Humans constantly perform risk compensation. We adjust behavior based on how safe we perceive an environment to be, often without realizing it.

• Eating lobster — am I allergic to shellfish?

• Singing in the rain — is anyone within earshot?

• Swimming alone in the ocean — can I see the shore?

• Riding a scooter in the street — is it a six-lane arterial or a quiet neighborhood block?

• Driving a car at 60 mph — am I on a highway or a beach?

Not every decision is life-or-death, but the pattern holds: perceived safety changes behavior. Risk compensation gets complicated fast, because humans are wonderfully irrational. But we’re consistently willing to push the edges of “risky” when something (speed, convenience, comfort) makes the risk feel worth taking.

Sam Peltzman, an economist at the University of Chicago, published research in 1975, arguing that automobile safety regulations were largely offset by riskier driving behavior. In other words, as cars had more safety features, people’s driving behavior would get worse because “my car is safe.”

Why do Danish cyclists ride so casually through traffic? Because they aren’t riding along the edge of a rooftop the way American cyclists often are. Infrastructure is everything. The Peltzman Effect is a reminder that street design is linked to traffic safety outcomes because people respond to how safe a space feels.

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Americans have been trained to expect hostile environments for biking, scootering, and skateboarding, and a remarkably pleasant environment inside a car. Comfortable seating, climate control, sound insulation. Driving feels so safe and frictionless that we compensate by doing things drivers a century ago wouldn’t dream of. Picture a man-on-the-street interview in 1922: “Good morning, sir, how often do you eat a freshly prepared meal while operating this jalopy? Never? What about trimming your beard?”

Peltzman was asking the questions every road safety advocate should ask:

• Why aren’t traffic deaths sharply declining every year as cars get safer?

• Does effortless steering encourage faster, less attentive driving?

• Do better shock absorbers make speeding over rough pavement feel safer than it is?

Each of these “improvements” can quietly produce a new kind of danger that’s harder to see because everything feels fine. In his book Foolproof, Greg Ip said “People feel safe, and the feeling of safety allowed danger to reemerge, often hidden from view.”

It’s tempting to ask the government to demand car makers be required to install stronger glass, more airbags, backup cameras, and collision alerts because they all feel like safety improvements. Those tools do have benefits, but they aren’t making us better drivers.

People are more careful when driving a car that feels a little dangerous. In the same way, a street that feels a little dangerous to speed on is a safer street. When you drive in an area with narrow lanes, parked cars close by, and people walking and riding bikes nearby, you naturally slow down and pay attention without being told to.

Just as our brains compensate for more safety features by taking more risk, they’ll compensate for perceived danger by guiding us to drive more carefully. Street design can adapt to human nature instead of fighting it. Make streets feel just risky enough to keep drivers on their best behavior, so that walking, biking, or rolling never feels like the riskier choice.

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The more time people spend in traffic, the more likely they are to be involved in a crash. Every day, around 100 Americans are killed in car traffic. That’s 100 families who receive the devastating news that their loved one will never return home.

As tragic as these deaths are on a personal level, there’s also a significant economic cost to consider. It sounds crass to put a dollar value on human life, but it might be an effective way to stop a dangerous transportation project before it gets past the drawing board.

How much are you worth? A family member, an employer, and an insurance agent will each have very different answers about your value as a human being in your current circumstances.

The cost of you not working

According to the National Safety Council, the total cost of motor vehicle deaths, injuries, and property damage is closing in on $500 billion per year. The Network of Employers for Traffic Safety found that motor vehicle crash injuries on- and off-the-job cost employers $72.2 billion in 2018 (their most recent study year).

On-the-job crashes cost employers $26,081 per crash. It costs them $66,119 per million vehicle-miles of travel and $78,418 per injury. And keep in mind this data is eight years old:

“Including insurance expenses, employer health care (medical) spending for motor vehicle crashes totaled $19 billion in 2018. Another $17 billion was spent on sick leave and life and disability insurance for crash victims. Protecting employees from motor vehicle crash injuries can be a valuable investment of time and resources.”

The cost of you not living

The US Department of Transportation (USDOT) says the value of a statistical life is roughly $10 million, although they suggest using a range that includes high and low values. That means that every traffic fatality prevented through a traffic calming project is worth $10 million in economic benefits. It’s an order-of-magnitude starting point, so don’t get hung up on precision. Take a look at this summary from USDOT’s chief economist if you’re curious about their methodology.

Count the costs

Let’s say your county is advertising a big road project to reduce congestion and improve safety. They’re using phrases like “corridor improvement” and “signal upgrades” in their marketing material.

But you can’t shake the curiosity of a roundabout instead of a massive intersection with dual left-turn lanes, more through lanes, and all the other status quo engineer fixings. You seem to recall a third of traffic crash deaths happen at signalized intersections.

Here’s some basic number crunching to compare your county’s hypothetical road project:

• USDOT reports that converting a signalized intersection to a roundabout can reduce fatal and injury crashes by 78%.

• The average number of fatalities and injuries at signalized intersections each year is around 7,500. That’s potentially over 5,800 lives saved or serious injuries prevented annually.

• The hypothetical corridor has a cluster of signalized intersections that account for 10 fatalities and 30 injuries in the last 10 years. Converting those signals to roundabouts could have saved 8 lives and 23 injuries. That’s $80,000,000 lost to fatalities and $1,803,614 lost to injuries.

Considering the value of human life might lead you to ask the project manager if those costs are part of the planning analysis. If not, why not? If yes, then why is this project moving forward?

The project manager might explain that the cost of building a roundabout is too high, something like $1 million for each intersection. Maybe it’s even [gasp!] $3 million. But if “expensive intersections” prevent just one fatal crash, the DOT has already more than made up for the cost in economic benefits, not to mention the immeasurable pain and suffering to families of victims.

The applications of these math exercises are endless, of course. This isn’t just about roundabouts. I’ve been working in the transportation planning and engineering industry since the 1990s, and I’ve rarely seen the costs of deaths and injuries incorporated in benefit/cost analysis.

The best way to reduce crash-related costs is to prevent crashes. Prevention strategies are abundant, but the willpower of decision-makers is rare. Make memes, make infographics, make videos. Focus some on an employer’s point of view and some on a local government point of view. Share them with any politician who wants to be a hero (i.e. every politician).

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Launched in January 2025, the program charges most drivers entering Manhattan’s core business district during peak hours. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) first comprehensive evaluation report, released in January 2026, shows clear success across mobility, environment, revenue, and equity metrics. The haters are flummoxed.

More Movement

Decongestion Pricing works by making drivers pay a fee towards the cost of clogging city streets. Even with a modest $9 in one of the world’s most congested areas, the results are impressive:

• Vehicle entries into the zone fell 11%, with more than 27 million fewer entries in the first year.

• Vehicle miles traveled inside the zone dropped 7.1%.

• Speeds rose 4.6% year-over-year during toll hours across the zone and key roadways. Morning peak speeds on major crossings into Manhattan (bridges and tunnels) improved an average of 23%, with standout gains like the Holland Tunnel at +51%.

• Trucks moved 5.6% faster.

Travel times became more reliable, without commuters or delivery trucks causing widespread spillover delays on surrounding corridors. Commuters who used to drive alone are shifting some trips to off-peak times, spreading demand and reducing the worst bottlenecks.

Real Benefits for Low-Income Residents

“But what about people who can’t afford a $9 toll” was one of the early questions. MTA’s Low-Income Discount Plan provides a 50% discount on peak tolls for eligible drivers with incomes ≤ $50,000 or in qualifying assistance programs. Residents inside the decongestion zone with incomes under $60,000 can claim a state tax credit covering tolls paid.

Most low- and moderate-income households in metro areas already depend on buses, trains, and walking rather than driving into downtown. Faster bus speeds, growing ridership, and revenue-funded upgrades deliver disproportionate benefits.

For families without cars (the majority in many urban low-income households) the program means quieter streets, safer crossings, fewer health impacts from pollution, and a better-funded transit network that connects them to jobs and opportunity.

