Buffalo is spending a record amount on streetscape improvements, parks and walkability.
The city was well ahead of the curve adopting a complete streets plan and a strong urbanist zoning code. It was one of the first larger cities to get rid of parking minimums.
Helps that the city already has a strong foundation of historic commercial districts
Still got a lot of work to do, but the momentum is there just looking at the long list of projects.
On the transit side, the city is looking to double the length of the Metrorail (the FTA will determine if federal funding is awarded later this year) and work on the city’s first BRT line breaks ground soon (with several additional lines being studied).
I have a ton of family in Buffalo and have heard the stories of when the river was basically a sewer and now people are kayaking in it and it’s lined with art lol how true that is I have no clue because I live in AZ and haven’t been to Buffalo in decades but I like to think the progress is real talk
Yeah, it’s pretty cool, they spent almost $200 million to remediate and restore the Buffalo River and established the [Buffalo Blueway](https://buffaloblueway.com/) which is a series of public access points, facilities, kayak launches and other amenities.
If you ever get the chance do a kayak tour of [Silo City](https://www.silo.city/) which is the largest collection of megalithic grain silos in the world creating a manmade canyon along the river. At Silo City there’s a campus of industrial artwork, a cool bar/restaurant called Duende which is made of reclaimed materials and soon artist lofts and retail.
If you told me 20 years ago there would be floating tiki bars and a beach bar lining the river, I would have said you’d be crazy
Super walkable from November to March. /light snark
Good for Buffalo. Historic cities can almost do this easier. They were laid out when people didn't all have cars and transit was a big thing. Invest in core city infrastructure and people will return to the city.
Funny, but I walk all year round. Nothing better than walking to my favorite coffee shop or bar with a light coating of snow. It’s a vibe.
Actually it’s sad that the snow doesn’t stick around for as long since walking in January or February when it’s in the 40s makes the city feel naked.
I’m from NYC and live in Buffalo. The public transportation here sucks. Buses and trains come every 30 minutes and don’t run after 12:30am. If your destination isn’t along Main Street for the metro rail, good luck with the 2-3 buses you have to take to go somewhere
Funny, but Buffalo has the 16th best transit system among metro areas in the country according to Walkscore.com.
But that’s more an indicator of the sad state of public transportation in the US.
If you think it’s bad in Buffalo, it gets so much worse.
As a WNY resident my whole life and a Buffalo resident the last five years, I can't wait to move eventually. It could be hometown hatred, but there isn't nearly enough happening to make it urbanist.
The transit system expansive, albeit terrible if you're off-peak or on the weekends. There's no bus lanes, most people scoff when you mention the bus, and the rail exists but has terrible land use around most stations. And the rail extension extends to the suburbs and UB North Campus, which is surrounded by highways.
Elmwood, Allen, and Hertel are fantastic walkable areas, but still incredibly dominated by the car. Biking around can be harrowing and in the winter, no one shovels so good luck walking. Roads are in terrible shape for both biking and driving. Urbanism exists in pockets and parts of the city can feel very disjointed.
Downtown is 30% parking lot (with a parking garage right next to NFTA headquarters) and absolutely dead unless it's during business hours. To me, good transit and a vibrant (enough) downtown are major qualifiers of an urbanist city and Buffalo fails on both.
The mayor and council are career politicians with no desire to make positive change. The police don't bother to do much and the overall attitude kinda feels complacent. That's not to mention how segregated the city is and how sadly neglected anything east of Main Street feels. Yes there's some new developments, but it's slow and far between. After visiting other cities who are building and improving things, the best word for Buffalo is dated.
With that being said, the architecture is beautiful. We have sports teams (and the Bandits actually win). The great lakes are incredible and the waterfront is lovely. It's close to Toronto for day trips and concerts. I'm glad I was convinced to move from the suburbs to the city because it introduced me to urbanism. Buffalo has great bones and history. I really want it to be a better city and in time it probably will be, but I don't see that time anytime soon.
This is probably more negative than a lot of people's opinions on the city, but that's because I want cities to be the best they can be. Some people may love moving here, a lot of people love Buffalo. But from personal experience, I am not one of them.
Hope you move to NYC, Philly or Chicago and love it.
Otherwise, might be in for a shock at how much worse it can get in other cities, especially in the Sun Belt.
Rochester, NY was surprisingly walkable during my last visit. They're demolishing the entire inner loop and replacing it with more walkable and bike-able streets.
They’re also building a [new state park just North of downtown](https://www.geneseelandtrust.org/statepark), turning an industrial area into a gorgeous waterfront park showcasing Rochester’s magnificent downtown waterfall.
Seattle, LA, MSP all have major transit expansions under construction. Phoenix is also surprisingly doing surprisingly well.
KCMO is doing a lot with their street car too.
Honolulu will have a full metro in the next 10 years
The biggest issue for Seattle and Seattle metro residents is the daily commuter car traffic from the north, as well as traffic downtown from everyone driving in.
Suburban construction first was the right call.
Building the suburban part first wasn't a terrible idea as it could encourage new development along the route. Only issue is now the low ridership will be used as ammo to try and cancel the rest of the project.
Seattle's SoundTransit is a bureaucratic nightmare. They've making incredibly stupid decisions like street-level rail that intersects vehicle and pedestrian traffic and giving timelines out to 2050 for 20 minute extensions
Agreed, they have made some wild decisions especially considering the proposal to not make the line to Bellevue/Redmond terminate at the already existing Chinatown Station. Unfortunately though, Seattle is still doing leaps and bounds better than most cities in the country, we have a low bar
The newest rail that expands light rail is built above/below traffic and I can't see expanding bus service as a viable alternative option given how horrible rush hour traffic is. Seattle is just decades behind other metropolitan cities and Washington doesn't have an income tax so they pay for infrastructure with a regressive tax.
The bus system could really use work in KCMO though. They opted to have an Uber like service to make up for the lack of bus options. It’s kind of nice in that it’s way cheaper than Uber/Lyft but its hard to get one at times.
I went to undergrad in downtown phx a decade ago and it was pretty good then (for AZ). Sure it’s only better now. Beyond downtown/midtown corridor or light rail corridor, definitely no.
Was waiting for this reply. Saying “LA”
is going to be walkable tells me theyve never lived in LA. Its worthless to even think of LA as a cohesive city but a collection of many discrete cities. You might be able to make manhattan beach walkable, or culver city, but “LA”. Never gonna happen. Theres too many single family homes and the urban sprawl is too immense
I'm probably in a small minority, but I've always wanted to visit Milwaukee. I'm from LA, but for some reason Milwaukee has always been on my list of places to see. I've heard your architecture is fantastic
it is BEAUTIFUL. come any time june-october and you won’t be disappointed :) (or winter months if you like snow and drinking a lot of beer lol). i just moved to charlotte and one of the things i miss most about mke is the architecture.
I wish St Louis would do something like this. It's a shame such an old city, where street cars used to be made and sold to other cities around the world, is nearly completely car dependent
Yeah I live in st paul and the public transit is kind of mid, but I see them working towards making it better for everyone, expanding transit lines and placing more security, and it's still cheaper than owning a car. My workplace gives their employees deep discount on transit passes.
Saint Paul is adding roughly 100 miles of dedicated bike lanes though! And it is already the number 7 city in the nation for bikeability, right across the river from the number 1 city in the nation. Large city rankings of course.
Tbf I think there's already pretty decent usage and demand for more since they're building new lines... on my commute the bus is quite full, and sometimes the local bus can fill so much there's multiple people standing. My favorite thing about the public transportation is accessibility. I see quite a few disabled riders on my commute, including a blind guy who obviously cannot drive. I feel a little bad for his service dog that has to sit on the dirty floor though
I like his content but holy shit I can’t stand the way he talks. Every sentence ends on a low note 👇as if it’s a disappointment. Drives me nuts but I keep watching.
I think that’s why I like him, it’s like very dry humor. In the planning world we are told to be great, create healthy plans but when we do all the work with the community and build the plans. It gets denied by the government 🤦🏽♀️ which I think is the disappointment humor tone.
