Monday’s Headlines Challenge Stereotypes

Do traffic engineers only care about moving cars? One says no, writing in Planetizen about his support for Vision Zero.

By Blake Aued

12:01 AM EDT on September 8, 2025

A protest in favor of Vision Zero in Washington D.C. A large group of people stand with protest signs expressing their support for life-saving strategies like road diets. — Los Angeles residents protest in favor of Vision Zero in February 2024. A recent Washington Post story held up L.A. as the poster child for driver rage and political cowardice.
|Photo: Ted Eytan

A traffic engineer pushes back against the notion that people in his field don't care about pedestrians, citing rumble strips, automated speed cameras, roundabouts, road diets and other proven safety measures engineers can incorporate into street designs. (Planetizen)
Now that the courts have forced the U.S. DOT to restart the Biden administration's $5 billion electric vehicle charger program, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that moving forward, the chargers will be sited at gas stations. (Autoblog)
President Trump is accusing political opponents who claim multiple primary residences of fraud, but several of his cabinet members are doing the same thing, including Duffy. (ProPublica)
The Federal Transit Administration's deputy administrator, a former Charlotte city council member, is leaving the post after just five months. (Spectrum News)
Duffy recently canceled a $90 million grant for a maglev train between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. originally authorized in 2005 that, for extremely complicated reasons, was never disbursed. (Eno Center for Transportation)
Texas will spend an incredible $146 billion on road construction next year, the third year in a row it's topped $100 billion. (Governing)
A rural California highway is falling into the ocean, and the only solution seems to be a $2 billion tunnel. (Los Angeles Times)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is holding up a $750 million lifeline for Bay Area transit agencies MART and Muni. (Sacramento Mercury News)
An Uber pilot project in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco allows users to pay drivers in cash. (NBC Los Angeles)
Philadelphia transit agency SEPTA unveiled a plan to tap a special transit fund for $400 million to restore service cuts and avoid fare hikes for two years. (Axios)
Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Lavine Cava dropped a gas tax proposal that would have raised $5 million a year for transit. (Herald; paywall)
Suburban cities continue to defy Dallas Area Rapid Transit on its funding requests. (KERA)
Texts from Houston Mayor John Whitmire obtained by safe streets advocates show that he misled the public on the reason for stripping bike lanes from Austin Street. (Chronicle; paywall)
The latest version of an Oregon transportation funding bill would sunset a 0.1 percent payroll tax devoted to transit after two years. (KATU)
Seattle's Sound Transit may buy double-length train cars for its next light rail purchase. (The Urbanist)
Nashville installed bollards on Broadway to improve pedestrian safety in the city's entertainment district. (Fox 17)
The supposedly progressive city of Asheville leads North Carolina in cyclist deaths per capita. (Citizen-Times)
Fairfax County, Virginia launched a slow streets pilot project where the speed limit is 15 miles per hour. (WUSA)
Five Dutch cities are asking the national government for the authority to ban off-road fatbacks and motorized e-bikes and e-scooters from bike lanes. (Dutch News)
A streetcar tragically derailed in Lisbon, killing 16 people and injuring 21 more. (The Guardian)
The Canadian province of Alberta is looking to follow Ontario's lead by threatening to rip out bike lanes in Calgary and Edmonton. (Calgary Herald)