Stronger Transit and Better Service

With fewer private vehicles clogging streets, transit riders benefit directly:

• MTA bus speeds in and around the decongestion zone increased 2.3%, reversing years of decline and delivering more reliable trips.

• Ridership grew on routes through the decongestion zone: subway trips +9%, local/select bus +8.4%, express bus +7.8%.

Revenue from the program is dedicated to transit capital improvements. That includes new electric buses, modern subway signals, station accessibility, structural repairs, and subway expansions. Charging a fee for contributing to congestion generates dedicated funds that keep the overall multimodal transportation system reliable.

Cleaner Air and Safer Streets

Reduced driving translates to environmental and safety gains:

• Greenhouse gas emissions in the zone fell ~6.1% because fewer people are driving themselves.

• Early air quality data shows stable or improving trends, with no major pollution spikes in surrounding areas. Some analyses noted double-digit drops in certain particulates inside the zone.

• Traffic crashes, injuries, and noise complaints have declined, improving quality of life for residents and workers.

A Model for American Cities

New York’s Decongestion Pricing shouldn’t be a one-off experiment. Any metropolitan area grappling with clogged streets now has hard evidence that the benefits of decongestion pricing arrive quickly, and public opinion can shift positively with results.

Other metros don’t need to copy NYC exactly. They can learn from its detailed monitoring, robust mitigation, and visible reinvestment of revenue. A smart pricing system works for people who need to drive themselves and transit riders whose buses move faster through downtown. What are the rest of us waiting for?

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There’s a better way, and it doesn’t require tearing up a single road.

Road diets repurpose space that already exists. By narrowing or reducing car lanes on overly wide streets, cities can carve out protected bike lanes, pedestrian refuges, and calmer traffic conditions—without major reconstruction. But here’s the real choice cities face: act now with quick-build methods to establish a safe network across dozens or even hundreds of blocks, or wait decades for funding to deliver premium concrete infrastructure on just a handful of blocks.

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This isn’t an argument against quality. Bike lanes protected by concrete or landscaped islands are excellent. But a gold-standard lane on one street does nothing for the person trying to bike safely ten blocks away. Coverage matters, and quick-build methods make coverage possible right now, within a single generation.

Capture the territory first, and harden it over time.

What Road Diets Do

A road diet reorganizes street space by narrowing and/or reducing regular car lanes to add protected bike lanes without major reconstruction. Road diets deliver measurable improvements beyond bike lanes. Federal Highway Administration and U.S. Department of Transportation data and studies show they benefit drivers, pedestrians, and the overall street environment:

Overall benefits. Road diets reduce total crashes by 19–47% on average when converting a four-lane undivided road to a three-lane configuration with a center turn lane. This includes reductions in rear-end, left-turn, and sideswipe crashes due to fewer conflict points and better separation of turning traffic. An analysis of 45 road diet sites in California, Iowa, and Washington found a 29% reduction in total crashes.

Driving benefits. Narrower lanes and fewer through lanes encourage more consistent speeds, reduce aggressive passing/weaving, and minimize “accordion” stop-and-go patterns. This can improve traffic flow for drivers in many cases, with dedicated turn lanes easing left-turn delays. Reduced speed differentials also lower crash severity.

Walking benefits. Fewer lanes to cross means shorter exposure to moving traffic and reduced crossing times. Road diets create opportunities for pedestrian refuge islands, which can cut pedestrian crashes by up to 46%. They also support curb extensions or wider sidewalks for added safety.

Two Types of Protection

The two main protection types below use the same amount of physical space.

Concrete-protected bike lanes

• Use raised concrete curbs or buffers (typically 6–8 inches high) for separation.

• More durable and effective at preventing vehicle incursions.

• Require more equipment, forming, pouring, and intersection work, so costs are higher.

Paint and flex-post bike lanes

• Use painted buffers with flexible delineator posts (usually spaced every 20 feet).

• Quick to install (often in weeks), inexpensive, and adjustable or removable if needed.

• Provide good visual and physical separation for lower speeds/traffic volumes.

NACTO is a great resource for illustrations like the ones below. This is just one example of how a wide, one-way street can be converted using a quick-build approach.

What Your Budget Can Buy

Below are three different budget examples to show the difference in coverage, based on recent project costs in places like Richmond, VA. These assume protected bike lanes on both sides of the street and a typical city block length of about 300 feet:

With a $50,000 budget:

• Concrete: 1–2 city blocks

• Paint & flex posts: 15–20 city blocks

With a $200,000 budget:

• Concrete: about 5 city blocks

• Paint & flex posts: about 50 city blocks

With a $1,000,000 budget:

• Concrete: roughly 20–40 city blocks

• Paint & flex posts: about 300–500 city blocks

Quick-build approaches enable generational improvements within a single generation. Premium-only strategies can take generations to achieve meaningful coverage.

Cities can start with paint and posts to establish a basic network quickly, demonstrate usage, and then harden high-priority segments with concrete as funding allows. This staged approach gets more streets safer for everyone sooner rather than delaying everything for premium designs.

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Few people would rally behind a campaign described as “we should control what other people can or can’t build,” or “let’s block certain people from living near us.” But that’s exactly what comes from typical zoning, permitting, and development rules. These local policies continue to get support from residents because the narratives are framed as “defending neighborhood character” or “protecting community identity.” Same policy, but without all the troublesome truth.

Reframing a narrative from oppression to protection doesn’t change the facts, it changes how people feel about them. Successful NIMBY activists are excellent marketers, whether they realize it or not. They lead with character, cohesion, heritage — appeals that feel collective and protective rather than selfish and restrictive. The frame doesn’t just soften opposition, it recruits people who might otherwise stay neutral.

This works because human psychology responds more powerfully to emotional and symbolic appeals than to literal descriptions. Negative frames highlight control, loss, or exclusion. Positive frames emphasize protection, belonging, and shared identity. In local politics, where home feels deeply personal, a protective-sounding narrative turns what could be seen as selfish restriction into principled guardianship.

In 2008, Shreddies was a square wheat cereal that had flagging sales. A young intern at an ad agency came up with an idea that added intangible value without changing the cereal recipe at all. Rotate the squares 45 degrees, and rebrand them as diamonds. Real people who thought they were part of focus groups described how the texture and taste of new Diamond Shreddies were better than the original squares. Sales surged for what became marketed as “45 more degrees of delicious.”

Red Bull’s early consumer tests essentially pitched people an odd taste in a tiny can at a high price. Rational analysis predicted failure, but the brand reframed every liability as a feature. The small can meant concentrated power, and like some type of medicine, the strange flavor told your brain that the drink was working. Red Bull is a multi-billion-dollar icon built entirely on perception.

Nothing changes but the story, and rejection becomes enthusiastic support. You might not like it, but that’s how our brains work.

Public policy rhetoric is no different. “Keep out new families” sounds harsh and even embarrassing, but “defending neighborhood character” sounds noble. The underlying policy is identical in either case, but the narrative frame transforms how people feel about the policy.

This framing advantage explains why housing shortages persist despite broad agreement that more supply is needed. NIMBY activists dominate the emotional, identity-based narrative. Pro-housing voices, by contrast, tend to default to terms that carry stigma or abstraction: “affordable housing,” “increased density,” and “upzoning.” These phrases describe policy accurately, but they don’t make anyone feel anything worth protecting. The asymmetry is stark when only one side in terms of values.

Until urbanists find equally resonant frames, the better marketers will keep winning. People who want to see their community become stronger might consider narratives like these:

• Legalize the kind of community where young families can put down roots

• More neighbors means more local businesses, more sidewalk conversations, more community.

• Build communities where teachers and nurses can live near the people they serve.

• Restore the kind of walkable, connected neighborhoods people love.

The facts don’t need to change, but the stories absolutely do. Reframing is perception magic.

Understanding NIMBY success as marketing, not merely as grassroots sentiment, is the first step toward opening the doors to new homes in communities that so desperately need affordable places to live. The goal isn’t to out-argue opponents on policy details, it’s to out-story them. Until pro-housing advocates learn to speak in the same emotional register, they’ll keep bringing a spreadsheet to a storytelling fight.