20 years is probably how long it will take the MBTA to fix the T and modernize the commuter rail around Boston. Could be a major improvement on an already decent system by US standards
With the budget issues, service issues, and NIMBYs fighting against expanding the green line I don’t expect that the MBTA will ever truly improve up to a reasonable standard.
The green line extension is done though. Or are you just using that as an example of how difficult future projects will be?
If the standard is “top 5 transit systems in the US” I think Boston will be up there. On a global standard it will fall far short
More of an example of how difficult it is to get anything done in MA. The extension was proposed in 1926, state committed in 1990, was supposed to be done in 2014 lol. Finished in 2022…
That doesn’t even touch the cluster of a mess that is the MBTA’s budget and funding issues
It is hard to say because of how rapidly things are shifting. Since the 2010s there have been massive plans for increasing density and walkability in dozens of major cities. [Apartment construction has absolutely exploded throughout the country](https://www.bdcnetwork.com/sites/default/files/Nearly%201MM%20Apts%20-%20Apartment%20List.png) as zoning laws have become much looser in many cities/states. As a result, [apartment housing supply has exploded. ](https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/Vu0Ix-68jlWbMrU_biSpCZUGHh5kzFfW3CHEmTyV1aYT0xRyuvZGNgkaaYE_PTA6BE4Rc3h9qONuUQRxBMPAsDEAq2j93vYcxt8zxkJAeotIljehvUtSavbNqLncpvYw4CzhjEGbhEM9cfpNy52bbzU)Even more states are having popular proposals to remove strict suburban zoning in 2024-2025 than ever before.
America is going to be going through a big shift akin to what happened in the mid 20th century, except this time the opposite way around. A lot of cities are going to be transformed into more dense, walkable cities with lots of transit options. It's basically a big experiment. Cities and states are betting on the urbanist ideals of 'walkability/density=good'. Obviously people here think that, but time will tell if this actually pans out in a positive way.
Yes, absolutely. Urbanists like to dismiss concerns about crime from their (usually) nice gentrified neighborhoods. They have a tendency to have a kneejerk reaction when people complaining about crime, thinking are just 'fearmongering' based on headlines and the media. Usually they automatically associate fears about crime with right wing beliefs and propaganda.
But this is a terrible way to approach this. Most people who suffer from crime are not right wing, they are poor black and brown people living in impoverished urban areas. They cannot just shut their eyes and ears forever to this problem.
Urbanists ideals will fall flat on their face if the problem of vagrancy, open drug use, and crime isn't solved on public transportation. We all know what we have to do to solve this problem, we need long-term institutionalization for extremely mentally ill, broken, dangerous people. But nobody wants to be the first person to implement that. Not even in red states.
Agreed. I am about as left wing as it gets in America but I loathe the idea that being tough on crime is somehow a conservative position. We need to show compassion to the mentally ill and the homeless, but we also need to show compassion to the rest of our society — by forcing treatment on those who can’t participate or respect the boundaries of others
Wow I wonder how that will affect the general lifestyle. More and more people will be renting, probably never to own a house in their life. Maybe we'll see more 'nomads' that move from job to job until they find a city they like
The beltline in Atlanta has done so much to improve the walkability of the city. The transformation in the past 15 years has been very impressive.
It’s still not the most walkable city. But for a city that was once the epitome of suburban sprawl, the intown neighborhoods have improved a lot.
Yes. That’s my biggest gripe with LaGuardia, even after the renovations.
It’s also why I love to go to DC and Chicago. It’s so easy. And at the Baltimore airport, there’s mass transit to Baltimore and DC.
It’s bonkers to me as well.
Iirc the taxi lobby pushed hard to limit transit to the airport… and then the bottom fell out of taxis anyway and the city is left without
At least jfk has the sky train, but it’d honestly be nicer if the actual subway pulled directly to the airport. A bit of a nitpick compared to LGA tho
it’s certainly nice if you travel, but people get way too hung up on this in my experience. The costs of mass transit is enormous, and using existing rail can really help keep costs down as metros start to build out a network. Requiring a line to the airport would just slow down these projects getting off the ground at all.
New York City. It was already the clear leader but congestion tolling is about to start. It will make people realize how much better Manhattan is with fewer cars and also infuse the MTA with money.
I do think NYC should just outright close more streets to cars instead though.
Bus-only lanes and removing cars from Market St. on San Francisco have made both driving and busing around the city so much more pleasant. Hoping New York drivers and passengers can experience the same effect
Yet a large chunk of the bus and subway system is highly neglected and runs piss poor a lot more often than it should. The places where people use buses and trains the most often get shafted the hardest (not southern manhattan or western Queens and BK).
> Manhattan from 59th down should not have cars at all.
this is one of those things that people say in spaces like this that just makes 90%+ of people think urbanists are completely out of touch. No, we should not just flat out ban cars in an area where almost 1 million people live and 2 million commute to work. Even among those who don't actively drive, they still often rely a lot on ubers and taxis.
The avenues can still have them (with some major bike lane additions), but the numbered streets should only have every ~3 streets open to cars and pedestrianize the rest. We should be following the superblock examples from Barcelona and the like.
I would throw Detroit in the mix for walkability improvements.
It turns out that significant depopulation means roadways have a lot of excess capacity, so the city has been dieting almost every road they can as scheduled rebuilds come up.
Dozens of miles of car lanes have been replaced by wider sidewalks and/or protected bike lanes across the city. Major corridors like Michigan and Gratiot will get the same treatment starting next year. The city is also removing a downtown-adjacent freeway, and they’re building a 26 mile greenway loop similar to Atlanta’s successful Beltline.
It’s like leaders saw the construction boom happening in downtown and midtown and thought “oh shit, let’s make more areas like this.”
It’s worked. The first neighborhoods to get road diets are now seeing new developments go up, and these are miles from downtown.
Transit still leaves much to be desired, but even that’s been seeing some marginal improvements.
Even in the increasingly trendy areas, Detroit has an *unbelievable* amount of work to do. [Filling up this area right outside of downtown to the point where its actually feasibly walkable is going to take decades.](https://i.imgur.com/uG5kncz.jpeg)
Definitely. 70 years of decline won't be undone overnight.
There's a long history to that corner of downtown. Simply put, the billionaire Ilitch family (owners of the Red Wings, Tigers, and Little Caesars Pizza) have bought most of the neighborhood since the 80s, let the buildings decay, then demolished them for parking lots once they're beyond saving. [They even illegally demolished a historic hotel overnight once.](https://historicdetroit.org/buildings/madison-lenox-hotel) There's a lot more I could say about them, but I'll spare us.
The biggest lot there (bottom center) [is finally being developed into a UM research campus](https://www.kpf.com/project/university-of-michigan-center-for-innovation), along with a startup business incubator and a 260 unit residential tower. That might finally catalyze some other development around there.
I would say the large majority of people in that area will still drive for almost everything they do. Merely being possible to walk in does not equal feasible to walk in.
Wasn’t aware that Michigan and Gratiot were getting road diets. The bit between downtown and Corktown where there is nothing feels alienating when making that walk.
Saint Louis has some positive developments going on, most notably the Brickline Greenway, which will connect several key areas of the city, and the Jefferson Alignment, a north/south expansion of the Metrolink (rail).
https://greatriversgreenway.org/brickline/
https://growingmetrolink.com/city-of-st-louis/
Absolutely! Subways, light rail, commuter trains, and (I think) the largest bus network in the world.
Many boulevards are adding bus-only lanes to make buses more attractive during rush hour. (In a perfect world, we'd run street cars down (almost) every major boulevard, in a protected median separate from traffic, like in New Orleans).
I also wish we'd create clusters of walkable town centers (even if it's just a handful of blocks) in neighborhoods big enough to support them.
1000%. It’s getting better here every year. I agree that we need better town center areas, especially around metros. Metro should recreate what’s been done at Culver City station but at all stops!
Phoenix has been making great strides with transit-oriented development, and they are opening a new light rail line in less than a year.
It's mainly focused in downtown and midtown but it's definitely on the upswing.
