core function of the fire service after the 1974 America Burning report of the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control, which found that across the nation, 95 cents of every dollar spent on fire services was used responding to fires, and only about five cents was spent on preventing fires from occurring in the first place. Nearly 8,000 people were dying in structure fires each year as a result. The fire service responded to the report by launching a stream of fire prevention programs and codes that, between 1980 and 2023, resulted in a 43% reduction in fire-related deaths nationwide, saving more than 5,000 lives over this period.

Nearly 50 years later, the fire service is well-positioned to apply its prevention expertise to the growing problem of street trauma, which now accounts for far more emergency calls than structure fires. For example, while pedestrian fatalities nearly halved between 1980 and 2009, national trends show a 74% increase in pedestrian fatalities from traffic collisions between 2009 and 2024, with a spike in 2022 representing a 40-year high. In comparison, all other traffic fatalities increased 8% from 2009 to 2024.

If it were to align its current approach to street trauma with the historic success of its fire prevention work, the fire service could emerge as a powerful advocate for street trauma prevention. Every firefighter and paramedic knows that the trauma experienced by vehicle occupants, pedestrians, or cyclists in a crash can cause immense suffering and financial hardship, and that — like structure fires — preventing these incidents is far preferable to simply responding to them as they occur. Street trauma prevention is also key to stabilizing and reducing the growing number of EMS calls that are taxing fire and EMS systems in cities across the nation.

We also know what works. Between 2000 and 2012, the expansion of protected bike lane networks reduced fatalities for all road users by 61% in Seattle, 49% in San Francisco, 40% in Denver, and 38% in Chicago. Site-specific interventions like pedestrian median islands and road diets can similarly cut crashes in half. Combined, these streetscape interventions create a redundant system of safety protections that dramatically reduces the likelihood of a serious injury or fatality. By making it genuinely safer for people to leave their car behind and walk or ride, these changes also hold the promise of reducing the congestion that is a common source of frustration — and delay — for firefighters and paramedics. There is emerging evidence that at least some designs that reduce vehicle speeds, such as moving from four lanes to one lane in each direction, have little to no effect on fire and EMS response times.

Finally, responding to critically injured persons also takes a toll on the mental health of firefighters and paramedics. In California, Senate Bill 542 created a rebuttable presumption that post-traumatic stress injuries among firefighters and police officers are work-related and thus compensable under workers’ compensation. The bill, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019, drew from the evidence, pointing out that “trauma-related injuries can become overwhelming and manifest in post-traumatic stress, which may result in substance use disorders and even, tragically, suicide.” The bill reported that “the fire service is four times more likely to experience a suicide than a work-related death in the line of duty in any year.” In my 13 years in the EMS and fire service, I certainly experienced a handful of calls involving young children that affect me to this day, more than 25 years later, as if they happened yesterday. Reducing the frequency of exposure to people who have been critically injured on the street is a more effective response to this reality for firefighters and paramedics compared to after-the-fact counseling and workers’ compensation payments for mental health support.

In 2024, this multifaceted prevention perspective informed the work of the Berkeley Fire Department and the city’s Disaster and Fire Safety Commission in launching the nation’s first Street Trauma Prevention program. The fire chief, Dave Sprague, also viewed the program as a way to help contain the more than 16,000 calls for service the department runs each year in the city of 128,000 residents. The new program’s manager is responsible for working with other city departments to integrate the department’s response needs with prevention strategies, including in the design of street safety improvements that the City of Berkeley is deploying to prevent the collisions that injure nearly 700 motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians each year, on average. This injury rate far exceeds the two persons injured each year on average in structure fires in Berkeley, a fact that informed a year-long discussion among the fire administration, the firefighters’ union leadership, Walk Bike Berkeley, and the Commission.

Berkeley Fire’s program is groundbreaking for street trauma prevention, yet it can also be seen as the logical continuation of a prevention lineage that has defined the fire service for nearly fifty years. Many thousands of lives could be saved in the coming years if fire services across the nation could see this proud legacy and apply it to protecting vulnerable road users through proven prevention strategies.

Mike Wilson is a senior safety engineer at Cal/OSHA and a commissioner on the Berkeley, California, Disaster and Fire Safety Commission, where he led the effort to establish a Street Trauma Prevention program at the Berkeley Fire Department. He previously served for 13 years in the California EMS and fire service as an EMT, firefighter, and paramedic. He organized EMS workers with SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West and served as president of the Salinas Firefighters Association, Local 1270 of the International Association of Firefighters. He can be reached on LinkedIn.

It’s Time for the Fire Service to Join Communities in Preventing Street Trauma was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How State-Level ISA Bills Are Gaining Ground in a Polarized America

By Natalie Draisin and Thomas DeVito

It’s no secret that the United States has a fatal love affair with speed. And our overly permissive relationship directly leads to over 11,000 deadly crashes on our roads every year. Hit by a vehicle going 20 mph, a pedestrian has an 18% chance of death or serious injury. Yet, hit at 40 mph, that same pedestrian suffers a 77% likelihood of death or serious injury. Every mile per hour counts when it comes to saving lives.

Speeding is also a solvable public health problem. Dr. William Haddon, the founder of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said that “we’ve been miseducated that the way to solve [traffic violence] is to have more squads of police chasing Americans so that they wouldn’t drive 120 miles per hour rather than arranging cars so they can’t go that fast.” This framework is the basis for our #StopSuperSpeeders campaign.

#StopSuperSpeeders was launched in the summer of 2023 in New York City by Families for Safe Streets and Transportation Alternatives with support from the FIA Foundation, and has since grown into a national movement. In 2024, the FSS Washington D.C. chapter was the first to successfully pass a #StopSuperSpeeders bill in the form of the STEER Act. In 2025, we joined with the newly emerging Steer Safe Coalition — convened by Smart Start and LifeSafer — to expand this campaign to Arizona, California, Maryland, New York, Virginia, and Washington state, with passage secured in the latter two states. These bills require the worst-of-the-worst reckless speeders to install Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) devices — or speed limiters — in their vehicles, in the same way as most states require drunk drivers to install breathalyzers. By physically preventing vehicles from speeding in the first place, ISA has the potential to be one of the most transformative vehicle safety technologies in a generation and to save tens of thousands of lives.

We compiled ten lessons from recent state legislative efforts that show how this life-saving technology can succeed in the US, even in times of conflicting partisan priorities.

Ten #StopSuperSpeeder Advocacy Lessons from State Legislative Sessions

Know Your Political Scope

An early attempt to #StopSuperSpeeders included a bill that would have required auto manufacturers to include ISA devices in all new vehicles by default. The auto industry and its lobbyists pushed back against us, and pushed back hard. Our bill was ultimately vetoed. We saw firsthand the political power of a multi-billion-dollar industry, so we switched our strategy to focus on aftermarket devices implemented by the state. This change in scope from federal to state still helps advance #StopSuperSpeeders has seen far less pushback from lobbyists and increasing success across the nation.

Target Super Speeders, Not Everyone

In New York City, drivers with 16 or more speed safety camera tickets in a year are twice as likely to kill or injure pedestrians. Several high-profile crashes, including one that killed a mother and two children in March 2025, have been caused by super speeders.

Policies aimed at excessive offenders are more likely to gain traction. These small numbers of drivers are disproportionately dangerous to all other road users, so focusing on these drivers paints a clear picture of a fair, proportional, and pragmatic targeted program.

Build the Right Coalition with an Inside/Outside Campaign

#StopSuperSpeeder success stories share one thing in common: they featured a coalition of survivors, safety advocates, legislative champions, and a skilled lobbyist who knew how to navigate the political system from both the inside and the outside.
An inside/outside strategy is a way to organize a campaign that binds — or bridges — people with disparate roles within a system together for a common goal.