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Whether they arrive by bus, bike, car, or on foot, people across the political spectrum want the same thing: places that work for everyday life. Places that feel safe, accessible, and appealing for young and old alike.

Unlikely alliances are forming around this shared vision. People who call themselves conservatives, liberals, capitalists, and socialists are standing at the same town hall podiums, calling for changes that a decade ago would have been dismissed as fringe. The YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) movement is one of the easiest to put your finger on.

But there’s one topic that these groups will continue fighting over: economics. Not who has more money, but fundamentally different views on how an economy thrives or dies. There’s broad consensus on the ends (safe transportation, abundant housing, etc.) but the means will be hotly contested. And the stakes are high enough that it’s worth being honest about which approaches actually work.

Prices are signals

Without outside interference, a price tells builders, buyers, and investors where scarcity exists and what people are willing to trade for something they value. If everyone in a town has an apple tree, apples are cheap. If only one person does, apples are expensive.

As Nobel prize winner Friedrich Hayek put it, prices are “a system of telecommunications.” Prices aren’t good or bad, they’re indicators. Prices tell us something. When the price of small and medium-sized homes rises, it means there aren’t enough of them to meet demand.

When a government intervenes to put a limit on housing rent or freezes prices, they’re turning off the feedback loop that tells housing suppliers where housing opportunities exist. Rent control sounds compassionate, but the outcomes undermine the goal. It discourages new construction, incentivizes disinvestment by property owners, and traps existing tenants in place, all while locking out potential new renters. You can’t balance supply with demand when the pricing mechanism is disabled. You can’t build your way out of a crisis if builders can’t read the signals.

What history shows us

In the Soviet Union, state ownership of housing led to chronic shortages. Millions of people waited years for a place to live, crowded into communal apartments while black markets emerged for basic dwellings. In Cuba, government control left housing stock decaying, with families crammed into crumbling buildings amid perpetual repair backlogs. Even in more moderate cases like Sweden’s post-war rent controls, people sat on waiting lists because suppressed prices discouraged new construction and maintenance.

These weren’t failures of effort or intention. They were failures of feedback. Without profit motive and pricing discipline, resources drift, costs balloon, and production slows, because there’s no mechanism to punish bad decisions or reward good ones.

Socialist housing schemes tend to treat the problem as one of allocation rather than production. But you can’t allocate what hasn’t been built. And you can’t build at scale without market signals showing what to build, where, and for whom. You can’t central-plan your way into abundance. You can’t price-freeze your way into affordability.

If pricing is allowed to function naturally, housing providers will think carefully about what kinds of homes people actually want. Investors weigh risk. Builders decide whether it’s worth constructing a new duplex or renovating an old triplex. These distributed decisions made by people with real skin in the game respond to reality in real time in a way no central planner can replicate.

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The path forward

If you care about housing abundance, the good news is that the policy prescription is fairly clear: loosen the local land use rules that restrict what can be built and where. Reforming zoning, permitting by-right development, eliminating parking minimums, and legalizing a mixture of land uses in one neighborhood are levers that increase the supply of homes.

It doesn’t matter how pro-housing a land use policy sounds on paper if the underlying economics ignores supply and demand or artificially manipulates prices.

The urbanist coalition is broad, and that’s a strength. But if human flourishing is the goal, and we genuinely want a world where everyone has a decent place to live, then we can’t afford to ignore the economic fundamentals that determine whether housing gets built in the first place.

Let the market work. That’s how you get housing abundance.

Vision Zero is a road safety philosophy that originated in Sweden in the 1990s and has since been adopted by cities across the United States and Europe. Its premise is straightforward: traffic deaths and serious injuries are preventable and can therefore be eliminated. With the right street design, traffic enforcement, and public awareness, everyone can get around safely.

The problem is that severe crashes are a catastrophe so routine that it barely registers in the news cycle. Americans have been conditioned to think traffic violence is inevitable. One outcome of that conditioning is that people will campaign against transportation projects that improve safety. That’s right—against safety.

Here’s a social media comment someone made to me in response to redesigning a street to improve safety: “Members of the public communicate their risk tolerance through voting. It is the job of engineers to comply with that, not to second guess democratic choices.”

I get comments like that all the time, and it’s not just anonymous bots. Putting transportation safety projects up for a Yes/No vote reminds me of this quote that’s often attributed to Ben Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”

Oklahoma City’s Classen Boulevard is just one of a buhzillion examples. A group of influential residents convinced elected leaders that a safer street design was a dangerous idea.

Is democracy a trap?

We don’t vote on airplane safety. Imagine being handed a survey when you board a plane: Should the airline prioritize your arrival time or the structural integrity of the landing gear? That would be absurd. We trust aviation engineers to design safe aircraft. Passengers vote with their wallets, but no one gets a veto over whether safety is a priority in the first place.

Surface transportation doesn’t work this way. When a city proposes narrowing a street to reduce speeding, neighbors show up to meetings and call it an “attack on drivers.” When a protected bike lane is added to a corridor with a history of fatal crashes, it gets removed after community complaints. When a signal timing change is proposed to give pedestrians more crossing time, it gets killed because drivers worry about congestion. When illegal parking that blocks sightlines at intersections is enforced by police, the cries of over-reach flood city hall.

Safety improvements frequently die by popular vote and public pressure. Americans, given the choice between their personal convenience and other people’s safety, have repeatedly chosen convenience. This is the democracy trap: the idea that every engineering decision must survive a public referendum, including decisions that exist specifically to protect human life.

There’s a reflexive response to this argument that goes: “So you want to just override what people want by taking out a lane? That’s anti-democratic.” That framing means your life, your child’s life, your neighbor’s life, my life, are all subject to negotiation. It means a neighborhood miles away gets to weigh in on whether a dangerous intersection near your home gets fixed. It means the people who are most likely to be harmed — pedestrians, cyclists, children walking to school, elderly residents — are outvoted by people who are primarily concerned about shaving seconds off their drive no matter the cost to others.

We don’t hold referendums on building codes. We don’t ask neighborhoods to vote on whether restaurants should have to refrigerate meat. Some protections exist precisely because they shouldn’t be contingent on majority sentiment.

The same logic should apply to street design.

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Should we get the vote out of safety projects?

The binary Yes/No vote to allow or forbid safety improvements needs to be tossed out. That doesn’t mean the public should be shut out of transportation decisions, it means the kind of community engagement needs to change.

Right now, transportation agencies and local governments often ask the wrong question: Do you want this safety improvement? That question is almost designed to fail, because most people don’t understand how street design contributes to crashes. They don’t know that wider lanes encourage faster driving. They don’t know that a 20 mph impact is survivable for a pedestrian while a 40 mph impact usually isn’t. They don’t know that on-street parking sometimes makes a street safer and sometimes makes a street more dangerous.

City transportation systems are complicated. When you ask people an uninformed question, you get an uninformed answer.

The better approach is education first, options second. Explain what Vision Zero is. Show people the data on speed and crash severity. Help them understand what road diets, raised crosswalks, curb extensions, signal changes, and what each one accomplishes. Ask for input about the problems they’re experiencing:

• People drive too fast on this street.

• I wish my neighborhood was quieter.

• I can’t see around the corner when I turn.

• Nobody stops their car for me at the crosswalk.

• The light turns red before I can walk across the street.

• There’s no easy way for my kids to ride bikes to school.

• I have to walk 15 minutes to the nearest bus stop.

• If I miss the bus, I have to wait an hour for the next one.

That’s meaningful public engagement. It respects people’s intelligence while also respecting the reality that prioritizing human life is not up for debate.

Culture shift is necessary.

In the US alone, tens of thousands are killed in traffic crashes every year. Hundreds of thousands more experience life-altering injuries. The idea that driving fast and without friction is a kind of birthright is woven into our infrastructure, our zoning, our politics, and our sense of personal freedom. Changing safety culture is hard, but it has changed before, in other places, and it can change here.