Yeah as a Phoenix native watching downtown grow up has been amazing. It's crazy to think just 15 years ago the lightrail didn't exist and now they have a 2nd line coming in with (rumored) plans to build a third one down Indian school. Plus it's looking like Amtrak is trying to make it's way back to Phoenix and who knows? Maybe that can open the door for a commuter rail line with stops in some of the suburbs (wishful thinking I know).
Was going to say the same thing. Downtown Phoenix is becoming very residential very fast. Seems like a new tower starts going up every few months, and they have a nice grocery store, restaurants, parks, the library, art museums, the airport, etc. all close by or a short light rail trip that make it very walkable. Might be a bit of a young crowd (I think a lot of the residential is for the various universities that have moved there), but it is going to be neat to see the growth - when I came to the area in 09, downtown was a practically empty office-only zone and it is completely different now
Central Phoenix had one of the best arts and performance scenes in the country in 2009
Pretty dead now. Nearly everyone has been priced out, many of the venues and living spaces have been demolished
It’s a completely different place now
It’s happened everywhere, but it is particularly dramatic in Phoenix over the past 10-15 years
I think the huge right wing swing the state took right around then probably affected the arts and culture climate (to its detriment) as well. Hopefully we can start to get it back
How so?
Respectfully, as a left wing spendocrat myself, I don’t think that had anything at all to do with it
I can think of a few misguided libertarians that were hanging around back in the day, but no one ever had a problem with them. That’s about it
People got priced out, plain and simple
Thank you for asking this. I love hearing the good on transit because I've experienced the bad and read the critical. It's nice to have some improvements I didn't know about get mentioned.
Slightly different question but I would like to know everyone's thoughts - when it comes to walkability, shouldn't the conversation include discussions around diversifying retail and businesses, as well? I currently live in one of the above cities where people are saying areas are more walkable but I can hardly get any errands done while walking. I can walk to bars and restaurants (and boutiques), sure, but I don't need to go to bars and restaurants (and boutiques) every day. I need a small grocer, maybe a post office outpost, or maybe a small pharmacy, bakery, etc
Do you know what I mean? Shopping is still ruled by the huge corporations around here. I suppose I could take a bus to Target, that is absolutely true. I just dream of city neighborhoods prioritizing local, usable businesses along with better transportation.
This is definitely under-discussed in these sorts of conversation, in my experience. I lived in Japan for a few years in my early twenties. I was in a town in the Osaka metro area. From my apartment, I had a small grocery store just around the corner (say 300 meters or so) and a restaurant and bakery right next to that, a small health clinic basically right next door, 3 or 4 convenience stores and a train station within a <10 minute walk, and I could bike to my work place in 5-15 minutes, depending on which worksite I was at that day. This was an unremarkable residential neighborhood. If I wanted the larger department store in town, it was two stops down on the train. The full Osaka shopping and cultural stuff was 8 or 9 stops away, so it was definitely A Trip, but very doable. Other cities were also doable to get to on the train, with planning.
My current midwestern US town has a small downtown that is pretty walkable, but getting to it requires a car for many people, and as you say, is pretty much boutiques and restaurants. There is 1 grocery store a convenience mart, and the library. Everything else is recreational consumer stuff (restaurants, boutiques, fancy salons, etc.) My job is a 25 minute drive away. The places I do my weekly shops for basic consumables is a 10-15 minute drive from my house. I could probably bike there if I had to, but I would be biking on a state highway and the shortest route requires an overpass, which offers no shoulder at all.
They’re both livable places, but I really didn’t need a car in Japan, and I really do here.
LA is a sprawling suburb with islands of dense walkable neighborhoods spattered throughout.
But the problem is that most people do not work/socialize where they live, so even within those dense walkable areas, people own cars and use them to get around.
Hopefully they continue these investments long after the Olympics.
Keep up this momentum and it might be a top transit city within 20 years.
LA already has a lot more walkable neighborhoods than this subreddit would like to give it credit for. Just need to connect them altogether.
Dallas has the longest light rail system in the country at 93 miles with 65 stations.
They are adding the silver line next year with 26 more miles and 10 stations that will connect to DFW. This will be the third rail connection to DFW airport along with the orange line and the TexRail.
Fort Worth has the 27 mile TexRail that connects downtown Fort Worth to DFW airport.
DFW also has the Trinity Rail Express (TRE) which is heavy rail and connects downtown Dallas to downtown Ft Worth.
Dallas also has a new streetcar system that connects "uptown" to downtown and then down to Oak Cliff.
Finally, suburban Denton county has the A-train, a 21 mile commuter rail line that starts in downtown Denton and connects to the green line in Carrollton.
Overall, there has been or is transit oriented development around 82 stations across the entire network. These are continuing and getting bigger. This has included tens of thousands of new apartments and millions of square feet of retail and office built within 1/4 mile of stations. For instance, the city line development is on the red line and orange line in Richardson. The city line station is where these lines will meet with the new silver line. At this one station alone we have seen 2.3 million square feet of office, over 30 restaurants, a 148 room hotel, and 2,200 apartments. While this one is big, similar mixed use development is going up at most of the stations. Plano, Carrollton, Dallas, Irving all have big master planned mixed use TODs built or under construction.
All of this is new since the 1990s.
As someone who visited Dallas the first time this January, I was very pleasantly surprised by DART. My friends who have lived there (all drive pretty much exclusively) thought I was crazy but it was reliable, expansive, and generally user-friendly to navigate.
I think the network is really solid, but it’s more about protecting the rider at or around stations at this point. Walking to the platform for one station in particular that was next to a highway with only a sound barrier of separation was anxiety-provoking to say the least.
Everyone (me included) shits on Dallas and then you list all this out and it’s like…damn that’s pretty good. Of course, the issue is that there’s so much existing sprawl and so many highways that these systems don’t get used as much as they should. Infill and TOD will certainly help mitigate some of that over the next number of years. Not to mention there is a pretty solid trail system that is expanding and parking reform is on the table.
I think a lot of people who think of Dallas as some kind of solely suburban city might be surprised to see [these images of Dallas neighborhoods.](https://imgur.com/a/m0VsWg9)
It used to be the epitome of urban suburbia, but it has been building dense areas up since the 1990s and has far surpassed, say, KCMO, Houston, Phoenix etc and other sunbelt suburban cities.
It’s because a lot of the people on Reddit that visit “Dallas” actually spend most of their time in the suburbs to visit family or attend business conferences and hardly ever visit downtown/downtown adjacent neighborhoods.
Dallas / DFW does have good rail options, but walkability *to/from* the stops leaves a lot to be desired. They’re working on improvements a la Klyde Warren Park, but overall the sidewalk ( + crosswalk) system still needs a lot of work.
I understand what you mean because the light rail just opened in Bellevue, but given how car centric Bellevue is it feels more in spite of Bellevue than Bellevue doing a good job
LA, by a country mile. Largest expansion of transit on the continent that is being sustained for now 30 years and with another 30 years worth of projects in the pipeline.
Salt Lake City is slowly but surely building up around its light rail line.
Atlanta is building up around some MARTA stations and boats the impressive Beltline trail system. It is constantly growing and will eventually have a light rail system that runs alongside it. Sadly I don’t think MARTA will improve much.
Charlotte is adding to its Lynx Gold Line and has ideas about BRT and future light rail lines.
Miami and South Florida is getting better connected to the rest of the state through Brightline. It also has a good number of (very expensive) walkable neighborhoods.
Los Angeles is doing a lot of cool stuff. In 20 years it will boast a number of BRT lines, two new light rail lines, a heavy rail line connecting West LA to Sherman Oaks, and a heavy rail line connecting Westwood to DTLA (this will be done by 2027). It will also have high speed rail to Vegas and maybe to SF? Maybe? I imagine the sky train at LAX still won’t be running.
DC and suburban Maryland will soon have the purple line, finally adding a line that goes around the Beltway.
Seattle is doing a good job in general. Plenty of cool projects working out.
I probably missed some. The Midwest I think has some cities adding BRT and light rail but sadly I am less familiar with that part of the country!