Center the Voices of Crash Victims

While trends in traffic violence have largely moved in the wrong direction over the last decade, this alone has not elicited a crisis response from decision makers. Data, while important for understanding policy, often does not suffice to drive change alone. Researchers show that people remember stories up to 22 times more reliably than data alone, indicating that elevating the voices of victim-survivors is central to winning the critical mass of support needed to change culture and win policy change.

Know When to Fly Below the Radar, and When to Use the Megaphone

Quiet campaigns work better in some states, while others require a bigger megaphone. Virginia’s ISA bill advanced quickly with minimal media fanfare, avoiding sensational headlines that invite opposition. However, other states like New York and California may require a bigger megaphone to break through legislative and political inertia.

The most effective approach may not always be clear from the start, but state legislatures hold clues in their rules and protocols. In New York State, legislators can introduce up to 50 bills in a session. This incentivizes legislators to introduce “messaging bills” — designed more to signal support from the politician than as a serious strategy for passage into law — and increases competition among “serious” bills. New York lends itself to a “go big and be loud” approach if there is any hope of success. Meanwhile, in Virginia, House members are restricted to 15 bills per session, dramatically reducing the dynamics outlined above.

Use Different Messages to Achieve the Same Outcome

People and organizations across the ideological spectrum can find common cause in ISA. Left-leaning advocates cited the #StopSuperSpeeders approach as an effective alternative to suspending or revoking licenses, which could potentially deprive working people of their mobility and livelihood. Additionally, justice reform organizations have expressed their support because of the anticipated reduction in interactions between individual motorists and armed law enforcement.

Meanwhile, right-leaning advocates said they appreciate holding disproportionately reckless individuals accountable. They shared the appreciation that this approach offers a concrete, enforceable, and measurable way of preventing dangerously antisocial behavior in shared public space. This bipartisanship is a key source of this campaign’s power.

Myth-Bust with Hands-On Demonstrations

ISA technology is often poorly understood, as it is only recently becoming a topic of more mainstream conversation.

Hands-on demonstrations of the technology have helped debunk misunderstandings among decision makers. Legislators with overall poor track records on road safety issues became supporters after experiencing the technology in action.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

In 2019, Families for Safe Streets helped establish the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program (DVAP) in New York City, a driver education program targeting super speeders.

DVAP was a promising and exciting idea at the time, but we learned that building an entirely new apparatus from scratch was prone to failure. A skeptical and reluctant implementing agency, operational hurdles like towing and storage capacity, and an unforeseen global pandemic led to its underperformance and unfortunate demise.

The conditions are different with #StopSuperSpeeders. There are already over thirty states that have legal, regulatory, and logistical systems in place for similar and successful car breathalyzer programs. States know these systems work and how to manage them, and these already existing frameworks provide proven, comfortable, and familiar ground for cautious bureaucracies to build on.

Focus on Cost-Benefit and Compare to Existing Examples

ISA programs can often build off the same regulatory framework of car breathalyzer programs, with big impacts for a relatively small cost. The costs of the Washington State program fall at around $1 million, for example, a drop in the bucket of any state budget, given that each deadly car crash costs society over $10 million. That’s a win for even the most budget-conscious politician.

Encourage States by Empowering Cities

In 2021, New York City’s Department of Citywide Administrative Services launched its first ISA pilot program, providing a real-world case study and empirical evidence of ISA’s safety benefits. Other U.S. cities have followed suit, integrating ISA into their municipal fleets.

Government and private fleets wield considerable purchasing power, and as more fleets incorporate ISA, the technology becomes more affordable thanks to economies of scale. Fleets account for roughly 20–25% of new vehicle sales in the U.S., with the potential to significantly influence the market. As fleet adoption grows, public awareness and acceptance will increase, production will scale up, costs will come down, and ultimately, vehicle speeds — and speed-related injuries — will decline across the board. All of this can help move state legislatures.

Public policy debates can fall into the trap of two unproductive extremes: dramatic, oversimplified solutions to complex problems, or a sense of hopelessness that nothing can change because the system is too broken. But our experience shows that between the two, there is an opportunity.

People want to see that real problems — like speeding — can be meaningfully addressed with practical, evidence-based policies leading to safer, better outcomes for everyday families. The #StopSuperSpeeders campaign reflects this approach — ambitious and forward-thinking, yet firmly grounded in what’s achievable. Its early success and attention are signs that this balanced approach resonates.

The road ahead is long, but our progress is undeniable. Let’s go further, together — join us.

Natalie Draisin is a visionary leader in safe, sustainable mobility. As Director of the North American Office and United Nations Representative for the FIA Foundation, she has championed transformative initiatives. Natalie played a pivotal role in integrating road safety into the UN Sustainable Development Goals, led Congressional efforts urging the World Bank to adopt minimum safety standards, and secured adoption of the FIA’s Road Safety Index by Fortune 500 companies and the NYC Department of Citywide Administrative Services. She holds an MPH/MBA and BA in public health from Johns Hopkins, was recognized as a TUMI Remarkable Woman in Transportation, and is a recipient of the Global Vision Zero Leadership Award.

Tom DeVito is the National Director of Families for Safe Streets, with 12 years of experience in transportation and safety advocacy. He helped launch Families for Safe Streets in New York during his first tenure at Transportation Alternatives (2013–2020), and later served as Senior Policy Manager for the Bluebikes and Citi Bike public bikeshare systems in Boston and New York (2020–2023). A skilled community organizer and strategist, Tom has played a key leadership role in many major policy wins such as New York City’s speed limit reductions (including the passage of Sammy’s Law), the 14th Street busway, congestion pricing, expanded funding for safer street designs and the passage of the Streets Master Plan, and growing the largest speed safety camera program in North America. He returned to Families for Safe Streets in 2023 to lead its national growth through a new strategic plan.

Ten Lessons from the Frontlines: How State-Level ISA Bills Are Gaining Ground in a Polarized America was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Elif Ensari

Two years after New York’s Second Avenue Subway made headlines as the most expensive mile of subway ever built, costing $2.5 billion per mile, Istanbul was named by the International Public Transport Association (UITP) as the global leader in heavy rail construction. At the time, the city had 13 projects under construction, totaling 135 miles, at an average cost of just $224 million per mile (adjusted for purchasing power parity and inflation). The Transit Costs Project (TCP), a global comparative study of urban rail construction costs, found that U.S. projects are often five to ten times more expensive than those in countries like Italy, Sweden, and Türkiye due to factors such as station design, lack of standardization, inefficient management of labor, procurement practices, and soft costs. In particular, American cities could learn from Istanbul, one of the TCP case studies that illustrates how a city effectively addressed similar challenges to expand its subway network efficiently and affordably, despite deep political divisions and ongoing economic turmoil. Building urban rail fast and cheaply allows more miles of subway to be built, improving transit access, expanding opportunity, reducing car use, easing congestion, lowering pollution, supporting healthier communities, and advancing a more sustainable future aligned with Vision Zero goals adopted by over 60 U.S. communities.

Over the past three decades, Istanbul has expanded its subway network by more than 200 miles, with an additional 50 miles of lines under construction as of June 2025. During those years, Türkiye went through multiple political and financial crises, and tensions between the ruling and opposition parties often spilled into the city’s politics and jeopardized transit funding. Adding to these challenges are Istanbul’s complex physical conditions: most construction sites are near the water or below the water table, the city lies in an active earthquake zone, and its rich archaeological heritage and aging building stock further complicate underground work. And yet, the public agencies in collaboration with private industry have consistently delivered new lines, at an average cost of $236 million per mile — 72% below the American average — with 80% of the lines in tunnels and projects winning international design awards.

The Transit Costs Project identified multiple cost-saving practices in Istanbul that mirror lessons from cities like Milan and Stockholm. These insights — including streamlined processes, a flexible collaboration between city agencies and the private sector, the accumulation of expertise over decades, and investment in technology and innovation — can inform better practices in cities in the U.S. and around the world.