We don’t ask voters to approve seatbelt laws every few years. We don’t hold referendums on speed limits every time someone complains. Engineers, pilots, air traffic controllers, and ground crews made aviation extraordinarily safe not by polling passengers, but by treating safety as a non-negotiable foundation, and then inviting the public to make choices within that foundation.

That’s the model for reaching Vision Zero. Not a top-down dismissal of community voices, but a reordering of the conversation: safety first, preferences second. Engage people early and help them visualize what’s possible, and for crying out loud, build safer transportation systems.

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I’m not singularly focused on vehicle size, but it’s a growing issue among people who already drive badly. The percentage of new vehicle sales/leases for pickup trucks, SUVs, and minivans continues to rise, and so will the debate over vehicle dimensions.

It’s not hard to find recent reports and commentary about the trade-offs associated with larger (and heavier) vehicles that are flooding the consumer market.

• Governors Highway Safety Association study: Larger vehicles like pickup trucks and SUVs are inherently more dangerous to pedestrians.

• University of Illinois at Springfield study: Kids are eight times more likely to be killed when hit by an SUV or light truck than kids who are struck by passenger cars.

• Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study: The reduced visibility in the front corners of large vehicles leads to a higher likelihood that those drivers will strike pedestrians and cyclists. Tall trucks and SUVs are 45% deadlier to pedestrians.

• Social media response: Sounds like Communist propaganda. I’m better dead than red.

I’m the type of person who hates extra layers of rules. I don’t want to control what people drive, but I remember the first time I drove a moving van with zero experience or training. I’d never driven something even remotely that large in an empty parking lot, let alone in mixed traffic or through a gas station.

Putting already careless and reckless drivers in large vehicles without any sort of demonstrated skill is asking for trouble.

I remember my late teens and early 20s, and I was definitely not thinking about people walking on sidewalks or crossing streets when I was zipping around corners. I was not thinking about families walking through parking lots when I was rushing to pick up a video rental and pizza.

Both of my kids are in their 20s, and several of their friends drive SUVs and tall trucks. It’s nerve racking.

Whatever their nose shape, pickups, SUVs and vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches are about 45% more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile. —Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

The largest trucks and buses in the world can be driven without incident. Driver behavior is the core problem. I have zero interest in banning trucks, SUVs, etc. My interest is human flourishing, which is why it’s important to talk about vehicle designs that are contributing to preventable injuries and deaths. We’ve got to be able to talk about how vehicle designs now make it much harder to see what’s happening outside the vehicle.

Here’s what Ford literature says about their big vehicles:

The 2024 F150 is equipped with a pedestrian detection system that uses sensors and cameras to identify pedestrians in the vehicle’s path. If a pedestrian is detected, the system can alert the driver and may even apply automatic emergency braking to help avoid or mitigate a collision.

Manufacturers want to sell you a truck so large that it needs a computer to see the people your own eyes can’t.

The real question isn’t whether you have the right to drive a big truck. You do. The question is whether we’re honest enough—as drivers, as parents, as neighbors—to acknowledge what the data shows and have difficult conversations about the dangers of large vehicles. Loving freedom and caring about the people around you aren’t in conflict.

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Productivity, and alleged lost productivity, has driven most of the conversation around traffic congestion and sprawl in the United States. While “time is money” is true in some contexts, it’s a terrible starting point for planning transportation systems.

Traffic congestion is a pervasive issue, whether it’s the destination (a downtown, a stadium, a new development) or the streets connecting to the destinations. In economic terms, congestion occurs when demand exceeds supply: not enough lanes for everyone trying to get somewhere at once. Your time is valuable and there are sometimes real consequences you experience when roads are clogged with cars. But it’s a serious mistake to overplay the economic claims.

Researchers tend to analyze traffic with the assumption that the “time is money” framework is completely valid. News outlets love it too because it produces reliable doom and gloom for clicks and views:

• Traffic congestion cost the US economy $74 billion in lost time last year.

• Drivers lost 102 hours stuck in traffic last year.

• The average American driver lost $771 in productivity sitting in traffic last year.

Of course, an industry that plans, engineers, and builds roads is eager to argue we need more roads. But the impulse to attach dollar values to time isn’t just self-serving industry spin. The World Economic Forum uses the same standard economic framework to justify transit lanes and bike lanes. Residents of cities and suburbs do benefit from multimodal infrastructure, but the economic framing around productivity is weak.

Economists treat humans as if we’re rational creatures who make decisions that can be predicted with basic math. An economist won’t calculate time with family, the choice to spend an extra hour at trivia night, homemade bread, journaling, or band practice. There isn’t a formula for why we make certain choices that lead to a higher quality of life. The productivity pressure that results creates fertile ground for anxiety, depression, and burnout. There’s a constant expectation to be “on,” connected, producing. Admitting you need a break reads as weakness. Too much productivity, paradoxically, undermines everything productivity promises. It’s not my musical genre, but I’m sure there’s a country song about a guy who tried so hard that he died too soon.

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Corporate HR departments tend to understand that a “machine” running without maintenance breaks down. They track the turnover, the disengagement, and the burnout. The human body and mind require regular maintenance: socializing, resting, walking with no particular destination, writing music, taking pictures, shooting hoops, and so on.

Public agencies are perpetually strapped for cash, but they continue spending depleted budgets on congestion relief that doesn’t work. Be deeply skeptical of any report on the economic costs of congestion because those studies reliably reduce humans to soulless economic units.

The same principle that makes road expansions fail — induced demand — explains why building for people works. Design for human flourishing and you’ll induce more of it. Build more lanes to make car travel easy, and you’ll get more car trips. Redesign a street network to make cycling easy, and you’ll get more bike trips.

Building a human-scale city means working towards outcomes that don’t show up on a productivity dashboard.

Before we were driving age, my sister and I were given our own cameras as Christmas gifts. We’d spend our own money buying and developing film. We basically documented our Gen X life: playing in the woods, sledding, beach trips, birthday parties, and even selfies. (I shot a 24-exposure roll of me stupidly rock climbing in regular clothes and treadless high-tops on Pikes Peak in Colorado.)

Years later, when I graduated college and started working on transportation studies, that same camera came with me. It seemed natural to shoot study areas before and after team meetings. When I’d put together slide shows to document the work we did, I kept noticing two distinct types of picture: the charming local ingredient (e.g. historic train caboose), and the oppressive transportation ingredient (e.g. wide arterial with turn lanes on all corners).

I’d look at those pictures and recall how dangerous it felt getting those shots to document the transportation “improvements.” My industry of highly educated professional planners and engineers was defining success in ways that didn’t make sense when you looked at the pictures I took of the study areas. Infrastructure projects were being executed in ways that prevented residents and visitors from taking a comfortable walk around town.

Plan for picture-worthy memories.

What is it about a place that makes people reach for a camera, hang out, spend money, and keep coming back? The status quo experts aren’t asking questions like that. Instead, they’re focused on technical requirements and processes that don’t consider what the average person is looking for: a bench in the shade, a fountain, or a plaza for people-watching.

Professionals create infrastructure that makes or breaks bonds between friends, families, and strangers. It’s paramount to understand the context of our work. Town planners and engineers have the opportunity to turn ordinary studies into recipes for creating places that are loveable, enticing, and even irresistible.

If you make decisions according to industry norms, your downtown will be easy to resist, because it’ll be entirely oriented around motor vehicle traffic rather than memorable human experiences. Regulations and permitting are anchored to car-oriented engineering, and that anchor weighs down our communities.

People across generations want walkable, bikeable downtowns. Millennials want them. Baby Boomers want them. Surveys consistently show communities of all types have an appetite for walkable, bikeable places. These are the places we see on family Slide Show Night or the modern social media equivalent.

Encourage your local leaders to plan infrastructure for slideshow-worthy human experiences. Consider how people of all ages are going to interact with each other and with their environment, and then (only then!) design the infrastructure. The internet is loaded with friendly people who would love to exchange ideas with you about irresistible places.