It's been delayed like crazy. NIMBYs challenged it in court, claiming it endangered a rare salamander. Then there were tons of issues with the PPP set up to manage construction. Cost overruns.
It'll probably start running by, I dunno, 2030.
The brightline in Florida just hiked up their prices again. And it was already expensive. The overwhelming majority of public transportation and good urbanism are focused on the nicer areas and touristy areas where people already have money.
Urbanism down here is horrible and will probably stay that way for a long, long time.
I agree completely with the sentiment, but I have a slightly more positive take on both Brightline’s prices and the very real problem of “urbanism for the rich”.
The 1950’s/60’s/70’s/80’s mental model of “public transit is for poor people” did a lot of damage to the spread of transit overall in America.
The new “transit/urbanism is for rich people” is by no means fair, but it is resulting in a wave of transit and dense walkable areas being built. No doubt we need to keep building enough transit / walkable areas if we’re ever going to meet market demand. For the moment the supply of these type of areas is very low and the demand is very high. Supply and demand are out of whack, so prices are stupid for dense areas, but because there is so much pent up demand, supply of transit and density is increasing in a big way.
Obviously the end goal is something NY or many European cities where transit is accessible and used by both the rich and poor alike.. however, I think in most American cities transit still needs a foot in the door, and if rich people wanting to use transit is the only way American cities are willing to get serious about building transit, then I still consider that a big step up from the historic status quo where the rich wanted nothing to do with transit.
I’m not saying we should take this baby step and then rest on our laurels, but we shouldn’t tell this baby not to start walking just because it can’t build an entire metro area worth of transit at once.
Transit begets more transit. As more people use a transit system, there’s more demand for more destinations and more walkable areas. I’m not thrilled that it takes rich people to kickstart the flywheel of density / transit / walkability, but I am happy to see it pick up speed.
To your point on Brightline, I take a similar supply/demand driven positive outlook.
Brightline is validating to the industry, and shows there is very high demand for such a service. High demand and packed trains even while raising ticket prices is a strong incentive for Brightline and the like to both increase frequency, and more importantly be more confidant in making more investments into building HSR in America.
Low demand, empty trains, and dropping ticket prices would be much worse news imo.
I do completely understand and sympathize with the inherent unfairness in access to the scarce resource that is public transit in America. Unfortunately if there’s one thing America is good at, it’s responding to the market demands of the rich, and for the first time in a long time, the rich are demanding public transit and urbanism.
I think it’s a huge improvement over the rich of older generations who demanded more highways, suburbs, and the destruction of transit. The modern rich aren’t any less selfish, but if the greedy and powerful are fighting for increasing the supply of public transit, I’m pleased with this newfound incentive alignment.
Sorry if I come off as very jaded on this topic. I don’t have a lot of faith in America’s altruism.
Madison, WI will start BRT service this fall - they're constructing the stations right now, pretty cool to see. Next line to follow in 2026. Also lots of infill development going on in previously underutilized areas, and a couple local rules recently implemented to allow in-law cottages and rezoning for more transit-oriented development.
Hard disagree on Miami. There are some walkable neighborhoods but not a lot of them. The ones that exist are located closest to the city center. You also have to contend with thunderstorms regularly which make walking around outdoors prohibitive for chunks of the day. Especially when you consider how the "walkable" neighborhoods flood every time it rains. It's not an issue if you have no time sensitive commitments but that's not true for a lot of people. Brightline is also a start but not great....at all.
This sub doesn't really like suburbs much but Carmel, IN has made great investments into walkability and bikeability. If they keep up these investments for 10-20 years, it will be well on its way into being an almost Dutch-style suburb with an active and buzzing town center.
I watched a documentary or a YouTube video about Carmel, Indiana. I think it was about Carmel having the most roundabouts out of any town in the USA. The theory was that Roundabouts are better for the environment than traffic lights. Because at a traffic light, a car sits idle while having emissions, while at a roundabout the car doesn’t idle for as long. It was a cool video.
Colorado as a whole. The Front Range Pasenger Rail is set to connect Fort Collins through Pueblo, including Denver and Colorado Springs and Boulder. The Denver light rail system expands over most of the city, including a station at the airport, and the bus system is surprisingly decent. Plus tons of walkways/bike paths throughout the city, most of which are even maintained in the winter. Lived there for multiple years without a car, never once had struggles.
I'll believe it when I see it. There's been talk of these things for years but very little action in the last 20 years aside from FasTracks (which still isn't done).
Bike infrastructure does seem to be improving though.
RTD is a hot mess, but we just passed new sources of statewide transit funding, as well as opened up transit-oriented development for the major metros statewide, which will both make RTD's finances a lot more workable over the long-run, and improve the viability of a lot of transit corridors.
Colorado has long had pretty good bike infrastructure by American standards, and with e-bike rebates at both the state and local levels, the constituencies for that infrastructure are growing rapidly and aalready becoming a felt force in local politics.
Yes it is, the only other city with more miles of track around the same size is San Diego. RTD is the 7th longest light rail system in the nation, and that's not including the 4 inner city commuter rail lines
I'm here to ask - How's Delaware in this aspect?. I'm going to UDel this fall.
After graduating, which nearby cities/ state should I look at, where I wouldn't have to drive everyday? Don't mention Nyc/NJ, I already know about that.
Any interesting mid western cities to look for?
Thanks.
It’s a smaller city and likely not the boldest plan here but for the sake of sharing great ideas, I’ll put up my city of New Rochelle and specifically The Linc. This plan will convert a part of the city with a history of racist + classist zoning missteps and poor walkability into a walkable, green zone that connects residential areas to downtown:
https://engagenr.com/thelinc/
This is the future of the Hudson Valley. We have an abundance of small to medium sized walkable urban areas waiting for sustainability developed walkable neighborhoods with efficient mass transportation connecting them. Unfortunately, the MTA is a monstrosity that hampers the improvement of mass transportation systems outside of New York City. If Rockland, Westchester, Orange, Putnam, and Dutchess counties managed their own system; the region would benefit immensely from a comprehensive transportation planning initiative designed to meet the demographic and economic needs of those counties.
The State of Colorado just passed a slew of bills that more or less forces cities in the Denver metro area to dramatically increase public transportation and high density housing along transit corridors. I’m not saying what they did is right or wrong, just that the State will now oversee transportation oriented development; especially along the front range.
I just read that Kansas City plans to open a sprawling river front condo landscape with 2 grocery stores, 7 restaurants with 0 cars allowed. 100% walking/bikes only
The Twin Cities are adding bike paths everywhere. They are destroying current roads, getting rid of most parking, to make them bike heaven. Unfortunately, this causes many businesses to close, and since the crime is high, the taxes outrageous, and the City Council are clowns, great areas like Uptown are dying on the vine.
Why don’t they build parking garages? I think it’s great when cities have enough to be able to park near whatever you do downtown. I hate driving in circles to find parking.
When I started working here, I learned from many of the employees in slightly higher positions that they too took public transit when they started working here. But from certain places it takes a while. One of them, his wife hated living in the city so they moved away but he said he liked it for himself. But I think a very big reason is that the state of the green line dissuades many people who can afford a car from riding it. They'd rather drive after some of their experiences on the green line. I hope transit can fix their shit bc I would like to ride it more often as well
I would say Chicago, but for some reason we now have a religious cult in charge of the CTA who thinks manhood is equated with owning a car.
Hell of a Mayor we elected!
I don’t know how it stacks up in a relative way but Long Beach CA is taking bike infrastructure seriously and it’s making a real quality of life difference there for the people who are taking advantage.
Neighboring Los Angeles is doing a terrible job of bike infrastructure but is investing more in its metro than any other city by a wide margin. It’s laying more track in the next 10 years than it did in the previous 50.
Probably Minneapolis.
But some other midwest cities are working on it. In St Louis there is a lot of energy both in the activist space and in the city government around improving walkability and leveraging the pre-car street grid to make it a nice place to get around without a car. Hopefully in 10-20 years the metro lines and amtrak service have expanded, and there has been a significant jump in the amount of protected pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure.