Between 1950 and 1990, Türkiye’s population nearly tripled, with urbanization increasing from 25% to over 56%. In response, the country implemented a series of reforms that harnessed urban growth to drive economic development. A new metropolitan municipality regime centralized planning and infrastructure authority in cities, while legalizing informal land rights spurred private investment in housing. Expansion of the housing stock was further supported by mortgage-based financing, and public-private partnerships (PPPs) were introduced to help fund essential municipal services like water and sanitation. These policies attracted significant domestic and foreign investment, fueling a construction boom in the early 2000s. Along with housing, many megaprojects were realized through PPPs financed by both local and international loans, backed by state guarantees.

Istanbul’s first metro project on the city’s Asian side, the 13.5-mile M4 line, faced significant early challenges due to limited institutional capacity, poor preliminary planning, and shifting project scopes. Initially proposed as an at-grade light rail line, the project underwent multiple redesigns, including a conversion to fully underground heavy rail. These changes led to major cost overruns and delays and highlighted the importance of robust pre-construction design and the need for clear oversight structures.

A key factor that helped rescue the troubled M4 project was the flexibility shown by both the agency and the contractors, but ultimately, the creation of the Projects Directorate under the Rail Systems Department of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality in 2014 marked the most significant advancement in efficiently managing subsequent rail projects. The Directorate centralized planning capacity and began requiring 60% design documentation before tenders, while remaining open to revisions proposed by the contractor’s design team during implementation. This shift helped the municipality streamline the procurement and project management processes and improved costs and delivery outcomes. The Rail Systems Department’s modest in-house capacity has not hampered its work, thanks to improved efficiency in managing consultants and contractors, as well as a competitive market with an abundance of firms.

The agency’s flexibility continues to pay off. During the M7 metro line’s construction, for example, archaeological discoveries at Beşiktaş station forced a major delay. Rather than halt progress, the agency and contractor restructured the signaling system and construction schedule to open the rest of the line in phases, minimizing delays and public disruption.

This adaptive mindset was matched by a commitment to learning and innovation. Initially, Istanbul relied heavily on foreign experts and supervisors, but local agencies, designers, and contractors quickly absorbed this knowledge, optimized their practices, expanded their equipment pools, and began investing in technologies like Building Information Modelling (BIM). This learning curve is evident across projects. One example is the Marmaray’s BC1 Bosphorus Crossing, undertaken by the Turkish Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, where the contractor, experts, and the agency tackled the engineering of a 190-foot-deep immersed tunnel beneath the Bosphorus strait, and found and managed archaeological discoveries at all four station sites — some dating back 8,000 years — through research, collaboration, and process refinement. From setting up concrete testing labs to adopting mixed-geology tunnel-boring machines and integrating archaeological oversight into construction planning, both public and private actors have continually adapted and improved their systems. By the time newer lines like M9 began, the city had developed a mature rail-building ecosystem. Even with an inexperienced contractor, the project stayed on track, thanks to the involvement of seasoned design and consultant teams and an institutional framework shaped by decades of continuous investment in urban rail.

Another area where Istanbul has reduced costs through learning and innovation is station design, which is a major driver of rail construction expenses. Underground stations require large-scale excavation, land acquisition, and navigation of complex underground utilities. In early projects like M4, station designs were bespoke, with large mechanical spaces and extensive cut-and-cover construction. Over time, however, stations became more standardized. Starting with M5, key technical components like fan rooms were relocated from large dedicated mechanical spaces to more compact NATM tunnels at the platform level, significantly reducing excavation volumes and cutting construction and land costs by tens of millions of dollars. The early adoption and gradual integration of parametric 3D modeling through BIM further enabled designers to test typologies and streamline planning. While Istanbul builds long platforms to accommodate high passenger demand, it has prioritized cost control over architectural flourishes. Unlike cities that invest in signature station designs, Istanbul adopts a no-frills approach, choosing standardized finishes and simple materials to build more lines, faster and more affordably.

Istanbul’s experience demonstrates how standardized practices, institutional learning, flexible risk-sharing, and technology adoption can yield more efficient outcomes. Rail-building agencies should streamline not only station designs but also their project delivery pipelines. They should invest time and effort in the preliminary design and planning phases, avoid offloading risk onto consultants and contractors, and instead build strong in-house teams capable of managing risk and making informed decisions. To cultivate a healthier rail-building ecosystem, agencies should lower barriers for smaller firms by cutting unnecessary paperwork and bureaucracy. They should also reconsider oversized contingency budgets, which can inflate overall project costs. There is no single solution to cost reduction, but international examples offer clear, recurring lessons. When cities build rail faster and cheaper, they can expand transit networks more rapidly, advancing safe mobility, reducing car dependency, improving access to opportunities, and accelerating progress toward Vision Zero and a sustainable urban future.

Elif Ensari is a research scholar at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, where she works with the Transportation and Land Use group. Her research focuses on the costs of building passenger rail, ridership estimation, Transit-Oriented Development, and the walking and cycling infrastructure of New York City. She contributes to the Transit Costs Project, which investigates why rail projects in some countries are delivered more affordably than others, with case studies spanning Istanbul, Boston, New York, Italy, and Sweden, with new cases currently underway.

How Istanbul Builds Subways Cheap and Fast — And What U.S. Cities Can Learn was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Replicating Paris’ Bike Boom in Los Angeles

By Lucia Cappella and Talia Goddard

As Los Angeles gears up to host the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, cycling advocates are looking to Paris 2024 — hailed as the “first bikeable Olympics” — for key lessons. The Paris Games not only introduced extensive cycling infrastructure but also cemented the city’s reputation as a bike-friendly capital, a shift marked by a steady rise in ridership.

The story of the legacy mobility improvements was non-linear and required vision, tenacity, and coordinated implementation. Initial plans for Paris 2024 focused exclusively on bus- and rail-based public transportation. Just two years before the opening ceremony, existing bike routes to the venues were unmarked and dangerous. Local cycling advocacy groups urged Olympic organizers to integrate active transportation into their mobility plans, warning that public transit alone would not be able to handle the anticipated 15 million visitors. It wasn’t until the groups formed a coalition and orchestrated a high-profile Olympic torch relay by bike that the Games organizing committee began to pay heed. This advocacy also played a key role in holding Mayor Hidalgo, who campaigned on an agenda of making Paris 100% bikeable by 2026, accountable to her promise.

With strong community interest aligned with Hidalgo’s political resolve, Paris achieved a remarkable turnaround. In just two years, the city introduced 34 miles of new bike routes, added 46,000 rental bikes, and created over 27,000 bike parking spaces. By the time the 2024 Games began, all 35 Olympic venues were safely accessible by bike, leading an estimated five percent of spectators to cycle to the events. After the closing ceremony, these bike routes remained open, and the bike racks were distributed to public spaces around the city. Reflecting on the long-term impacts of the Games bike-buildout, Charlotte Guth, Head of Bicycle Mission for the City of Paris Roads and Transport Department, remarked, “Today, in Paris, cycling is no longer just a weekend pastime, but the fastest and easiest way to get around on a daily basis. The 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games have offered us a unique opportunity to accelerate these changes.”

There is a lot of skepticism that Los Angeles can accomplish the same kind of success, but Paris reminds us of the power of coalition-building and persistent advocacy. In early 2025, Paris en Selle, a key advocate for Paris bike buildout, reached out to the Festival Trail, a Los Angeles initiative advocating for mobility improvements ahead of the 2028 Games. Seeing the Festival Trail as a successor to their efforts, Paris en Selle symbolically passed the baton by sharing their testimony as encouragement.

Of course, Los Angeles faces a very different set of challenges from Paris. While Paris is compact with a population density of 56,000 people per square mile, Los Angeles is vast and sprawling, with just 8,300 people per square mile. The stark difference in the urban design of these two cities can be attributed to LA’s car-centric planning, which has had lasting negative effects on the city and its residents.