As legendary musician Frank Zappa said, progress requires deviation from the norm. That absolutely applies to planners and engineers working to create lovable, enticing downtowns.

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You’re stuck in traffic again, late for work, watching brake lights stretch to the horizon. According to the most recent data in the US (2024), here are some of the ways traffic jams are lowering the quality of life:

• Americans lost an average of an entire work week sitting in traffic.

• Commuter costs have surged 16% over the past five years to reach $269 billion annually.

• As congestion time for commuters has gone up 10% since 2019, it’s jumped 19% for trucks delivering all the products we buy.

• Stress increases in 80%, and aggressiveness increases in 52%.

• Long stretches in traffic leads to back pain, leg pain, and headaches.

There’s no one solution to dealing with crowds of people all trying to move in the same direction at the same time, but there is one opportunity staring us all in the face that hardly any commuter seems to notice—public transit.

If you’re like most drivers, public transit is for other people. But here’s the thing: investing in better buses and trains could make your commute faster and less stressful, without you ever setting foot on one. Maybe transit is for other people to ride, but it can help improve your car trips.

A surprisingly small drop in cars on the road—just 5-10%—can dramatically ease congestion, and public transit is one of the most effective ways to get that drop.

Congestion doesn’t increase linearly as the number of vehicles goes up. Streets handle car traffic just fine, until you cross a certain capacity threshold when everything quickly collapses. A transportation planning model developed in the 1960s quantifies this phenomenon. On a typical urban road running at 90% capacity:

• Baseline: About 10% delay over free-flow conditions

• 5% fewer cars (85% capacity): Delay drops by roughly 18%

• 10% fewer cars (81% capacity): Delay plummets by 35%

We’ve all experienced the exponential improvements in travel time from modest reductions in vehicle volume. If transit gives some commuters a viable alternative, your commute could save minutes each day without building a single new lane.

Transit helps people who don’t use transit.

A transportation system that offers reliable and convenient public transit isn’t forcing you out of your car. There’s only so much space on the roads, and one bus can hold 40 or 50 people, replacing that many cars. The extra-long buses with the bendy middle can replace 70 or 80 cars. One train can replace hundreds of cars.

Transit already saves Americans 865 million hours in traffic delays annually. In dense urban areas, the potential is even greater.

New York City’s decongestion zone offers a real-world example. By charging people who choose to drive into Manhattan’s core, the city reduced traffic volumes and delivered major wins: pollution fell, streets flowed better, and spillover congestion to outer areas decreased. And the people who drive themselves benefit from less crowded roads.

You might be thinking “I will never use public transit, so why should I fund something I won’t use?” Whether or not you use public transit, think of it as an investment that delivers:

• Better travel times because fewer people are driving at the same time.

• Fewer crashes because fewer people are driving at the same time.

• Less stress on you because fewer people are driving at the same time.

Transportation systems work better when people have real choices. You might always opt for driving yourself, and that’s fine. But when others have practical alternatives like buses, trains, and subways, your drive is improved. Remember, if just 5-10% of people aren’t driving themselves, your experience on the roads can be dramatically improved.

The best thing for drivers might be investing in something they’ll never personally use, and it might be the fastest way to improve quality of life.

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The key difference was that doctors were coming straight from performing autopsies to delivering babies, without washing their hands. They would dissect cadavers in the morning, then examine pregnant women in the afternoon with just a quick rinse. In 1847, Semmelweis instituted a policy requiring doctors to wash their hands with a chlorine solution between the autopsy room and the maternity ward. Death rates plummeted dramatically to around 1-2%.

Great news, right? But instead of celebration, the medical community mocked Semmelweis for his claim that handwashing was worth the time and effort. He was driven out of the profession, and the “childbed fever” deaths went back up. It took more than 50 years after his discovery for handwashing to go mainstream in hospitals.

Right now, in early 2026, state legislatures across the country are trying to outlaw a proven treatment for traffic injuries and fatalities.

Speed enforcement cameras are proven to reduce vehicle speeds and reduce crashes. According to the US Department of Transportation’s Proven Safety Countermeasures initiative, fixed speed cameras can cut crashes on urban principal arterials by up to 54% for all crashes and 47% for injury crashes.

For obvious reasons, school zones are the first place communities tend to install safety cameras. Speeding near schools creates unacceptable risks for kids crossing streets or waiting at bus stops.

Montgomery County, Maryland’s automated speed enforcement program found that cameras reduced the likelihood of a crash involving a fatality or incapacitating injury by 19%, decreased the chance of drivers exceeding the limit by more than 10 mph by up to 59%, and fostered long-term changes in driver behavior that substantially lowered overall deaths and injuries.

In New York City school zones, fixed cameras have reduced speeding by up to 63% during active enforcement hours. Many other case studies demonstrate similar outcomes. The bottom line is automated speed enforcement saves lives.

Pre-installation surveys at some Virginia schools revealed a whopping 95% of drivers were blazing through school zones at 10+ mph during arrival and dismissal. Nearly every driver was risking the lives of young kids, including parents. In Fairfax County, the safety cameras at Key Middle School issued 7,429 citations from August 2024 to May 2025. But after the cameras had been in place for a while, average speeds fell from 33.1 mph to 27.8 mph.

People need consequences for dangerous driving. Automated cameras deliver fair, unbiased enforcement where officers can’t patrol constantly, holding reckless drivers accountable in high-risk areas like school zones while freeing up police for other duties.

But while automated enforcement is saving lives, politicians in multiple states are advancing bills to ban, restrict, or phase out speed cameras.

• Virginia: SB 297 (introduced January 13, 2026) repeals the authority for law-enforcement agencies to use photo speed monitoring devices. It has been referred to the Senate Committee on Transportation and remains under consideration in the 2026 Regular Session.

• Arizona: SCR 1004 (advanced through the Senate Appropriations, Transportation, and Technology Committee in mid-January 2026) aims to place a statewide ban on photo radar enforcement (including speed cameras) on the November 2026 ballot for voter decision.

• Georgia: HB 225 repeals all laws authorizing automated traffic enforcement safety devices (speed cameras) in school zones, with an effective date of July 1, 2028, to phase out existing contracts. Reintroduced in the 2025-2026 Regular Session (published January 13, 2026), it previously passed the House 129-37 in 2025 but stalled in the Senate.

• Texas: Building on the state’s existing prohibitions on most fixed speed and red-light cameras (banned statewide in 2019), recent efforts like HB 2810 (introduced in the 2025 session but died) sought to expand bans to include portable devices enforcing speed limits. Similar measures could resurface in the 90th Legislature starting January 2027, driven by complaints about distractions from flashes and potential safety risks in local deployments.

• Minnesota: Rep. Greg Davids (R-Preston) announced in late 2025 that he would author a bill to ban automated speed cameras statewide, to be introduced in the 2026 legislative session. This follows Rochester’s City Council narrowly approving a request for a speed camera pilot program, highlighting opposition amid concerns over enforcement fairness and local authority.

Robust evidence from federal and local sources supports speed cameras as effective for slowing drivers and preventing crashes—especially in child-heavy school zones. It’s a shame to see politicians working to dismantle them.

Speed enforcement cameras save lives. The victims and survivors of traffic violence deserve better than the misguided bills that will directly lead to more life-altering crashes.

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In the 1950s, the Air Force designed cockpits for the average pilot by measuring thousands of pilots and calculating the average for ten key physical dimensions—height, arm length, torso size, etc. They assumed most pilots would be close to average in most dimensions.

When researchers actually checked, they found that out of 4,063 pilots, exactly zero were average on all ten dimensions. Not a single pilot fit the average they’d designed for. Even when they reduced it to just three dimensions, fewer than 5% of pilots were average on all three. By designing for the average, the Air Force created a cockpit that fit virtually no one well, and that had serious consequences for pilot performance and safety.

The solution might sound obvious: adjustable seats, adjustable pedals, adjustable controls, etc. The cockpit was fine once they designed for the range of human variation, rather than an average person that doesn’t exist.

