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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In Greek mythology, the god Dionysus granted King Midas his wish for the power to turn everything he touched to gold. Midas revels in the effortless wealth—objects, furniture, and even the ground beneath him turn to gold. The Midas touch was great right up until he wanted to eat or drink or just hug his daughter.

There’s a King Midas aspect to motor vehicles, this technological gift that promised and delivered abundance until it became a curse.

Personal cars expanded opportunities like never before. Post-World War II America saw vehicle ownership explode from 25 million in 1945 to over 100 million by 1970. Having access to a family car made far-flung places viable for living, working, and playing, fueling a middle-class expansion across previously rural areas. An entire car-oriented ecosystem emerged.

The promise of freedom and wealth held until cities and suburbs began optimizing for vehicle throughput instead of local access and mobility.

Like Midas discovering he couldn’t eat golden food, we’re discovering that car-dependent places can’t sustain the human activities they were meant to enable. The same infrastructure that promised connection now isolates. What began as freedom morphed into obligation.

American cities now dedicate somewhere between one-third and one-half of their land area to streets, parking lots, and garages. In downtown Los Angeles, parking occupies more space than all the buildings combined. We’ve paved over so many of the destinations cars were supposed to help us reach.

The economic costs of car dependency are brutal at the household level. Transportation often ranks as the second-largest expense after housing, consuming up to 30 percent of household income. The “drive until you qualify” phenomenon pushed families toward affordable suburban housing, only to burden them with commutes that devoured time and money. Car loan defaults have jumped 50% in the last 15 years, and in 2024, car repossessions hit the highest number since 2009.

Meanwhile, the infrastructure itself demands constant funding. Roads, bridges, and parking structures deteriorate faster than municipalities can maintain them. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates a multi-trillion-dollar backlog in deferred transportation maintenance. Every lane-mile of road requires ongoing investment that property taxes in sprawling development patterns often can’t support.

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The Isolation Paradox

Car dependence promised mobility but delivered immobility for anyone without a vehicle or unable to drive. Children lost independence because nothing is within walking or biking distance, and the elderly face isolation when they can no longer drive safely. People with disabilities, those who can’t afford vehicles, and those who simply prefer not to drive find themselves trapped in places without practical mobility alternatives.

The distances themselves became barriers. When corner stores give way to big-box retailers miles away, when schools require driving rather than walking, when social spaces exist only as isolated destinations rather than chance encounters, community itself attenuates. Neighbors pass each other at 45 MPH on 6-lane arterials rather than 3 MPH on sidewalks. The “third places” that anchored community life (cafés, parks, plazas, etc.) disappeared into the car-oriented strip malls and shopping centers.

The Health Toll

The King Midas curse extends to our bodies. Vehicle-oriented development correlates strongly with obesity, cardiovascular disease, and respiratory illness. When walking becomes impractical and driving becomes mandatory, physical activity disappears from daily routines. Air pollution from vehicles contributes to asthma, especially in children living near major roadways.

Traffic crashes kill 40,000 Americans annually, and injure hundreds of thousands more. Larger vehicles, faster vehicles, and inattentive driving create an increasingly deadly environment.

Breaking the Curse

King Midas eventually begged Dionysus to reverse his wish, washing away the golden touch. Like Midas, our situation is fixable.

People are rediscovering that neighborhoods can be planned and designed at a human scale that welcomes motor vehicles without squashing the good life. Zoning reforms that allow mixed-use development are the single most important starting point. When someone can walk to a store, bike to work, or take transit to social activities, the car returns to being a useful tool rather than an iron requirement. But that only happens if a local government legalizes a variety of land uses in neighborhoods.

Cars are fantastic inventions. The Midas predicament emerges when we optimize everything around them, when we mandate their use, when we eliminate alternatives. A city where people can choose to drive, walk, bike, or take transit according to their needs is fundamentally different from one where driving is the only option.

The Midas story ends with the king learning wisdom through suffering. We’ve suffered quite a bit from the built environment. But even in real life, things can get better in the end.

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You may have heard the term “Vision Zero” in local political campaigns or public safety PSAs. Vision Zero is a strategy to eliminate all severe crashes. It’s not just a marketing campaign, it’s an approach to road safety that begins with this basic understanding: severe crashes are preventable.