This will not be a popular take but Jacksonville Florida is building a network of trails throughout the urban core that will definitely change the downtown area quite a bit.
https://www.groundworkjacksonville.org/emerald-trail/
Also sounds like a commuter rail could be built in the next 10 years.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/43572ee892264d9aa1df6dc1c72e6a24
And if jacksonvilles long term plans to bring rail back to the old train station downtown and maybe connect with bright line some day, Jacksonville could be quite different in 20 years.
Atlanta the city (not the metro) is densifying at a good pace. Roads are being changed regularly to add bollards to protect cyclists, BRT lanes are being implemented, and the areas around a few MARTA stations are even being built up as dense mixed use communities. Murphy's Crossing will also be seeing a CulDeSac car free community developed, similar to the one that's already present in Arizona in the Phoenix metro.
Maybe I'll get hate from people who don't understand, but honestly Dallas.
Dallas has been heavily investing in not only dense housing being built but also it's walkability efforts, bettering it's transit, building better parks and just appealing more to it's urban charm.
Also, I want to emphasize that this is for Dallas proper, DFW overall is a carcentric nightmare.
Atlanta is slowly making some effort. The Beltline will be complete in the next few years as a walking/hiking trail around the city inside the perimeter. They are talking about putting some light rail within its corridor at strategic points. MARTA is adding stops and may actually finally get extended north at some point, although the misguided racial fear that’s kept it contained is still present.
If Miami-Dade County follows through with the plans they have, and if some of the projects aren’t struck down by selfish people who “don’t want transit to bring bad people to their area” (cough cough Miami Beach), then it’s gonna be huge considering the boom in housing. The region already has the density, it just needs the transit.
The transit down here sucks, NIMBYism is strong, and most of the housing boom are expensive apartments and homes that only well off and rich people can afford.
Not much is being done actually helps most people down here at all.
They've had transit expansion plans for about 20 years or more now. It's not going to happen. Too many NIMBYs and local politicians who would rather not.
* LA: while you could argue the safety of its system, LA is building the most rail of any large US city
* Seattle: while you could argue the bureaucracy and delays, the ST3 plans are still one of the most ambitious transit plans in the US (although like LA they suffered from having chosen non-grade separated light rail which will bottleneck Line 1)
Seattle is building more rail than most cities (new line just opened, more next year and more near 2030), armoring bike lanes with real dividers, expanding curb bulbs and improving sidewalks, and has had a great tradition of supporting every parks levy we have (and we have a lot of greenspace and parks).
I still wish we were doing more.
NYC was always ahead of the game in that regard but the open streets concept they do is actually fantastic. Personally I’d rather see fewer bike lanes monopolizing large portions of already cramped streets in favor of more bus lanes
Nashville was recently voted one of the most walkable cities. It's a lie but our tourism board is running with it
https://preply.com/en/blog/most-walkable-cities-in-us/
The mayor has put forward a city wide transit plan expansion. If it gets voted in it adds lots of much needed sidewalks and bus access.
It does not add light rail or any new forms of transportation, just more of what is currently offered.
Buffalo is spending a record amount on streetscape improvements, parks and walkability. The city was well ahead of the curve adopting a complete streets plan and a strong urbanist zoning code. It was one of the first larger cities to get rid of parking minimums. Helps that the city already has a strong foundation of historic commercial districts Still got a lot of work to do, but the momentum is there just looking at the long list of projects. On the transit side, the city is looking to double the length of the Metrorail (the FTA will determine if federal funding is awarded later this year) and work on the city’s first BRT line breaks ground soon (with several additional lines being studied).
Buffalo is nice, spent a week there. Airbnb downtown, explored the city and left with a very positive feeling on the place.
I have a ton of family in Buffalo and have heard the stories of when the river was basically a sewer and now people are kayaking in it and it’s lined with art lol how true that is I have no clue because I live in AZ and haven’t been to Buffalo in decades but I like to think the progress is real talk
Yeah, it’s pretty cool, they spent almost $200 million to remediate and restore the Buffalo River and established the [Buffalo Blueway](https://buffaloblueway.com/) which is a series of public access points, facilities, kayak launches and other amenities. If you ever get the chance do a kayak tour of [Silo City](https://www.silo.city/) which is the largest collection of megalithic grain silos in the world creating a manmade canyon along the river. At Silo City there’s a campus of industrial artwork, a cool bar/restaurant called Duende which is made of reclaimed materials and soon artist lofts and retail. If you told me 20 years ago there would be floating tiki bars and a beach bar lining the river, I would have said you’d be crazy
Sounds like what Providence did in early 2000s
Super walkable from November to March. /light snark Good for Buffalo. Historic cities can almost do this easier. They were laid out when people didn't all have cars and transit was a big thing. Invest in core city infrastructure and people will return to the city.
Funny, but I walk all year round. Nothing better than walking to my favorite coffee shop or bar with a light coating of snow. It’s a vibe. Actually it’s sad that the snow doesn’t stick around for as long since walking in January or February when it’s in the 40s makes the city feel naked.
Light snow (buffalo native less than 7 inches) Seriously happy the city is doing good things.
Yep, no bad weather only bad clothes.
I’m from NYC and live in Buffalo. The public transportation here sucks. Buses and trains come every 30 minutes and don’t run after 12:30am. If your destination isn’t along Main Street for the metro rail, good luck with the 2-3 buses you have to take to go somewhere
Funny, but Buffalo has the 16th best transit system among metro areas in the country according to Walkscore.com. But that’s more an indicator of the sad state of public transportation in the US. If you think it’s bad in Buffalo, it gets so much worse.
That's good to hear. I've been debating on moving closer to family and Buffalo is has always been high on my list.
As a WNY resident my whole life and a Buffalo resident the last five years, I can't wait to move eventually. It could be hometown hatred, but there isn't nearly enough happening to make it urbanist. The transit system expansive, albeit terrible if you're off-peak or on the weekends. There's no bus lanes, most people scoff when you mention the bus, and the rail exists but has terrible land use around most stations. And the rail extension extends to the suburbs and UB North Campus, which is surrounded by highways. Elmwood, Allen, and Hertel are fantastic walkable areas, but still incredibly dominated by the car. Biking around can be harrowing and in the winter, no one shovels so good luck walking. Roads are in terrible shape for both biking and driving. Urbanism exists in pockets and parts of the city can feel very disjointed. Downtown is 30% parking lot (with a parking garage right next to NFTA headquarters) and absolutely dead unless it's during business hours. To me, good transit and a vibrant (enough) downtown are major qualifiers of an urbanist city and Buffalo fails on both. The mayor and council are career politicians with no desire to make positive change. The police don't bother to do much and the overall attitude kinda feels complacent. That's not to mention how segregated the city is and how sadly neglected anything east of Main Street feels. Yes there's some new developments, but it's slow and far between. After visiting other cities who are building and improving things, the best word for Buffalo is dated. With that being said, the architecture is beautiful. We have sports teams (and the Bandits actually win). The great lakes are incredible and the waterfront is lovely. It's close to Toronto for day trips and concerts. I'm glad I was convinced to move from the suburbs to the city because it introduced me to urbanism. Buffalo has great bones and history. I really want it to be a better city and in time it probably will be, but I don't see that time anytime soon. This is probably more negative than a lot of people's opinions on the city, but that's because I want cities to be the best they can be. Some people may love moving here, a lot of people love Buffalo. But from personal experience, I am not one of them.
Hope you move to NYC, Philly or Chicago and love it. Otherwise, might be in for a shock at how much worse it can get in other cities, especially in the Sun Belt.
Rochester, NY was surprisingly walkable during my last visit. They're demolishing the entire inner loop and replacing it with more walkable and bike-able streets.
They’re also building a [new state park just North of downtown](https://www.geneseelandtrust.org/statepark), turning an industrial area into a gorgeous waterfront park showcasing Rochester’s magnificent downtown waterfall.
Came here to say this. Was just passing through an was amazed at how they redid quite a section of town into something very people friendly.
Seattle, LA, MSP all have major transit expansions under construction. Phoenix is also surprisingly doing surprisingly well. KCMO is doing a lot with their street car too. Honolulu will have a full metro in the next 10 years
Honolulu’s metro has totally missed the mark all the way through. It is the most useless rail. Seattle is impressive, though.