The Statistical Ghost

Most American transportation systems suffer from the same fallacy. The car becomes treated as a prosthetic extension of the human body rather than what it actually is: a tool used for one segment of a multi-modal journey.

Designing for the average driver creates a phantom user—a person who materializes inside their vehicle, drives, and dematerializes upon arrival. This ghost never walks across a street, never uses a bicycle or scooter, never uses a downtown circulator bus, and only makes long trips. The ghost is capable of seeing and hearing everything, is always alert and sober, doesn’t experience chronic pain, doesn’t need a cane or wheelchair, isn’t young, and isn’t old. And of course if the imaginary average driver has to wait a few seconds behind other people, the economy will collapse.

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Even the most car-dependent commuter is a pedestrian at the beginning and end of every trip. They walk from their front door to their driveway, from a parking space to the office entrance, from their car across a parking lot into the grocery store. By optimizing transportation systems for the average motorist, we’re making significant portions of every trip uncomfortable or dangerous for everyone.

Like the Air Force’s phantom pilot, the average driver doesn’t exist. Designing for the statistical middle means designing well for none of them.

Mode-Switching Humans

Complete Streets is an engineering principle that acknowledges what actually exists: people switch modes throughout their day and even within single trips. The same person might drive to a park-and-ride, take transit downtown, walk to lunch, bike to a meeting, then return to the park-and-ride in an Uber.

The approach works. Over 1,700 American communities have adopted Complete Streets policies, and cities that implement them well see real results. Des Moines, Iowa went from being the 24th safest metro area for pedestrians to the 5th safest in just three years. Boulder, Colorado cut carbon emissions by half a million pounds annually as more people chose walking, biking, and transit.

Like the adjustable cockpit, Complete Streets accommodates the full range of users with protected bike lanes, accessible curb cuts, varied lane widths by context, pedestrian refuges, and transit priority lanes.

Still, progress on implementation remains frustratingly slow across the country. Despite widespread policy adoption, most local governments have struggled to translate policies into actual street improvements. Planning and designing transportation systems for real, mode-switching humans instead of phantom average drivers creates safer, healthier, more livable communities. The question isn’t whether Complete Streets works—it’s whether we’ll finally implement it at scale.

We can’t afford to maintain the roads we have, so why do we keep building more?

The Highway Trust Fund (HTF) is the primary federal mechanism for surface transportation. It receives revenue mainly from the federal fuel tax (18.4 cents per gallon on gasoline and 24.4 cents per gallon on diesel) plus taxes on tires, heavy vehicles, and some other sources. The fund has two accounts: (1) the Highway Account (road construction, maintenance, and other surface transportation projects), and (2) the much smaller Mass Transit Account.

Debates about how Americans should pay for roads are endless:

• General taxpayer funding, regardless of whether someone drives

• Per-mile charges (vehicle miles traveled fees)

• Weight-based fees, since heavy trucks and EVs cause disproportionate damage

• (and the less common) Full privatization, letting owners/operators set tolls and other forms of charging road users

But the debates often sidestep or ignore any sense of urgency. The fact is there’s a massive and growing funding gap. Under the current setup, we can’t afford to maintain what’s already been built, let alone pay to build and maintain new construction projects. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) sounds the alarm, even if it’s in dry, academic language:

Historically, most federal spending for highways has been paid for by revenues—largely from excise taxes on gasoline, diesel, and other motor fuels—that are credited to the highway account of the Highway Trust Fund. For more than two decades, those revenues have fallen short of federal spending on highways, prompting transfers from the Treasury’s general fund to the trust fund to make up the difference.

The Congressional Budget Office projects that balances in both the highway and transit accounts of the Highway Trust Fund will be exhausted in 2028. If the taxes that are currently credited to the trust fund remained in place and if funding for highway and transit programs increased annually at the rate of inflation, the shortfalls accumulated in the Highway Trust Fund’s highway and transit accounts from 2024 to 2033 would total $241 billion, according to CBO’s May 2023 baseline budget projections.

The HTF is in a state of bankruptcy, but we keep chugging along as if there’s no real financial urgency. For more than 20 years, taxpayers have been subsidizing roads because the people who use the roads don’t pay enough to cover the costs. The fund has avoided collapse only through repeated bailouts from the U.S. Treasury’s general fund totaling over $275 billion since the mid-2000s.

Tapping into the general fund might seem fair if all taxpayers put the same amount of wear and tear on the transportation system, but that’s obviously not the case.

About 19% of people aged 20-24 don’t have a driver’s license, and 30-40% of people over 85 don’t have a driver’s license. Not to mention the wide variety of driving contexts of people who are licensed, the types of vehicles used, and how often they contribute to clogged street networks during rush hours.

The underlying revenue problem has to be fixed, which means the debate has to go deeper, from “who should pay?” to “how do we make sure revenue covers road expenses?”

“Systemic problem” is an overused term in urbanism, but that’s the best way to describe the transportation funding debacle. Cars are more fuel efficient, EVs pay no fuel tax, and other taxes have stayed the same since the early 1990s. I’m not even arguing in favor of taxes, I’m simply drawing your attention to the obvious problem that there isn’t enough money to cover the costs of road maintenance or road expansion.

If we treated this issue like a household budget facing chronic overspending, the questions would be straightforward:

• How can we reduce expenses?

• How can we increase revenue?

• Is maintenance more important than new construction?

• If we can’t even afford to maintain the current system, how quickly can we halt new spending on expansions?

• What alternative mobility options (transit, biking, walking, ridesharing, remote work) can ease the burden using the infrastructure we already have?

This fiscal disaster isn’t abstract policy wonkery, it’s a hard constraint on what the U.S. can realistically build and maintain. Ignoring it risks more patchwork bailouts, more maintenance delays, and eventual service breakdowns. Bottom line, ask better questions and vigorously explore and debate the trade-offs.

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The cultural transformation happened because advocates sold a powerful vision of lifestyle upgrades, not through incremental tweaks but bold, aspirational narratives. They didn’t poll residents about whether they felt “interested but concerned” about automobiles. They showed them the future and made them want it.

Today’s planning profession has inverted that approach. Instead of selling a vision, we survey people about their willingness to adopt one. People self-identify based on current conditions, reflecting limited beliefs about what’s possible in America. The results are predictable.

In a bike-friendly California college city, a survey found 87% were either interested or confident in using a bicycle to get around. In a sprawly Texas city, only 54% were interested or confident in using a bike. A whopping 44% said no way they’d ride a bike.

Should we look at that Texas city and say “Well, 44% are okay with deadly streets”? No, of course not. You protect all human life. The goal is infrastructure that gives practical mobility options for everyone—even that 44% who say they won’t ever use a bicycle for transportation.

Children in Copenhagen today might think their surroundings have always been bike-friendly. But in the 1970s, Copenhagen looked like Anyplace, USA—streets clogged with cars, bike mode share down to just 10%.

The transformation sparked from the 1973 oil crisis, which led to car-free Sundays, public protests against motorways, and a gradual shift back to cycling through dedicated infrastructure investments. It didn’t happen by surveying Danes about their comfort level with cycling.

We shouldn’t be aiming to nudge a few percentage points in public opinion. Our goal should be to make freedom of mobility so compelling that people demand it. Help people visualize (and demand!) a future where kids can bike to school, seniors can walk to the store, couples can bike to dinner, etc.

How great would it be if fifty years from now, North American kids think their cities have always been bike-friendly.

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The Takings Clause is a part of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and it says that if the government wants to take away someone’s private property, they have to do it in a way that’s fair. Most of us grew up hearing adults say that life isn’t fair. And they’re right—it isn’t. Neither is an authority forcing you to give up your property for whatever they think is fair.

Courts have said the government can take your property if it’s for something that benefits the public, like building a road or a park. As if nothing go wrong with that.

How did we get here?!

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the British government had a policy of taking land from private citizens and giving it to favored individuals or companies for economic development. This practice, known as eminent domain or expropriation, was a major source of frustration for colonists, who were aghast at the violation of their property rights.