Most Angelenos do not feel safe walking or biking in their own city. Los Angeles is dominated by wide, multi-lane roads lacking basic safety features like sidewalks, adequate lighting, and bike lanes. The results are devastating: a pedestrian is killed in Los Angeles every two days, a fatality rate that is four times the national average. These rates are even higher for communities of color, where decades of disinvestment have left streets without critical safety infrastructure — and the city is getting even more dangerous. In 2024, there were 303 traffic-related deaths in Los Angeles, a rise of nearly 30% since 2019.

Despite this data, the city of Los Angeles has not prioritized improvements around pedestrian and cyclist safety. In 2024, citizens advocated for a ballot measure demanding that the city implement a mobility plan for safer streets. The measure passed thanks to an astounding organizing effort by residents, but a year later, the city has still not outlined its plans for implementation. Furthermore, in the most recent city budget, Mayor Bass addressed a $1 billion deficit by making deep cuts to the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and StreetsLA, the two agencies responsible for managing street safety and carrying out Vision Zero. These actions make it clear that we cannot rely solely on public leadership or dollars to get us ready for the Olympics. Los Angeles will need to be prepared by the people, for the people.

So what do we rely on?

One answer is to combine community, philanthropy, and partnerships — co-aligning the once-in-a-generation investment during the 2028 Games with long-term goals of building the next LA. A project that embodies this ethos is the Festival Trail, a community-driven initiative for interconnected, non-vehicular corridors connecting the dispersed neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The Trail route aims to connect major venues of the 2028 Games along current and planned transit connections, helping Angelenos safely move around the city car-free during the Games and for years after. Though the vision is bold, the Festival Trail is rooted in a strategic idea: closing a few key gaps in the network can open up Los Angeles in a big way.

One of these gaps is along the LA River bike path, an eight-mile chasm from Elysian Valley through Downtown Los Angeles that forces cyclists onto busy surface streets with dangerous intersections. There is $365 million in earmarked funding to connect the bike path, but the project has been caught in a bureaucratic stalemate that needs to be unlocked in order to bring this life-saving infrastructure to communities along the LA River. The Festival Trail is leveraging the momentum of the 2028 Games to bring attention to this long-overdue project and deliver a seamless 51-mile protected bike path stretching from the San Fernando Valley all the way to Long Beach.

We have already seen early success in closing these gaps. In May 2025, Segment A of the Rail-to-Rail project opened a safe, car-free route that links neighborhoods, transit stops, schools, and parks across South LA. This corridor now sees 4,300 pedestrians and 2,500 cyclists daily, a major mobility upgrade in a part of the city where one in five households is car-free.

In addition to building physical connections, the Festival Trail aims to shift the culture of bike ridership and car-free transportation more broadly in Los Angeles through public space activations. Festival Trail is partnered closely with CicLAvia on Open Streets events, citywide celebrations where Angelenos can walk and bike along streets temporarily closed to cars and reimagine what LA could feel like if it were designed for people. These joyful events help introduce new riders, facilitate community connections, and build momentum around the idea that public streets are for public joy.

With only three years before the opening ceremony, there is still a long way to go to ensure Angelenos see lasting benefits from the Olympic Games — but the Festival Trail is not working alone. In the past two years, the team has held over 300 meetings to build momentum, supported by a growing cross-sectoral coalition of engineers, designers, community leaders, grassroots organizers, arts advocates, philanthropists, corporations, and government representatives. The initiative is fiscally sponsored by the California Community Foundation, one of the most prolific foundations in the country. Together, this coalition brings together the diverse expertise and perspectives needed for a project of this scale, all united by a shared vision for a positive Olympic legacy.

In recent months, the Festival Trail has hosted three community design workshops at key sites along its corridors to gather feedback directly from Los Angeles residents. Interest and excitement are palpable at the workshops, particularly around bike infrastructure. Attendees voice strong support for protected bike paths as well as infrastructure to support cyclists’ and pedestrians’ basic needs, like hydration stations, shade structures, comfortable benches, and clean restrooms. They also stress that every aspect of the Trail should be designed for people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds.

Participants of Festival Trail workshops also emphasize the importance of storytelling along the route. The Festival Trail must reflect the “real” Los Angeles — a city of astounding multiculturalism — by helping users see and experience the city’s many diverse neighborhoods.

This feedback has directly shaped the Festival Trail’s vision and informed the development of a branded “Kit of Parts”, a flexible design toolkit to remake streets across the region. The Kit incorporates residents’ top priorities, including comfort and cooling, stages for artistic expression and cultural programming, space for rest and gathering, greenery, and more. Implementation would be site-specific, tailored to reflect the unique needs and identities of each community along the Trail.

As millions of visitors arrive in Los Angeles for the 2028 Games, the Festival Trail would offer safe, car-free ways to move through the city, but the true impact of the Festival Trail would extend far beyond the Games.

The Trail would provide easy walking and biking access for the estimated 1.8 million Angelenos who live within half a mile of the route, including 1.3 million residents of color and 280,000 residents living in poverty. It would run along 344 schools and 25 universities, linking 673,000 students to 167 parks, countless cultural institutions, and public space activations. Long term, the Festival Trail envisions building corridors of affordable housing along the trail, with initial studies yielding up to 20,000 units of affordable housing through the heart of Los Angeles.

Success in Los Angeles will look different from Paris. Solutions to the unique challenges and cultural context of Los Angeles will take shape in their own way. What we can mirror from Paris is the spirit of activism that made their achievements possible. We know that ballot measures, data, and promises alone will not bring change to Los Angeles streets. Instead, our strength will come from momentum built by deep community organizing, grassroots visioning, and bold and innovative methods of project delivery.

We’re faced now with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform our city. And while it should not take the Olympics for Angelenos to get the improvements they deserve, we must make the most of this moment.

The baton has been passed. Let’s get going.

Lucia Cappella is a Los Angeles-based writer, advocate, and current Outreach Coordinator for the Festival Trail. She is passionate about expanding access to arts programming, public transportation, and urban nature — seeing these spaces as vital to creating more connected, empathetic, and resilient communities.

Talia Goddard is an undergraduate student at Occidental College double-majoring in Urban & Environmental Policy and Economics. She interned with the Festival Trail during the summer of 2025. As a Los Angeles native, Talia was drawn to the project’s commitment to creating a positive Olympic legacy for the city. Her studies currently center on global climate policy, sustainable cities, and urban history through art. Outside the classroom, she works as a photographer and enjoys highlighting community stories and urban landscapes.

An Olympian Task: Replicating Paris’ Bike Boom in Los Angeles was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Using Federal Data to Make Our Roads Safer

By Cathy Chase

Federal datasets have helped advance road safety for decades. When robustly maintained, these datasets help researchers and policymakers understand road safety trends to intervene with informed policies. When incomplete or biased, however, these datasets leave decision-makers uninformed and directionless, or worse yet, lead them to make incorrect choices. The need for data-driven solutions is especially critical at this time as America’s roads continue to become busier, with more people and goods on the move. Upholding federal data transparency is key to understanding and reversing the alarming level of crashes, fatalities, and strained infrastructure.

The Bad News

America’s roads are moving an ever-increasing number of people and goods. This growth comes with a significant human toll, infrastructure threat, and price tag. On average, 112 people were killed every day on roads in the U.S., totaling nearly 41,000 fatalities in 2023. This amounts to a staggering 24% upsurge in deaths in just a decade. An additional 2.44 million people were injured. Early projections for 2024 traffic fatalities remain at a similar level; over 39,000 people are estimated to have been killed last year.

Our roads are deteriorating, too. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2025 Report Card, U.S. roads received a grade of “D+,” with 39% of major roads in poor or mediocre condition. Bridges received a “C,” with about a third of the nation’s bridge inventory (221,791 spans) in need of repair or replacement. In addition, approximately 45% of bridges have exceeded their planned design lives of 50 years.