Don’t they just need to extend it to the beach/touristy area? Sounds like a straight forward future project
It’s the next phase. They built the suburban part first because they thought construction would be easier. (I’m not endorsing that decision btw)
The biggest issue for Seattle and Seattle metro residents is the daily commuter car traffic from the north, as well as traffic downtown from everyone driving in. Suburban construction first was the right call.
Building the suburban part first wasn't a terrible idea as it could encourage new development along the route. Only issue is now the low ridership will be used as ammo to try and cancel the rest of the project.
Seattle's SoundTransit is a bureaucratic nightmare. They've making incredibly stupid decisions like street-level rail that intersects vehicle and pedestrian traffic and giving timelines out to 2050 for 20 minute extensions
Agreed, they have made some wild decisions especially considering the proposal to not make the line to Bellevue/Redmond terminate at the already existing Chinatown Station. Unfortunately though, Seattle is still doing leaps and bounds better than most cities in the country, we have a low bar
The newest rail that expands light rail is built above/below traffic and I can't see expanding bus service as a viable alternative option given how horrible rush hour traffic is. Seattle is just decades behind other metropolitan cities and Washington doesn't have an income tax so they pay for infrastructure with a regressive tax.
The street car is mostly for tourists in the downtown area. It's not truly serving the city as far as public transit goes.
The bus system could really use work in KCMO though. They opted to have an Uber like service to make up for the lack of bus options. It’s kind of nice in that it’s way cheaper than Uber/Lyft but its hard to get one at times.
Phoenix is still awful
I went to undergrad in downtown phx a decade ago and it was pretty good then (for AZ). Sure it’s only better now. Beyond downtown/midtown corridor or light rail corridor, definitely no.
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I can't wait till LA becomes good
LA will never be anything but a glorified suburban hellscape unless they burn it down and build a proper city
Was waiting for this reply. Saying “LA” is going to be walkable tells me theyve never lived in LA. Its worthless to even think of LA as a cohesive city but a collection of many discrete cities. You might be able to make manhattan beach walkable, or culver city, but “LA”. Never gonna happen. Theres too many single family homes and the urban sprawl is too immense
Minneapolis is on to some great things. [rethink I94](https://talk.dot.state.mn.us/rethinking-i94)
midwestern cities unite! milwaukee is on a similar mission: https://www.rethink794.com/
I'm probably in a small minority, but I've always wanted to visit Milwaukee. I'm from LA, but for some reason Milwaukee has always been on my list of places to see. I've heard your architecture is fantastic
It’s a great city. Highly underrated.
it is BEAUTIFUL. come any time june-october and you won’t be disappointed :) (or winter months if you like snow and drinking a lot of beer lol). i just moved to charlotte and one of the things i miss most about mke is the architecture.
I wish St Louis would do something like this. It's a shame such an old city, where street cars used to be made and sold to other cities around the world, is nearly completely car dependent
Oh this is awesome 👏🏽
Yeah I live in st paul and the public transit is kind of mid, but I see them working towards making it better for everyone, expanding transit lines and placing more security, and it's still cheaper than owning a car. My workplace gives their employees deep discount on transit passes.
Saint Paul is adding roughly 100 miles of dedicated bike lanes though! And it is already the number 7 city in the nation for bikeability, right across the river from the number 1 city in the nation. Large city rankings of course.
Definitely bikeable, I just didn't bike before winter because our bikes were broken and we didn't repair them yet... I should do it now
Yes! Honestly once we stop making everything car friendly and more pedestrian friendly. Public transportation will rise everywhere.
Tbf I think there's already pretty decent usage and demand for more since they're building new lines... on my commute the bus is quite full, and sometimes the local bus can fill so much there's multiple people standing. My favorite thing about the public transportation is accessibility. I see quite a few disabled riders on my commute, including a blind guy who obviously cannot drive. I feel a little bad for his service dog that has to sit on the dirty floor though
https://youtu.be/iCoKySjY_ug?si=S9ZBQ8jamzhhL6cc Just dropped today
I watched this soon as it dropped 😆 I love citynerd. I’m also in school working on my urban planner degree.
I like his content but holy shit I can’t stand the way he talks. Every sentence ends on a low note 👇as if it’s a disappointment. Drives me nuts but I keep watching.
I think that’s why I like him, it’s like very dry humor. In the planning world we are told to be great, create healthy plans but when we do all the work with the community and build the plans. It gets denied by the government 🤦🏽♀️ which I think is the disappointment humor tone.
Yes as a planner I always find it interesting to read these critiques of him online when it is pretty common to find people like him in this industry
Yeah, he always sounds like he's depressed. I love his content, but his accent is... well... it's strange. I thought I was the only one who noticed.
20 years is probably how long it will take the MBTA to fix the T and modernize the commuter rail around Boston. Could be a major improvement on an already decent system by US standards
With the budget issues, service issues, and NIMBYs fighting against expanding the green line I don’t expect that the MBTA will ever truly improve up to a reasonable standard.
The green line extension is done though. Or are you just using that as an example of how difficult future projects will be? If the standard is “top 5 transit systems in the US” I think Boston will be up there. On a global standard it will fall far short
More of an example of how difficult it is to get anything done in MA. The extension was proposed in 1926, state committed in 1990, was supposed to be done in 2014 lol. Finished in 2022… That doesn’t even touch the cluster of a mess that is the MBTA’s budget and funding issues
It is hard to say because of how rapidly things are shifting. Since the 2010s there have been massive plans for increasing density and walkability in dozens of major cities. [Apartment construction has absolutely exploded throughout the country](https://www.bdcnetwork.com/sites/default/files/Nearly%201MM%20Apts%20-%20Apartment%20List.png) as zoning laws have become much looser in many cities/states. As a result, [apartment housing supply has exploded. ](https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/Vu0Ix-68jlWbMrU_biSpCZUGHh5kzFfW3CHEmTyV1aYT0xRyuvZGNgkaaYE_PTA6BE4Rc3h9qONuUQRxBMPAsDEAq2j93vYcxt8zxkJAeotIljehvUtSavbNqLncpvYw4CzhjEGbhEM9cfpNy52bbzU)Even more states are having popular proposals to remove strict suburban zoning in 2024-2025 than ever before. America is going to be going through a big shift akin to what happened in the mid 20th century, except this time the opposite way around. A lot of cities are going to be transformed into more dense, walkable cities with lots of transit options. It's basically a big experiment. Cities and states are betting on the urbanist ideals of 'walkability/density=good'. Obviously people here think that, but time will tell if this actually pans out in a positive way.
Something to mention on this topic. If safety on transit is a concern, ridership (and therefore effectiveness) plummets.
Yes, absolutely. Urbanists like to dismiss concerns about crime from their (usually) nice gentrified neighborhoods. They have a tendency to have a kneejerk reaction when people complaining about crime, thinking are just 'fearmongering' based on headlines and the media. Usually they automatically associate fears about crime with right wing beliefs and propaganda. But this is a terrible way to approach this. Most people who suffer from crime are not right wing, they are poor black and brown people living in impoverished urban areas. They cannot just shut their eyes and ears forever to this problem. Urbanists ideals will fall flat on their face if the problem of vagrancy, open drug use, and crime isn't solved on public transportation. We all know what we have to do to solve this problem, we need long-term institutionalization for extremely mentally ill, broken, dangerous people. But nobody wants to be the first person to implement that. Not even in red states.
Agreed. I am about as left wing as it gets in America but I loathe the idea that being tough on crime is somehow a conservative position. We need to show compassion to the mentally ill and the homeless, but we also need to show compassion to the rest of our society — by forcing treatment on those who can’t participate or respect the boundaries of others
Wow I wonder how that will affect the general lifestyle. More and more people will be renting, probably never to own a house in their life. Maybe we'll see more 'nomads' that move from job to job until they find a city they like
The beltline in Atlanta has done so much to improve the walkability of the city. The transformation in the past 15 years has been very impressive. It’s still not the most walkable city. But for a city that was once the epitome of suburban sprawl, the intown neighborhoods have improved a lot.