The Proclamation of 1763 forbade American colonists from settling west of the Appalachian Mountains, because British officials might move to the colonies and want some land. This policy prevented colonists from using the land for farming or hunting, and was one of the factors that contributed to the war for independence.

The overreach by a central authority was fresh in Americans’ minds when the Virginia Declaration of Rights was adopted in 1776. It’s one of this country’s earliest documents to recognize the importance of property rights. The Declaration said “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which... the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Property rights are essential to individual liberty and should be protected by the government, but there was always a fanbase for central power. During the debates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, there was significant discussion about the need to protect private property rights. James Madison argued that without such protections, the government could seize property at will, which would be a threat to individual liberty. Madison proposed a protection of property rights, which eventually became the Fifth Amendment.

This was only a decade after Americans experienced the widespread abuse of eminent domain that some of their new leaders were saying “ackshully, taking your property by force is for the greater good.”

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In the early 19th century, the Supreme Court ruled that private property could only be taken for public use and with just compensation. This principle was reaffirmed in several cases, including Pumpelly v. Green Bay Co. (1872) and Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Co. v. City of Chicago (1897).

Later decisions expanded on this idea, such as the landmark case of Kelo v. City of New London in 2005, which held that the government could take private property for economic development purposes.

Kelo v. The Man

• In 2005, the Supreme Court ruled the government could use its power to take Susette Kelo’s private property for economic development purposes, even though her property was not blighted or in disrepair. The city where she lived wanted Pfizer to have her property along with a bunch of other properties, because Pfizer would generate more tax revenue than a lowly nurse and other working class households.

• The homeowners in the affected area argued that this was an improper use of eminent domain, but the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the city, claiming the taking was permissible because it was part of a comprehensive redevelopment plan to create jobs and increase tax revenue.

• Some states were angered enough to pass laws limiting the use of eminent domain.

• Pfizer didn’t even end up building what they promised, and the land ended up being sold for people not named Susette Kelo to live on Susette Kelo’s old property.

Why do I vent about this?

Because I want you to wrestle with the idea that eminent domain—taking property by force—is a power move. I want you to feel something between discomfort and rage when you hear about people being forced to let a road widening take over their front yard, or being forced to move out of their home to make way for some corporation.

We’ve gotten to a place in modern culture where the press equates “property rights” and “right wing extremist,” sending a not-so-subtle message to readers or viewers that you don’t want to side with those people. But property rights isn’t a right/left or red/blue issue. My most left-wing friend should be a staunch property rights advocate to hold big corporate power at bay.

The British Empire was hardly a left-wing operative, taking what they wanted when they wanted in the 1700s. And the City of New London was definitely not pushing a working-class agenda as it kicked out homeowners to make way for Big Pharma in the early 2000s.

If you shrug at a government having the power to take stuff just because, then all your other rights and protections are up for grabs.

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This notorious escapade has been shared in quite a few essays and books about corporate and organizational management because it’s such a memorable example of British thinker Stafford Beer’s phrase: “The purpose of a system is what it does.” Or, in shorthand, POSIWID. The gist is that we shouldn’t judge a system’s purpose by the intentions of its designers or operators, but by its actual results. No single person is held accountable and the rules roll on.

For over a century, zoning has been the backbone of American city planning, ostensibly designed to create orderly, safe, and efficient communities by separating incompatible land uses—like keeping factories away from homes and schools. Zoning laws emerged in the early 20th century as a response to the chaos of rapid industrialization. The first comprehensive zoning ordinance in the U.S. was New York’s 1916 code, which aimed to prevent skyscrapers from blotting out sunlight and to curb the “blight” of mixed-use neighborhoods.

On paper, it’s a rational framework: residential zones for quiet living, commercial zones for business, industrial zones for manufacturing. But if you agree that the purpose of a system is what it does, you’ve got to consider what zoning does:

• Housing scarcity and soaring housing expenses.

• Severely limited property rights.

• Car dependency (not to be confused with car use).

• A lack of walkability in everyday life.

• Accelerated environmental degradation through sprawl.

• Long-term municipal insolvency and crumbling infrastructure.

• The “Growth Ponzi Scheme” of new development paying for old debt.

• Negative ROI land use that drains local government coffers.

• Stifled incrementalism that prevents neighborhoods from evolving.

• Deepening economic segregation by design.

• Social isolation caused by a lack of communal “third places.”

• The visual monotony of a cookie-cutter landscape that impacts humans in psychological ways that we’re only recently starting to understand.

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Across the country, local zoning codes operate with blind, mechanical efficiency.

For over 100 years, well-meaning residents hold to the promise that the strict land use regulations as we know them will protect property values and “neighborhood character.” Even if those things happen, the many other outcomes can’t be ignored. We’re desperately missing conversations and debates about trade-offs.

Without serious reforms, the POSIWID story of zoning deserves to remain in the same category as the Dutch health department’s meat grinder.

Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher whose groundbreaking 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is credited with bringing the term “paradigm shift” to pop culture. Kuhn described how scientific communities stick to established paradigms, even as evidence of their limitations mounted. Widely accepted paradigms for understanding and interpreting knowledge don’t crumble under the weight of mere data. Instead, they tend to persist until a crisis emerges—when anomalies become so disruptive that a shift to a new paradigm is unavoidable.

Zoning was established in the early 20th century as a way to protect homeowners from unwanted industrial developments nearby. It was pitched as a way to separate heavy industry from residential neighborhoods, which made practical sense at a time when factories polluted neighborhoods. Early industrial cities were notorious for their noise, filth, sickness, and all around misery.

The wealthy had options, so they’d put some distance between themselves and factory life. You can imagine that the elite would want to guarantee never having to deal with the industrial riff-raff. Zoning would give such guarantees. You can also imagine that social workers and other empaths would want to guarantee the poor and middle class had the same separation from the dirty parts of a city as the elites had. Zoning would give such guarantees.

But zoning wasn’t used merely as a tool to separate heavy industry from residential zones. Local power brokers segregated all the land uses—separating single-family homes from apartments, office buildings from retail, residential from retail, and so on. The regulatory framework became so normalized in America that it’s hard for people to imagine life without it: “Without zoning, my neighbor might build a strip club and a paper mill.”

Normal Science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all of their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary, at considerable cost.

Thomas Kuhn

As Kuhn would’ve predicted, the normal science of zoning has produced a number of “anomalies” that increasingly contradict zoning’s purported benefits:

1. Housing Expense and Shortage: By restricting a variety of housing sizes and types, zoning codes limit the supply of housing, driving up prices and making places unaffordable for many residents.

2. Environmental Degradation: Zoning encourages urban sprawl by pushing residential development outward into zones that are only practically reachable by car. Zoning codes create low-density, car-centric development, at great expense to our natural environment.

3. Social Segregation: Zoning is a devilish segregation tool. Throughout pre-zoning history, cities had opportunities for people from all walks of life, social standing, and economic standing.

4. Economic Stagnation and Opportunity Costs: By prohibiting a mixture of land uses in a neighborhood, zoning limits economic activity, making it difficult for small businesses to thrive in residential neighborhoods or for residents to access amenities without a car.

5. Car Dependency. Neighborhood pharmacies are outlawed, so you drive to CVS just to get a birthday card. Neighborhood restaurants are outlawed, so you drive your kids to Chick-Fil-A. Neighborhood salons are outlawed, so you drive to get your nails done.

Changing a paradigm isn’t just about accepting new facts, it’s about challenging an entire worldview, and that’s something humans are generally reluctant to do. And in spite of all its harms, the zoning paradigm remains resilient among the experts because:

• Planning departments are organized around zoning administration.

• Professional credentialing still lionizes zoning codes.

• University programs train students to use zoning for the greater good.

• Thousands of attorneys specialize in zoning law.

• Lobbying pressure remains intense from industries that benefit from strict land use policies.