These trends generate a massive financial toll. Driving on deteriorated and congested roads costs the average driver over $1,400 per year in vehicle operating costs and lost time, while the annual economic cost of crashes is approximately $340 billion in 2019 dollars. This figure equates to every person living in the U.S. essentially paying an annual “crash tax” of over $1,000. Moreover, the total value of societal harm from motor vehicle crashes in 2019, which includes loss of life, pain, and decreased quality of life, was nearly $1.4 trillion. Research from the Network of Employers for Traffic Safety finds motor vehicle crashes cost employers $72.2 billion in direct crash-related expenses in 2019.

The Good News

We understand the above trends primarily because of the data published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) within the U.S. Department of Transportation (US DOT). As much as data bear out the bleak trends, there is hope in using this same data to intervene.

Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety releases a Roadmap to Safety report annually, which provides a comprehensive blueprint on actions that can and should be taken by state and federal officials. All these recommendations are rooted in data, research, and analyses, including those from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the US DOT, among others. These entities publish data on crashes, injuries, fatalities, and other site-specific details from police reports. Sound data is essential to developing effective policies.

For instance, in 2006, NHTSA’s Special Crash Investigations (SCI) program began investigating crashes where a vehicle backed over a person located behind the vehicle, typically a young child. In 2008, Congress enacted with bipartisan support the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act, directing the US DOT to improve the rearward visibility in vehicles. In 2014, NHTSA issued a rule to require all new vehicles under 10,000 pounds to be equipped with a rearview camera by 2018.

Throughout the legislative process, safety groups, including Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, used the SCI reports to demonstrate the urgency of the problem. In addition, the SCI findings were cited by NHTSA during the rulemaking. If SCI did not undertake this work or if it eliminated certain incidents, the demonstrated safety need would have been incorrectly skewed, potentially delaying or derailing a rule that has saved many lives. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has found that rearview cameras have reduced backing crash involvement rates by 17%.

Another salient example occurred last year when, compelled by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, NHTSA issued one of its most significant recent safety advances by requiring light vehicles be equipped with automatic emergency braking systems. The agency concluded that taking this action will save hundreds of lives and prevent thousands of injuries each year. NHTSA’s own public data informed this critical rulemaking, again upon which Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and others relied during intensive lobbying efforts, demonstrating the indispensable role these databases play in crafting effective safety standards.

The Danger

Unfortunately, NHTSA also recently demonstrated what can happen when data does not provide a complete picture of how certain vehicle technologies perform. In 2021, the agency issued an order requiring manufacturers and operators to report on certain crashes involving automated driving systems or autonomous vehicles. However, in 2025, NHTSA amended the order to omit crash reporting on certain crashes harming vulnerable road users, tow-away crashes, involving vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems, and some property-damage-only crashes, among other changes. This collective narrowing of the data required threatens to conceal important safety and performance issues, leaving the agency and public in the dark about the real-world impact of these technologies.

Another example of threats to robust data collection occurred in 2015. The Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, administered by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, is designed to improve safety and prevent commercial motor vehicle crashes, injuries, and fatalities by analyzing important safety data such as roadside inspection and crash reports. Yet, Congress removed the program’s data related to a property carrier’s safety performance from public view. Therefore, the public, including those seeking to contract a carrier’s services, does not have a full understanding of the company’s safety record. Sadly, despite the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine finding the program was sound, the data have remained hidden from the public for nearly a decade.

Data drives meaningful change when it’s complete, transparent, and free from external influence. The federal safety standards and requirements for back-up cameras and automatic emergency braking systems are proof that data analysis can have positive safety benefits. As we confront emerging roadway challenges, robust safety data must remain the foundation for sound policy that saves lives.

Cathy Chase is President of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an alliance of consumer, public health, law enforcement and safety organizations and major property-casualty insurance companies and trade associations. Chase has over 25 years of experience in public policy, law and advocacy across the nonprofit and government sectors. Before joining Advocates in 1996, she held roles at Sasha Bruce Youthwork, Street Law, and in the New Jersey State Assembly, among others. Chase holds a Juris Doctor from The George Washington University Law School and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Rutgers College.

Crunching Numbers to Curb Crashes: Using Federal Data to Make Our Roads Safer was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

San Antonio’s Bold Bike Plan in a Car-Centric State

By Isaac Levy

“BICYCLIST HIT, KILLED BY VEHICLE ON THE NORTHEAST SIDE”, read the KSAT News headline on April 2, 2025. Tragic headlines like this are all too familiar in San Antonio and serve as a stark reminder of why we at the City’s Transportation Department do this work: to eliminate traffic deaths.

To move this mission forward, we have crafted The Bike Network Plan (BNP), which was adopted by our City Council on January 30, 2025. The BNP provides safe, sensible, and protected bike facilities where they are most needed, connecting missing network gaps and properly upgrading existing bike facilities.

For a car-dominated city and state, a plan that recommends 1,740 miles of new and upgraded bike facilities faces a bit of scrutiny. “Why waste billions of dollars on bike lanes that no one will use?” “No one even bikes in San Antonio.” “San Antonio wants to turn us into Amsterdam.” Opposition has been loud and clear — and we have been listening. We want to deliver a bike plan that gives everyone safety in their freedom of choice.

Texas Transportation Culture

Texas is known for its low density, hot climate, excessively wide lane highways, sprawling suburban areas, and poor accommodations for anyone outside a car. If a bike facility exists at all, cyclists are frequently offered a six-inch strip of white paint as “protection” from the travel lanes.

San Antonio is no exception. From the Interstate 35 NEX project to the rebuilding of highways like State Loop 1604, state dollars are primarily used to fund highway projects, creating a challenge for local municipalities in meeting their multimodal goals.

The Bike Network Plan

Our attempt to address these bike-hostile conditions began with the City’s 1997 Master Plan, which first called for a citywide bike network. In 2000, the greenway system, named for bike advocate and former mayor Howard W. Peak, won a dedicated sales tax. Greenway construction began in 2007 with a 2-mile segment between Voelker Homestead and Phil Hardberger Park. Still, street-level improvements lagged until the 2011 Bike Plan and Complete Streets Policy, which gave engineers clear guidance on adding bike lanes, boulevards, and safe pedestrian features to city roads.

The 2025 BNP was built off the 2011 Bike Plan, aiming to build 1,740 miles of new or upgraded cyclist facilities across San Antonio via safer cyclist facilities, context-sensitive design, and community engagement. The plan will increase the number of residents with access to protected bike lanes by 75% once fully implemented.

The BNP prioritizes fair outcomes for underserved communities. Historically, about 65% of bike infrastructure investment has occurred in wealthier, low equity concern areas at the exclusion of poorer neighborhoods, resulting in 111% more pedestrian and bicyclist crashes in areas of high equity concern. The BNP’s full implementation will increase comfortable bicycling routes in these neighborhoods by 275%, significantly increasing access to schools and grocery stores. Additionally, the BNP recommends that the city decriminalize sidewalk riding and lower speed limits to 20–25 mph in order to make sure that all road users can arrive at their destination safely.

Whether you are a child riding to Mark Twain Academy along West Mulberry Avenue, a nurse traveling along Huebner Road to get to their clinic at the Medical Center, or a veteran utilizing a handcycle down Starcrest Drive to reach the VA Hospital, this plan is designed to include all ages and users on our network.

Policy Meets Politics

The BNP did not get passed without extensive community engagement. Our 43 engagement events with other city departments and community/neighborhood associations, and our pop-ups allowed us to gather feedback. We held additional stakeholder meetings with accessibility organizations, colleges and research institutions, developers, school districts, and suburban leaders. Council Members were also involved for over two years on a district level. The core tenet of the BNP — safety and comfort for everyone — clearly resonated, as 98% of BNP survey respondents called for greenways or protected bike lane investments in their neighborhoods.

While our Council Members and Mayor Nirenberg played an important role, we owe it to our Internal Advisory Committee, Mobility Working Group, Health Impact Advisory Committee, and Technical Advisory Committee for helping to underscore interdepartmental collaboration, provide on-the-ground insight, explore cyclist health disparities, and ensure that bicycle design standards uphold safety.