The status quo believes the fantasy that traffic violence is inevitable. That there’s nothing we can do. The truth is, we can prevent severe crashes.

Every day, another 100 families are grieving the loss of a loved one. Every day, thousands of families are dealing with medical bills, physical therapy, loss of work, loss of mobility.

Vision Zero is the strategy to end this pain and suffering. It’s a wildly different approach from the status quo in two major ways:

1. First, people make mistakes. A transportation system needs to be designed so that when people do make mistakes, it doesn’t result in a death or serious injury.

2. Second, safety is multi-disciplinary. People are influenced by more than just street design. In Richmond, 1 in 12 residents is dealing with a combination of substance abuse and mental health disorders. And then they get behind the wheel of a car.

In other words, Vision Zero is a practical strategy to save lives that’s based on understanding human nature. So if we know how to fix this crisis, why isn’t culture changing? It’s because the average person needs to hear the personal stories about the victims of traffic violence.

Any historian or psychologist will tell you that facts alone don’t move humans to action. Emotion moves us. It’s hard to admit, because on some level we all want to think of ourselves as rational and logical creatures. But it’s when we get emotionally attached to something that we take action.

That might sound overwhelming, but let me give you an example of how culture changed just in my lifetime, and not at all based on logic.

In a 10-year period, about 13 Americans died from peanut allergies. Each one of those cases was tragic. But in that same 10-year period, over 400,000 Americans were killed in traffic crashes. And that’s not even counting the millions injured.

13 deaths from a chemical reaction in the body versus 400,000 deaths from preventable crashes.

An entire generation of kids was led to believe that peanuts might send one of their classmates to the hospital. The peanut became a boogeyman in neighborhoods across the country. Now you can’t get a bag of peanuts near a school, or a soccer game, or a birthday party, or even on some airplanes.

In a very short period of time, America mobilized for a Peanut Vision Zero.

I’m telling you this not to mock people who have to be careful around nuts, but to tell you our culture is capable of radical change in a short period of time.

So when it comes to road safety:

• We have the data explaining what’s causing tragedies.

• We have the engineering and enforcement solutions to prevent tragedies.

• We can change culture. We can stop the tragedies.

Whatever your background, your economic status, your education level, your job status—you’re a human being who interacts with other human beings. Get people emotionally connected to the impacts of traffic violence. There are many ways you might choose to do that. Maybe it’s playing a short video at a PTA meeting of a heartbroken parent talking about their child who was lost in a preventable crash. Maybe it’s inviting a survivor who’s dealing with life-altering injuries to speak at a local forum.

No severe crash is acceptable. If you truly believe that, you’ll drive carefully and you’ll be the person in your friend group who’s always pressing on others to drive carefully.

We’ve seen culture change in small and large ways. We can do this together. We can reduce life-altering crashes down to zero.

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There’s plenty to learn from the giant leaps in art and science that will improve your urbanism advocacy. Happy, healthy communities aren’t made from being stuck in a bygone era.

Impressionist painters didn’t discover fog. It was always there, but it wasn’t something people were discussing much in the early 19th century leading up to the impressionists and tonalists. Each of those artistic movements created illusions of reality with familiar scenes. James McNeill Whistler was an influential figure and one of the original tonalists. Here’s what he had to say about finding inspiration from natural elements previously left off the canvas:

“And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us—then the wayfarer hastens home; the working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artists alone.”

Claude Monet is probably the most famous of the impressionist bunch. Monet’s focus shifted from clear objects to the effects of atmosphere and light, after he stumbled into the London fog. Critics would argue about deeper meanings, whether impressionism was creating a dreamy or nightmarish mood for London, angelic or demonic. But the meaning (or lack thereof) isn’t what got me thinking about these 19th century art movements. It’s the idea that something was always there and it took artists to draw the attention of normies to it.

300 years before Monet and Whistler, Nicolaus Copernicus was making the shocking case that Earth and other planets revolved around the sun, rather than Earth being the center of everything. He didn’t get everything right. Copernicus had no concept of gravity, so he wasn’t clear on how the celestial blobs swirled around each other or why they all orbited the sun. Not many decades later, Isaac Newton watched an apple fall out of a tree. He organized his math homework and philosophy into laws of gravity that were eventually used to describe planetary motion.