There are powerful incentives to preserve the system, even among professionals who privately acknowledge its failures. Kuhn observed that paradigms persist not because they work well, but because entire careers, departments, and professional identities are built upon them. Challenging zoning means threatening not just an idea, but the livelihoods and expertise of countless people.

Much like a fundamentalist belief system, zoning has developed a language of justification that makes it difficult to challenge. Clever defenses like “preserving neighborhood character” or “protecting property values” are invoked to defend restrictive zoning policies, even when these policies have been proven to harm the vast majority of people. Zoning defenders use language not to inform, but to deflect and manipulate.

Kuhn would say a paradigm shift requires a moment of crisis, a point at which the old framework can no longer explain or accommodate the reality of a situation. I think we’re getting there with zoning, because the accumulating anomalies are becoming too severe to ignore.

Scientific revolutions reshaped how we understand the world. A zoning revolution has the potential to transform our small towns, big cities, and sprawling suburbs in positive ways we have yet to fully imagine. We have 100 years of evidence that zoning has brought more harm than good.

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Roundabouts are one of the many Planner vs. Engineer debates, and it happens to be a very important issue where emotions cloud good judgment. As much as I criticize the engineering profession, they are generally correct on this one. But that wasn’t always the case.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the status quo transportation engineering community believed wholeheartedly that roundabouts were not only not good, but were silly, dangerous, would lead to gridlock, couldn’t be understood by American drivers, etc. The primary reasons for opposing roundabouts and defending traffic lights (the typical alternative) were speed and delay. That is, if an intersection design slowed down vehicles, that was bad. If there was real or perceived delay for drivers at intersections, that was bad.

The status quo certified planners, spotting a thing engineers hated, praised the thing. Their reasons for supporting roundabouts included their function as a community gateway, a traffic calming feature, an environmentally sustainable design, and something that wasn’t so car-oriented like seemingly everything else dreamt up by traffic engineers.

But in the 2000s, a fringe group of practitioners and academics who were claiming that roundabouts were [gasp!] actually good started growing in numbers. Case studies were repeatedly finding the same results: roundabouts dramatically reduced vehicle speeds, reduced crashes, maintained or reduced overall travel time, and made it safer for pedestrians to cross the street.

When the engineers became pro-roundabout, the planners became roundabout skeptics or flat out anti-roundabout. I lived through this transition. It was wild to behold.

Modern roundabouts have been proven to be the safest form of at-grade intersection, and the most common claim from skeptics is “but cars don’t stop at roundabouts, so they must be dangerous for pedestrians.” That seems like a reasonable explanation, but it’s wrong.

There are two reasons pedestrians are safer at roundabouts: slower vehicle speeds and shorter crossing distances.

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Speed is the difference between life and death

Speed is the fundamental factor in crash severity. The difference between a person struck at 45 MPH (the standard American arterial speed limit) and one struck at 20 MPH (the standard design speed at a roundabout) is the difference between death and life.

Roundabout geometry forces drivers to slow down. Even on a high-speed road, roundabouts are designed to slow approaching vehicles. Once drivers enter the circle itself, speeds drop even lower, giving them ample time to yield to people in crosswalks on the exit leg. The physical design of the roundabout makes speeding through nearly impossible. When drivers are moving slowly, they have time to see pedestrians, react, and stop.

Shorter crossings are safer crossings

Multi-lane roads get even wider at intersections, with multiple left-turn and right-turn lanes added to process vehicle queues during each signal cycle. Without these additional lanes, traffic would back up to adjacent signals. For pedestrians, this means crossing not just two lanes but potentially six or more, with threats coming from all directions. The longer pedestrians remain exposed to moving vehicles, the greater their risk.

Turn lanes extend hundreds of feet before intersections, meaning a series of signalized intersections produces bloated corridors between them. These wide corridors invite speeding, and speeding leads to more severe crashes. Roundabouts eliminate the need for long turn lanes in every direction. Without them, the corridors between intersections can remain narrow, which naturally discourages high speeds throughout the entire roadway network, not just at intersections.

Most modern roundabouts are designed so pedestrians never cross more than one or two lanes at a time without reaching a refuge island. The splitter islands that separate entering and exiting traffic create natural stopping points, breaking what would be a long, dangerous crossing into manageable segments.

Retrofitting suburbia

In the United States, the greatest life-saving potential for roundabouts lies in sprawling suburban areas along multi-lane arterials—precisely the environments where traffic engineers were trained to maximize vehicle flow at the expense of all else. These are the locations where pedestrians face the longest crossing distances, the highest speeds, and the most complex traffic movements.

On tight urban streets with traditional grid patterns, signalized intersections can work well for pedestrians. But in suburban contexts, where intersections are spaced far apart and roads are designed for high speeds, roundabouts offer a proven solution for protecting vulnerable road users.

As a certified planner who has worked as an engineer for many years, I don’t care which team gets the bragging rights for promoting pedestrian safety. I only care that we stop designing intersections and corridors in ways that are proven to be deadly. In suburbia especially, every new or retrofitted multi-lane arterial crossing should default to a roundabout.

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Since I rant so often about Planning Inc., you might assume I have a planning degree and came up as a local government planner of some type. That’s not the case. I was working towards purchasing an engineering degree in college, so I wasn’t exposed to the planning industry in school at all.

It wasn’t until several years into my career when I took the path towards certified planner instead of licensed engineer that I learned about the many fascinating characters who were held in high regard by Planning Inc. at that time. had planning awards named after them, magazine articles celebrating them, and books written by and about them.

One of the most curious paradoxes I discovered was that the most celebrated heroes aren’t products of the professional planning establishment. The individuals who were recognized by the status quo as having done the most to humanize public spaces, challenge dysfunctional orthodoxy, and promote timeless principles of good design arrived at their insights in spite of the status quo. They learned by watching people in streets and squares, by studying beautiful old places that somehow still worked, and by applying basic economic reasoning.

• Jane Jacobs, a journalist with no formal design training whatsoever, demolished the intellectual foundations of mid-century urban renewal with a book written from her Greenwich Village stoop.

• William H. Whyte, a sociologist and magazine editor, put movie cameras on tripods in Midtown Manhattan and simply counted how people actually used public space.

• Kevin Lynch learned about mental maps by asking ordinary citizens to draw their cities from memory.

• Donald Appleyard measured the devastating social effects of traffic-dominated streets.

• Allan Jacobs walked the world’s great streets and published the photographs so the rest of us could see what works.

• Jan Gehl spent decades counting cyclists and lingerers in Copenhagen before the planning profession noticed that public life could be studied empirically.

• Donald Shoup, an economist, demonstrated that “free” parking is anything but.

• Léon Krier drew polemical plans for walkable, traditional cities while the planning mainstream embraced the superblock.

• Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk took the ideas of those predecessors and turned them into buildable codes and real towns. (I’m not being fair by leaving out Stefanos Polyzoides and all the other great people who helped launch Congress for the New Urbanism.)

Jane Jacobs and William Whyte were the first to take me down the rabbit hole of how to create great places for human flourishing. But it was wild to me that as I was making my way through Planning Inc.’s catalog of greatness, one after the other was an example of rebelling against the very doctrines that Planning Inc. spent the 20th century institutionalizing.

The heroes fought against the separation of land uses, the subordination of streets to parking and traffic flow, the obsession with bland open space at the expense of enclosure and sociability, and so many other factors that deliver a miserable built environment.

It’s also true with the more recent reform movements:

• YIMBY movement exposing the scarcity mindset of NIMBY activism and promoting a path to abundant housing,

• Strong Towns chapters promoting financial solvency and incremental growth (see ),

• Parking Reform Network illuminating the disastrous consequences of government-mandated parking minimums and sharing ideas for tapping into valuable curbs.

It’s encouraging that so many professional planners are active participants in these movements and celebrate the heroes I listed above. But it’s disappointing that the intellectual energy is still coming from outside the establishment or from planners who first had to unlearn much of what they were taught.

If I was part of American Planning Association leadership, I’d have my members doing some serious soul-searching about why this is. I’d also talk openly about it and encourage vigorous debate.

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