What’s Next

Passing a plan is only the first act in a never-ending, ever-evolving process. Now we have reached the hard parts: funding, implementation, and metric tracking. Performance measures are particularly important as they help us understand how the BNP improves health outcomes, increases recreational opportunities, expands access to schools and jobs, and decreases crash frequency.

The BNP helped spur the creation of our City’s first Multimodal Transportation Committee, made up of 13 members of the community that include transit riders, pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists. Their insights will shape how we prioritize projects and provide a direct line of accountability to the public.

We are also collaborating with our Public Works Department on 30 street projects to incorporate bike facilities, and working on three Bike Network Plan-related projects: McCullough Ave Bike Study, Camden St Bike Lanes, and Woodlawn Lake Bike Facilities. As we implement pilot designs on our priority projects, we will study each corridor to finalize or adjust the layout. After a trial period, each project will move to a permanent design with construction planned over the next eight years and full implementation by 2050.

Headlines like the one we saw on April 2, 2025, are why we do this work. They are more than tragic news alerts — they are calls to action. In a city and state where the car still reigns supreme, building a comprehensive, community-centered bike plan is a revolution in how we think about safety and mobility. That is why it took nearly two years of listening, learning, and leading to get it right.

San Antonio has proven that change is possible. We have shown that designing for bikes is designing for parents and kids getting to school, slowing down drivers on neighborhood streets, and everyone in between. When you plan for bikes, you plan for people. Know that it will take time, trust, and teamwork, and that it is worth it. Because one day, your plan will do more than just prevent tragic headlines — it will create a future for biking that your grandkids and great-grandkids can admire, appreciate, access, and adore.

Isaac Levy is a Senior Transportation Planner with the City of San Antonio’s Transportation Department, where he leads efforts to advance multimodal transportation. Originally from Galveston, Texas, Isaac developed an early interest in transportation. He moved to San Antonio in 2015 to attend the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in Geography & Environmental Sustainability, followed by a Master of Science in Urban & Regional Planning. Isaac joined the Transportation Department in 2023 to focus on multimodal planning and infrastructure development. He brings a strong foundation in urban planning, policy analysis, and stakeholder engagement to his role, contributing to projects that shape safer, more accessible streets for all San Antonians.

Pedaling Toward Progress: San Antonio’s Bold Bike Plan in a Car-Centric State was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Brandon Chamberlin

In 1887, New York cyclists achieved a major legal victory when Albany passed the first-in-the-nation law granting bicycles the same rights and responsibilities on the road as “persons using carriages drawn by horses.” In the 140 years since, much has changed on the road in terms of the built environment, user base, and legal landscape. By the mid-20th century, the widespread adoption of automobiles led to an explosion of traffic regulation and control devices. In the 1970s, the vehicular cycling movement fought early attempts to construct separate bike infrastructure, fearing it would marginalize bicycles from general-purpose roads. These advocates promoted a model in which cyclists rode in mixed traffic, mimicking the behavior of motor vehicles to defend their legal status.

Today, while vehicular cycling has fallen out of favor in most planning circles, its legal legacy endures. The default in nearly all states is to impose the same traffic rules on bicycles as on motor vehicles. This approach ignores a simple truth: bicycles are not cars.

The Problem with Treating Bikes Like Cars

The persistence of car-centric bike laws is rooted in an outdated view of mobility. Cyclists are closer in size, speed, and sensory experience to pedestrians than to motor vehicles. They share the road but not the advantages of steel armor, airbags, or engine power. In collisions, they absorb the impact with their bodies. A driver who hits a pedestrian usually walks away unscathed; a cyclist is as likely as a pedestrian to suffer injuries in a collision.

Just as crossing mid-block is sometimes the safest move for a pedestrian, detouring onto a sidewalk or rolling through a stop sign might be the safest move for a cyclist. Penalizing those behaviors makes no more sense than ticketing someone for jogging on a grass median to avoid a dangerous intersection.

Rigid enforcement also opens the door to discriminatory policing. Studies have repeatedly shown that enforcement of minor traffic violations can be used to target marginalized communities. Decriminalizing behaviors like sidewalk riding or stop-as-yield protects not only cyclists’ safety but also their civil liberties.

Flexible Laws Save Lives

Perhaps no reform better illustrates the safety benefits of legal flexibility than the Idaho Stop, which allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs and, in some states, red lights as stop signs. At least eleven states and the District of Columbia have adopted this rule in full or in part. Internationally, countries like France and Belgium permit cyclists to proceed straight or turn right at red lights at specific intersections designated by signage. New York City’s law allowing cyclists to proceed on pedestrian walk signals gives cyclists a head start at certain intersections and offers similar — but more limited — protections.

The principle is simple: allowing cyclists to move through intersections before cars begin accelerating protects them from being stuck in blind spots or caught between turning vehicles. Intersections are the most dangerous places for cyclists, and giving them a head start (or “leading interval”) can be life-saving.

This isn’t just theory. A 2023 literature review by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the Idaho Stop can reduce crash rates by up to 23% and, crucially, showed no evidence of increased conflicts with pedestrians or other cyclists.

If we tolerate pedestrians crossing against a red light when no cars are coming — a technically illegal but widespread behavior — why shouldn’t we trust cyclists to exercise similar judgment? They, too, have literal skin in the game.

Let Cyclists Use the Sidewalk — Sometimes

Sidewalk riding is often condemned as hazardous to pedestrians and a sign of reckless cycling. The truth is more complicated. Many cyclists ride on the sidewalk not to flout rules, but to avoid being crushed by cars. In areas where traffic volumes are high and protected infrastructure is nonexistent, the sidewalk can feel like the only refuge.

Laws concerning sidewalk riding require nuance. In New York City, sidewalk cycling is flatly illegal for adults, even though it is not explicitly banned in most states. In those that do allow it, riders are typically required to yield to pedestrians or to sound a bell when passing. The key is reasonable and courteous behavior, not prohibition.

Contrast this with Hoboken. The New Jersey city permits sidewalk cycling at walking speeds provided cyclists yield to pedestrians. Since 2017, Hoboken has recorded zero traffic deaths, a testament to how safety can be achieved through balanced regulation rather than inflexible bans.

More tellingly, cities that invest in protected bike infrastructure see sidewalk riding drop dramatically without resorting to ticketing. When New York City installed a protected bike lane on Prospect Park West, the percentage of cyclists using the sidewalk fell from 46% to just 3%, even as total bike volumes tripled. The lesson? The most effective way to keep cyclists off the sidewalk is to give them a safe place to ride, not criminalize their attempts to avoid danger.

Mandatory Helmet Laws Miss the Mark

Another policy that appears safety-focused on its face, but carries unintended harm, is mandatory helmet legislation. After all, motorcycle helmet requirements are uncontroversial, so why shouldn’t they also be required for bicycles? But while bike helmets can offer personal protection in crashes, laws that require their use often discourage cycling altogether.

Australia’s experience with mandatory helmet laws is instructive. After implementing such laws nationwide, the country saw a marked decrease in cycling rates, reversing the “safety in numbers” effect: the more cyclists on the road, the more drivers anticipate their presence, and the safer each cyclist becomes. Reducing ridership undermines this protective effect and ironically increases risk for those who continue to ride.

Moreover, research suggests that drivers tend to pass more closely to cyclists wearing helmets than to those without, perceiving them as more experienced and therefore less vulnerable. This behavioral shift may negate some of the safety benefits of helmet use, especially in dense urban environments.

Helmet laws also send the wrong message by reinforcing the idea that cycling is inherently dangerous, requiring armor to participate. This contributes to a car-centric view of streets and deters would-be cyclists who might otherwise replace car trips with bike trips.

With all this in mind, it’s no surprise that none of the countries with the highest rates of cycling and fewest cyclist fatalities have mandatory helmet laws. Cyclists should be encouraged to wear helmets through education and incentives, not forced through punitive mandates that reduce ridership and safety.