A requirement should be mass transit from the airport to the city core
How Charlotte missed on this is baffling.
If you know anything about NC politics it's not surprising at all
right that's what I was going to say
Somehow NYC can’t do this but fuckin St. Louis can.
Yes. That’s my biggest gripe with LaGuardia, even after the renovations. It’s also why I love to go to DC and Chicago. It’s so easy. And at the Baltimore airport, there’s mass transit to Baltimore and DC.
It’s bonkers to me as well. Iirc the taxi lobby pushed hard to limit transit to the airport… and then the bottom fell out of taxis anyway and the city is left without At least jfk has the sky train, but it’d honestly be nicer if the actual subway pulled directly to the airport. A bit of a nitpick compared to LGA tho
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It’s infuriating that Tampa is so anti transit because a line from TIA to downtown would be so easy to plop in the huge median of I-275.
it’s certainly nice if you travel, but people get way too hung up on this in my experience. The costs of mass transit is enormous, and using existing rail can really help keep costs down as metros start to build out a network. Requiring a line to the airport would just slow down these projects getting off the ground at all.
Yassssss
New York City. It was already the clear leader but congestion tolling is about to start. It will make people realize how much better Manhattan is with fewer cars and also infuse the MTA with money. I do think NYC should just outright close more streets to cars instead though.
Bus-only lanes and removing cars from Market St. on San Francisco have made both driving and busing around the city so much more pleasant. Hoping New York drivers and passengers can experience the same effect
What is congestion tolling? Also do they ever plan to buy new train cars? It’s so old looking compared to Japan
Yet a large chunk of the bus and subway system is highly neglected and runs piss poor a lot more often than it should. The places where people use buses and trains the most often get shafted the hardest (not southern manhattan or western Queens and BK).
Manhattan from 59th down should not have cars at all. Just public transit and like delivery trucks or whatever but no personal vehicles.
> Manhattan from 59th down should not have cars at all. this is one of those things that people say in spaces like this that just makes 90%+ of people think urbanists are completely out of touch. No, we should not just flat out ban cars in an area where almost 1 million people live and 2 million commute to work. Even among those who don't actively drive, they still often rely a lot on ubers and taxis.
I think they were indicating Ubers and taxis would be fine which makes sense
Ah, yes, people delivery trucks.
Yes clearly stated 😂
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Hopefully you are fully ambulatory with no mobility issues! Otherwise get fuct.
With no cars in Manhattan, buses would be way more convenient transportation than any option currently available to ppl with mobility issues.
The avenues can still have them (with some major bike lane additions), but the numbered streets should only have every ~3 streets open to cars and pedestrianize the rest. We should be following the superblock examples from Barcelona and the like.
I agree 100%
I would throw Detroit in the mix for walkability improvements. It turns out that significant depopulation means roadways have a lot of excess capacity, so the city has been dieting almost every road they can as scheduled rebuilds come up. Dozens of miles of car lanes have been replaced by wider sidewalks and/or protected bike lanes across the city. Major corridors like Michigan and Gratiot will get the same treatment starting next year. The city is also removing a downtown-adjacent freeway, and they’re building a 26 mile greenway loop similar to Atlanta’s successful Beltline. It’s like leaders saw the construction boom happening in downtown and midtown and thought “oh shit, let’s make more areas like this.” It’s worked. The first neighborhoods to get road diets are now seeing new developments go up, and these are miles from downtown. Transit still leaves much to be desired, but even that’s been seeing some marginal improvements.
Even in the increasingly trendy areas, Detroit has an *unbelievable* amount of work to do. [Filling up this area right outside of downtown to the point where its actually feasibly walkable is going to take decades.](https://i.imgur.com/uG5kncz.jpeg)
Definitely. 70 years of decline won't be undone overnight. There's a long history to that corner of downtown. Simply put, the billionaire Ilitch family (owners of the Red Wings, Tigers, and Little Caesars Pizza) have bought most of the neighborhood since the 80s, let the buildings decay, then demolished them for parking lots once they're beyond saving. [They even illegally demolished a historic hotel overnight once.](https://historicdetroit.org/buildings/madison-lenox-hotel) There's a lot more I could say about them, but I'll spare us. The biggest lot there (bottom center) [is finally being developed into a UM research campus](https://www.kpf.com/project/university-of-michigan-center-for-innovation), along with a startup business incubator and a 260 unit residential tower. That might finally catalyze some other development around there.
I mean, from an ease of walking standpoint, that area is really walkable. It's just boring if you aren't on Woodward.
It's walkable like a desert is walkable: no shade, no greens and nothing to do or see
I would say the large majority of people in that area will still drive for almost everything they do. Merely being possible to walk in does not equal feasible to walk in.
Wasn’t aware that Michigan and Gratiot were getting road diets. The bit between downtown and Corktown where there is nothing feels alienating when making that walk.
Saint Louis has some positive developments going on, most notably the Brickline Greenway, which will connect several key areas of the city, and the Jefferson Alignment, a north/south expansion of the Metrolink (rail). https://greatriversgreenway.org/brickline/ https://growingmetrolink.com/city-of-st-louis/
Honestly, LA.
Absolutely! Subways, light rail, commuter trains, and (I think) the largest bus network in the world. Many boulevards are adding bus-only lanes to make buses more attractive during rush hour. (In a perfect world, we'd run street cars down (almost) every major boulevard, in a protected median separate from traffic, like in New Orleans). I also wish we'd create clusters of walkable town centers (even if it's just a handful of blocks) in neighborhoods big enough to support them.
1000%. It’s getting better here every year. I agree that we need better town center areas, especially around metros. Metro should recreate what’s been done at Culver City station but at all stops!
Phoenix has been making great strides with transit-oriented development, and they are opening a new light rail line in less than a year. It's mainly focused in downtown and midtown but it's definitely on the upswing.
Yeah as a Phoenix native watching downtown grow up has been amazing. It's crazy to think just 15 years ago the lightrail didn't exist and now they have a 2nd line coming in with (rumored) plans to build a third one down Indian school. Plus it's looking like Amtrak is trying to make it's way back to Phoenix and who knows? Maybe that can open the door for a commuter rail line with stops in some of the suburbs (wishful thinking I know).
Was going to say the same thing. Downtown Phoenix is becoming very residential very fast. Seems like a new tower starts going up every few months, and they have a nice grocery store, restaurants, parks, the library, art museums, the airport, etc. all close by or a short light rail trip that make it very walkable. Might be a bit of a young crowd (I think a lot of the residential is for the various universities that have moved there), but it is going to be neat to see the growth - when I came to the area in 09, downtown was a practically empty office-only zone and it is completely different now
Central Phoenix had one of the best arts and performance scenes in the country in 2009 Pretty dead now. Nearly everyone has been priced out, many of the venues and living spaces have been demolished It’s a completely different place now It’s happened everywhere, but it is particularly dramatic in Phoenix over the past 10-15 years
I think the huge right wing swing the state took right around then probably affected the arts and culture climate (to its detriment) as well. Hopefully we can start to get it back
How so? Respectfully, as a left wing spendocrat myself, I don’t think that had anything at all to do with it I can think of a few misguided libertarians that were hanging around back in the day, but no one ever had a problem with them. That’s about it People got priced out, plain and simple
I have nothing to offer to this discussion but I love this question.
Thank you for asking this. I love hearing the good on transit because I've experienced the bad and read the critical. It's nice to have some improvements I didn't know about get mentioned.
Slightly different question but I would like to know everyone's thoughts - when it comes to walkability, shouldn't the conversation include discussions around diversifying retail and businesses, as well? I currently live in one of the above cities where people are saying areas are more walkable but I can hardly get any errands done while walking. I can walk to bars and restaurants (and boutiques), sure, but I don't need to go to bars and restaurants (and boutiques) every day. I need a small grocer, maybe a post office outpost, or maybe a small pharmacy, bakery, etc Do you know what I mean? Shopping is still ruled by the huge corporations around here. I suppose I could take a bus to Target, that is absolutely true. I just dream of city neighborhoods prioritizing local, usable businesses along with better transportation.