In hindsight, it seems almost childish to talk about major leaps in art and science because the advancements seem so obvious. Of course a foggy picture with shadowy figures in motion makes me feel uneasy. Of course gravity makes things fall to the ground.

Generations ahead of us will probably read stories about our era that begin like this: “Once upon a terrible time, America’s most educated city planners were convinced that cities optimized for motor vehicle traffic would be the safest and most prosperous.” Things that don’t even cross our minds today as possible outcomes will be boring in their obviousness later.

Consider space:

• In 1960, science fiction was the only reasonable place for stories about a group of humans traveling beyond our atmosphere, circling the globe, and returning safely in their ship.

• In 1961, Project Mercury launched multiple such voyages, making all sorts of discoveries about how people and machines function in weightless environments..

Consider music:

• In 1965, anyone interested in hearing a new band had to either listen live to one of a few radio stations, or suffer through a friend’s attempt to sing.

• In 1966, the portable cassette recorder was introduced, making it possible for anyone to make and play recordings without cables and microphones.

Consider city planning:

• In 2022, land use planners and politicians still worked under the assumption that the social and physical harms of zoning were necessary and would always exist.

• In 2023, a brave local planning department liberated its community from the crushing burdens of zoning, becoming a model for others to follow. (Maybe.)

There’s no reason to always be operating from a yesteryear mindset with issues like affordable housing, traffic engineering, parks planning, and intersection design. Challenge what others take for granted. Open your eyes to the hidden potential of your block, your street, your neighborhood, and your city.

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It’s a messaging strategy that’s become so ingrained, and it leaves everyday folks who might be eyeing their bikes with mild curiosity shrugging and reaching for the car keys instead. Sure, they’ve thought about using a bike for some of those short errands close to home, but why take the risk since the local pro-bike advocacy group is convinced riding those streets is a death sentence.

I routinely post on social media about the horrors of modern infrastructure and the ways in which planning and transportation departments make life miserable for people who want (or need) to use a bicycle to get around town. So you might be scratching your head, wondering if this account has been hacked. It’s still me, the decrier of the American junk infrastructure that harms tens of thousands every year.

Bike Advocacy, Inc. is absolutely correct that most of our built environment does not fit who we are as humans. For most of the 20th century, “bike infrastructure” wasn’t even a phrase, so of course transportation networks across the country need improvements. The big mistake that so many bike advocacy organizations are making is failing to realize they have two audiences that need two very different messages. They need to appeal to donors, who make the operation possible. And they need to appeal to ordinary people, so they can demonstrate to donors that they’re helping to change culture.

The people who write checks need shock-and-awe messages related to politics and policy. But normies need inspirational messages related to practical ways to improve their daily lives.

An Instagram post showing a mangled bike frame next to a highway is the kind of gut-punch that prompts a philanthropist to donate. And that funding keeps the lights on at bike advocacy nonprofits. But that tactic is a total buzzkill for the average person just trying to figure out if biking to get bagels is worth the hassle. The message that gets one person to give money to improve bicycling as transportation will get another to give up on bicycling as transportation.

Whether a nonprofit is a staff of one or a few dozen, they’ve got to deliver the right messages to their very different audiences. Here’s a sample of what bike advocacy should focus on with the general public:

• Encourage members to take a friend on some short bike rides to do fun things (concert, lunch, happy hour, birthday card shopping).

• Organize fun group rides for neighbors. It could be as simple as a slow ride on a school night that ends at a favorite ice cream spot.

• Invite local e-bike owners to a weekend talk about how they’re able to switch car trips to bike trips. This helps demystify the two-wheeled minivan that’s selling like hot cakes.

• Celebrate new bike lanes all over social media. (If your local advocacy group needs some inspiration, there are over 100 agencies who participate in National Association of City Transportation Officials, regularly sharing success stories.)

• Teach people how to share their personal stories related to using a bike to get around.

• In everything you do with the general public, spread hope and smiles.

Bike infrastructure has dramatically improved over the last 15 years. My city will have added about 100 miles of bike lanes in 10 years. People are riding more and discovering all the calm neighborhood streets that are pleasant for all ages and abilities.

Things can get better in the end. But not if bike advocacy is nonstop banging a drum that riding bikes is a death sentence. Get people outside on bikes in places where it’s already safe. Pretty soon, the people will demand better infrastructure from their local leaders.

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