A Smarter Framework for Safety

New York City’s recent decriminalization of jaywalking offers a new way forward. By acknowledging that pedestrians are capable of making safe judgments and that punitive enforcement does little to improve safety outcomes, the city has moved toward a smarter, more humane regulatory approach. The same logic applies to cyclists.

This doesn’t mean cyclists should be free to endanger others; right-of-way laws would still apply. Cyclists could still be held civilly liable for causing a crash, but enforcement should focus on harmful behaviors — like failing to yield or riding recklessly — and not technical violations that have no impact on others. There is simply no justification for penalizing cyclists for choosing the safest course of action in situations where the rules were written for machines that outweigh them by two tons.

Trust Cyclists to Keep Themselves Safe

For too long, laws have treated cyclists like small, slow cars. It’s time to abandon that fiction. Cyclists are people — vulnerable, alert, and often more aware of traffic dynamics than the drivers around them. We should trust them to make smart choices. More importantly, we should write laws that reflect the realities they face on the road every day.

Policies like the Idaho Stop, flexible sidewalk riding rules, and the decriminalization of technical and equipment violations are not radical. They are necessary. They save lives, reduce conflict, and bring our legal system in line with how people actually move through cities. Let’s stop forcing cyclists to follow rules designed for cars, and give them the freedom — and legal protection — to ride smart.

Brandon W. Chamberlin is an attorney and safe streets advocate. He is of counsel to the Law Office of Adam D. White, where he represents pedestrians and cyclists injured on New York City streets. In 2023, he was honored as Transportation Alternatives’ Citywide Activist of the Year for his work tracking New York City’s progress in installing protected bike lanes. He frequently writes and speaks on legislative and regulatory issues that impact vulnerable road users. He clerked for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and received a JD with High Honors from Emory University School of Law. Brandon lives in Brooklyn with his Brompton.

Breaking the Car-Law Mold: Rethinking Traffic Rules for Bikes was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Nicholas Dagen Bloom

In most American cities, even the best public transit administrators face untenable choices, ranging from deferred maintenance to service cuts. With few exceptions, underfunded and underperforming transit is a feature, not a bug, of American life. It doesn’t have to be this way. Quality mass transit, with steady subsidy and supportive land use, can thrive in an autocentric society as it has in cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco.

The United States once had virtually no truly public-owned transit. However, riders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enjoyed access to the world’s largest privately developed and operated transit systems. How was this possible?

Private transit companies initially attracted capital because streetcars and elevated lines enabled the profitable development of peripheral land. Developers built residential neighborhoods and transit lines connected them to the heart of the city, drawing new residents who would then pay fares to ride the transit line. Many neighborhoods that we consider urban today initially developed as “streetcar suburbs,” including brownstone Brooklyn, San Francisco’s Sunset District, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Although land development generated initial revenue, fare boxes were soon expected to sustain the transit service. Transit companies that survived the land development phase only remained profitable through monopolistic consolidation, fare increases, labor exploitation, and maximizing the use of aging equipment. Taking transit wasn’t pleasant — one result was reformer outrage and the establishment of public service commissions that attempted to regulate private companies’ fares, routes, and service levels — but it was fast, frequent, affordable, and well-connected.

Transit riders and politicians, seeing only defects, failed to grasp how much transit service they enjoyed without public investment. In 1900, American transit riders from Atlanta to Los Angeles had far more access to streetcar transit than their European counterparts. The private companies, despite their many flaws, delivered a valuable public utility with minimal public subsidy and regulation.

The transit companies’ monopoly was broken when the mass automobile arrived in the 1920s and 1930s. Affluent riders bought cars and fled to new auto-centric suburbs; some were tired of the old streetcars, while others simply preferred the privacy and speed of automobiles. City leaders invested in pavement for new and widened streets and highways, which only led to even more cars being pumped onto city streets.

Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, private transit companies experienced significant declines in ridership and growing difficulty operating streetcars and new buses on congested city streets. Limited by public commissioners on fare increases, the owners slashed service frequency, abandoned express downtown service plans, terminated unprofitable lines, failed to expand into growing suburbs, and replaced streetcar systems with cheaper and less frequent buses. Nothing much helped: the transit companies collapsed in full public view, but few city or state leaders seemed to care. After all, private transit companies were widely viewed as monopolistic bad actors despite the necessary service they had provided. Streetcars were also unfairly blamed for slowing down automobile traffic.

Vulture capitalists, such as National City Lines, stepped into the void. These entrepreneurs aimed to help automotive industry patrons sell buses instead of streetcars, and are notorious for degrading transit in the 1940s and 1950s. While National City, which controlled a fraction of total transit ownership nationally, is usually blamed for all streetcar losses, almost all private transit operators took the same slash-and-burn approach to legacy streetcars. In most cities, the government encouraged swapping buses for streetcars to speed up traffic, or intervened only when much of the expensive transit infrastructure, such as streetcar tracks, had been dismantled, and only a few bus lines remained.

Fearing the loss of all transit service, on which many riders still depended, the government grudgingly entered the transit business after World War II. Sadly, public ownership was no panacea. Public transit agencies fell into three broad categories: “pay as you go” systems, where fare revenue was expected to cover the entire cost of operations; poorly subsidized transit systems; and deeply subsidized systems.

The “pay as you go” model, which relied solely on fares for funding and most directly emulated the fully private transit system it replaced, had a very short lifespan in the United States. Though it met a similar fate in Detroit, Cleveland, and Seattle, this flawed management model is best exemplified by the struggling Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), created in 1945.

While the CTA initially benefited from tax exemption, it had no public funding to help it through farebox gaps. Steep ridership losses after World War II could only be addressed through reductions in service; these actions resulted in lost fare revenue and growing customer dissatisfaction. By the late 1950s, the CTA had ripped out the nation’s most impressive streetcar network to make way for buses. The managers cut service and deferred maintenance for decades. The state grudgingly stepped in to bail out the CTA in 1971 as complete collapse loomed. However, the limited regional taxes the state created did not right the ship, so the CTA became a poorly subsidized entity, requiring decades of additional cuts.

The “poorly subsidized” transit agency model dominated in the 1960s and 1970s, when the public sector across the nation finally absorbed the remnants of private operators. Politicians, more responsive to automobile owners than transit riders — a growing proportion of whom were Black and low-income — provided limited funding from local, regional, or state sources. Fares had to rise to pay the bills, and annual cuts made riding transit an expensive, inconvenient, and undesirable second choice. Federal subsidies beginning in the 1960s, primarily for capital funding, couldn’t make up the losses. Transit managers had no control over land use around their stations. So, even when they built high-quality rail, usually with federal support, they were unable to profit from strong ridership growth.

Agencies with the most extreme pandemic-related ridership losses, such as those in Chicago and Philadelphia, have been vulnerable for decades due to their poorly subsidized and inadequate funding models. Their systems were outdated, and long-suffering riders, who had endured cuts and poor maintenance long before the pandemic, fled to cars. Agency leaders annually travel to state capitals to beg for bailouts, while automobile infrastructure subsidies expand without controversy. As a result, transit is a marginal part of American life, while it has grown or stabilized in other parts of North America, Europe, and globally.

The few domestic exceptions to this sad story are the deeply subsidized agencies in cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco, where the government entered the transit business in the early twentieth century, when urbanites still rode public transit en masse. By taking over systems before they reached total collapse, the new agencies were able to maintain higher ridership and avoid having to start from scratch. Public managers developed express rail systems, such as the IND rail lines in New York or the Sunset Tunnel in San Francisco, that rivalled automobiles in speed. Managers in cities like these also benefited from dense urban cores that managed to avoid many of the parking requirements and highway construction that hollowed out other American cities.

This high-ridership, high-service model creates a virtuous cycle that maintains public and political support for subsidies. Boston’s first regional transit taxes, for instance, began in 1918, and government subsidies over the subsequent century evolved to fund the bulk of transit operations. In San Francisco, the city government directly contributed a total of $11 million (approximately $130 million in 2025 dollars) in property tax revenue to Muni operations between 1946 and 1956. Subsidies in cities like these sustained good service through the worst years.

Transit agencies in Boston, New York, and San Francisco continue to benefit from a range of robust local and state subsidies that enable them to operate at levels far beyond what fares can provide. These include annual provisions for local and state general revenue operations, capital subsidies, attractive bond financing, real estate taxes, sales taxes, mortgage transfer taxes, payroll taxes, parking fees, and tolls from bridges and tunnels. Agencies with strong local funding have leveraged federal capital grants since the 1960s to modernize and expand.

The contrast between the few winning and many losing transit systems is sharp today. In the wake of the 2020 pandemic, well-funded systems like New York City’s MTA have come back stronger thanks to service predictability, and even San Francisco’s Muni has made great strides despite having the worst-performing return-to-office rate in the nation. Riders are back in Boston despite embarrassing maintenance shortcomings. The “winners” in transit are legacy cities that can draw on deep subsidies, decades of goodwill, and transit-oriented development.

These conditions and politics aren’t easily reproducible, but they aren’t impossible to pursue elsewhere. West Coast cities, such as Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland, which experienced massive ridership losses, private transit collapse, and decades of weak public transit, have more recently developed robust local and regional funding models to expand rail and bus service.

Zoning reform, the elimination of minimum parking rules, and new transit-oriented development projects may generate a new generation of riders — and therefore more substantial political support for transit — in other cities. Context matters, too: traffic congestion, environmental concerns, and the rising costs of automobiles may drive future growth. Successful Bus Rapid Transit in cities like Richmond, VA, and Indianapolis, IN, has raised hopes of a high-quality, low-cost option that serves riders where they live.

A better understanding of the tactics and strategies employed by these rebounding transit cities, as well as the successful, deeply subsidized legacy cities, may help advocates elsewhere refine their transit visions.

Nicholas Dagen Bloom is a Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College and Acting Chair of the Department. His research examines the long-term planning outcomes in essential urban systems, including subsidized housing and mass transportation. He is the author, most recently, of the widely praised book, The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight (Chicago, 2023). Material for this article is largely drawn from the book.

Fund Transit, or Lose It. was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Anna Zivarts

The first time I met Krystal Monteros, she wore a black mask bedazzled with rhinestones for a press conference on a muddy stretch of exurban highway shoulder. It was February 2021. Krystal, a disabled advocate, had joined our coalition’s fight against Washington state’s business-as-usual investments in highway expansions while failing to meet basic mobility needs like accessible sidewalks.

Over the roar of traffic, Krystal shared her story: forced from her apartment when the landlord stopped taking Section 8, she began a nearly impossible hunt for a place that was affordable, wheelchair accessible, and near transit. She finally found an apartment with a bus stop nearby, but the path to the stop included traversing a 100-yard mud pit. She would often get stuck in her wheelchair just trying to reach the bus.

And it was not just that corner. All over her city, sidewalks ended in gravel, vanished into nothing, or were too broken to use, leaving her stranded again and again. Krystal’s experience is not unique. Ask any disabled nondriver, especially a wheelchair user, about the condition of their communities’ pedestrian infrastructure, and I guarantee you will hear similar horror stories.

Inaccessible sidewalks mean that people walking and rolling end up in the street with vehicles, a contributing factor in pedestrian deaths. Research by the University of Central Florida and the Florida DOT in 2022 reveals that the absence of a sidewalk can increase the risk of a pedestrian crash by 67%.

The immense unmet need for connected accessible networks to roll and walk will take political will and substantial financial investments to address, but it also helps to have a legal framework to ensure that when upgrades occur or new infrastructure is constructed, best practices are used. This is why when the Federal Register finally published an updated version of the Public Right of Way Accessibility Guidelines (PROWAG) in August 2023, advocates were hopeful.

PROWAG is a set of guidelines developed by the US Access Board to address access to sidewalks and streets, crosswalks, curb ramps, pedestrian signals, on-street parking, and other components of public right-of-way. The first PROWAG guidelines were published in 2005, and in 2013, the US Access Board proposed an update. It took another ten years for those proposed updates to be negotiated and finalized, but in August 2023, the updated PROWAG was finally published in the Federal Register.

In January 2025, the US Department of Transportation adopted those changes, meaning that these new standards must be applied to all transit projects in the US. These new requirements include truncated domes along loading platforms, wide and flat enough landing areas for boarding and deboarding passengers, and a “clear” area for mobility devices.

Unfortunately, the Department of Justice has not yet passed PROWAG, which means that new guidelines are unenforceable for non-transit projects. These guidelines include clarifications on where directional curb ramps are required, and what “triggers” them to be built or updated; when and how truncated domes should be used for crossings; crossing design and safety for large roundabout designs; accessible detours during construction projects requirements; and requirements for audible and tactile pedestrian signals when there are signalized crossings. The guidelines also include clarification around scoping and design for accessible parking spots and passenger loading zones.

There are also a lot of accessible design questions that have not yet been included in PROWAG’s design guidance, raising questions for many state and local DOTs across the country dealing with accessible bicycle infrastructure, floating bus stops, and multimodal space. Nor does it provide guidance on the tactile surfaces and directional indicators that many transit agencies and transportation departments are experimenting with, or how “tactile urbanism” projects like curb extensions and flex posts can be used to further accessibility for blind and low-vision pedestrians rather than complicating safe crossing strategies.

Even if PROWAG is fully implemented, and even if future versions do provide guidance for these more recent design treatments, most of these changes are the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Just because an eight-lane, high-speed road might have sidewalks, curb ramps, and accessible pedestrian signals does not mean that it is a comfortable or safe experience for pedestrians accessing a bus stop along that route. If we are serious about improving access, we need to normalize walking and rolling. We need to normalize transit use. We need to start building communities that reduce the need to drive long distances — which means rethinking land use and zoning policies that exile affordable housing on the outskirts, in locations with missing sidewalks and nonexistent transit. There is clearly plenty of work to do as we wait a little longer for PROWAG to be fully implemented.

As I was working on this article, I heard my friend Dorian Esper-Taylor had just been hired into a new ADA coordinator role at Pierce Transit, the transit agency that serves Krystal Monteros. Esper-Taylor has both physical and cognitive disabilities and was only recently able to get a driver’s license after spending most of his life reliant on transit and rides.

He also shared that Pierce Transit created this ADA coordinator position in part because they wanted to better understand the agency’s obligations under PROWAG — but it was not just limited to compliance.

“It is really critical they hired me, someone with lived experience,” Esper-Taylor explained. “A lot of the time, ADA coordinators are hired to check a box, but Pierce Transit wants to understand how they can serve our customers better both in the public right of way and in day-to-day interactions. Having someone with lived experience can help the agency understand the difference between compliance and accessibility.”

With Esper-Taylor at Pierce Transit, I can confidently say that PROWAG’s adoption by the DOT is creating positive and real impacts. However, as Esper-Taylor points out, when we think of accessibility as limited to guidelines and regulations, we fail to acknowledge the complex and very human needs of people trying to access our communities.

So in many ways, even though we do not yet have a set of comprehensive federally enforceable rules telling us how to make our streets and sidewalks accessible, there is still lots of work to can do: local, state and federal transportation departments and transit agencies need to hire disabled staff to ensure that our expertise is built into projects from the initial scoping and budgeting phases, just as Pierce Transit has done. Planning and engineering schools need to teach inclusive design, and also need to recruit and support disabled students who add invaluable lived experience to any project team. And we need advocates to fight for funding for sidewalk construction and repair, for safer crossings, for slower traffic speeds, and to stop funding highway expansions and road widening projects that only induce more driving and drive (literally) our communities deeper into car dependency.

Anna Zivarts is a visually impaired/low vision parent and author of When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024). Zivarts launched the Week Without Driving to bring attention to the needs of nondrivers and is launching the Nondriver Alliance to build transit-rider power across Washington State.

PROWAG Passed. Now What? was originally published in Vision Zero Cities Journal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.