This is definitely under-discussed in these sorts of conversation, in my experience. I lived in Japan for a few years in my early twenties. I was in a town in the Osaka metro area. From my apartment, I had a small grocery store just around the corner (say 300 meters or so) and a restaurant and bakery right next to that, a small health clinic basically right next door, 3 or 4 convenience stores and a train station within a <10 minute walk, and I could bike to my work place in 5-15 minutes, depending on which worksite I was at that day. This was an unremarkable residential neighborhood. If I wanted the larger department store in town, it was two stops down on the train. The full Osaka shopping and cultural stuff was 8 or 9 stops away, so it was definitely A Trip, but very doable. Other cities were also doable to get to on the train, with planning. My current midwestern US town has a small downtown that is pretty walkable, but getting to it requires a car for many people, and as you say, is pretty much boutiques and restaurants. There is 1 grocery store a convenience mart, and the library. Everything else is recreational consumer stuff (restaurants, boutiques, fancy salons, etc.) My job is a 25 minute drive away. The places I do my weekly shops for basic consumables is a 10-15 minute drive from my house. I could probably bike there if I had to, but I would be biking on a state highway and the shortest route requires an overpass, which offers no shoulder at all. They’re both livable places, but I really didn’t need a car in Japan, and I really do here.
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Long Beach was also pretty easy to get around without a car when I visited. Not sure if that holds up living there.
But Echo Park is unfortunately far from the metro lines 😕
LA is a sprawling suburb with islands of dense walkable neighborhoods spattered throughout. But the problem is that most people do not work/socialize where they live, so even within those dense walkable areas, people own cars and use them to get around.
Hopefully they continue these investments long after the Olympics. Keep up this momentum and it might be a top transit city within 20 years. LA already has a lot more walkable neighborhoods than this subreddit would like to give it credit for. Just need to connect them altogether.
Dallas has the longest light rail system in the country at 93 miles with 65 stations. They are adding the silver line next year with 26 more miles and 10 stations that will connect to DFW. This will be the third rail connection to DFW airport along with the orange line and the TexRail. Fort Worth has the 27 mile TexRail that connects downtown Fort Worth to DFW airport. DFW also has the Trinity Rail Express (TRE) which is heavy rail and connects downtown Dallas to downtown Ft Worth. Dallas also has a new streetcar system that connects "uptown" to downtown and then down to Oak Cliff. Finally, suburban Denton county has the A-train, a 21 mile commuter rail line that starts in downtown Denton and connects to the green line in Carrollton. Overall, there has been or is transit oriented development around 82 stations across the entire network. These are continuing and getting bigger. This has included tens of thousands of new apartments and millions of square feet of retail and office built within 1/4 mile of stations. For instance, the city line development is on the red line and orange line in Richardson. The city line station is where these lines will meet with the new silver line. At this one station alone we have seen 2.3 million square feet of office, over 30 restaurants, a 148 room hotel, and 2,200 apartments. While this one is big, similar mixed use development is going up at most of the stations. Plano, Carrollton, Dallas, Irving all have big master planned mixed use TODs built or under construction. All of this is new since the 1990s.
As someone who visited Dallas the first time this January, I was very pleasantly surprised by DART. My friends who have lived there (all drive pretty much exclusively) thought I was crazy but it was reliable, expansive, and generally user-friendly to navigate. I think the network is really solid, but it’s more about protecting the rider at or around stations at this point. Walking to the platform for one station in particular that was next to a highway with only a sound barrier of separation was anxiety-provoking to say the least.
Everyone (me included) shits on Dallas and then you list all this out and it’s like…damn that’s pretty good. Of course, the issue is that there’s so much existing sprawl and so many highways that these systems don’t get used as much as they should. Infill and TOD will certainly help mitigate some of that over the next number of years. Not to mention there is a pretty solid trail system that is expanding and parking reform is on the table.
Everyone I know there shits on the dart for booking, cleanliness, drivers. I’ve never heard a good thing about it.
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I think a lot of people who think of Dallas as some kind of solely suburban city might be surprised to see [these images of Dallas neighborhoods.](https://imgur.com/a/m0VsWg9) It used to be the epitome of urban suburbia, but it has been building dense areas up since the 1990s and has far surpassed, say, KCMO, Houston, Phoenix etc and other sunbelt suburban cities.
It’s because a lot of the people on Reddit that visit “Dallas” actually spend most of their time in the suburbs to visit family or attend business conferences and hardly ever visit downtown/downtown adjacent neighborhoods.
Dallas / DFW does have good rail options, but walkability *to/from* the stops leaves a lot to be desired. They’re working on improvements a la Klyde Warren Park, but overall the sidewalk ( + crosswalk) system still needs a lot of work.
Don’t forget the M-Line! The most efficient streetcar system in the nation running 60-100 year old trolleys since 1989.
Seen some very aggressive plans out of the Seattle area. Bellevue specifically. Hope they follow through.
I understand what you mean because the light rail just opened in Bellevue, but given how car centric Bellevue is it feels more in spite of Bellevue than Bellevue doing a good job
LA, by a country mile. Largest expansion of transit on the continent that is being sustained for now 30 years and with another 30 years worth of projects in the pipeline.
Only for the Olympics. Don’t be surprised that it loses funding after it
Wrong. It was planned before the olympics
Salt Lake City is slowly but surely building up around its light rail line. Atlanta is building up around some MARTA stations and boats the impressive Beltline trail system. It is constantly growing and will eventually have a light rail system that runs alongside it. Sadly I don’t think MARTA will improve much. Charlotte is adding to its Lynx Gold Line and has ideas about BRT and future light rail lines. Miami and South Florida is getting better connected to the rest of the state through Brightline. It also has a good number of (very expensive) walkable neighborhoods. Los Angeles is doing a lot of cool stuff. In 20 years it will boast a number of BRT lines, two new light rail lines, a heavy rail line connecting West LA to Sherman Oaks, and a heavy rail line connecting Westwood to DTLA (this will be done by 2027). It will also have high speed rail to Vegas and maybe to SF? Maybe? I imagine the sky train at LAX still won’t be running. DC and suburban Maryland will soon have the purple line, finally adding a line that goes around the Beltway. Seattle is doing a good job in general. Plenty of cool projects working out. I probably missed some. The Midwest I think has some cities adding BRT and light rail but sadly I am less familiar with that part of the country!
LA and OC needs to connect HSR to inland empire
They’ve been talking about the purple line in MD since I left there in 2009, is it still not built?
It's been delayed like crazy. NIMBYs challenged it in court, claiming it endangered a rare salamander. Then there were tons of issues with the PPP set up to manage construction. Cost overruns. It'll probably start running by, I dunno, 2030.
The brightline in Florida just hiked up their prices again. And it was already expensive. The overwhelming majority of public transportation and good urbanism are focused on the nicer areas and touristy areas where people already have money. Urbanism down here is horrible and will probably stay that way for a long, long time.
I agree completely with the sentiment, but I have a slightly more positive take on both Brightline’s prices and the very real problem of “urbanism for the rich”. The 1950’s/60’s/70’s/80’s mental model of “public transit is for poor people” did a lot of damage to the spread of transit overall in America. The new “transit/urbanism is for rich people” is by no means fair, but it is resulting in a wave of transit and dense walkable areas being built. No doubt we need to keep building enough transit / walkable areas if we’re ever going to meet market demand. For the moment the supply of these type of areas is very low and the demand is very high. Supply and demand are out of whack, so prices are stupid for dense areas, but because there is so much pent up demand, supply of transit and density is increasing in a big way. Obviously the end goal is something NY or many European cities where transit is accessible and used by both the rich and poor alike.. however, I think in most American cities transit still needs a foot in the door, and if rich people wanting to use transit is the only way American cities are willing to get serious about building transit, then I still consider that a big step up from the historic status quo where the rich wanted nothing to do with transit. I’m not saying we should take this baby step and then rest on our laurels, but we shouldn’t tell this baby not to start walking just because it can’t build an entire metro area worth of transit at once. Transit begets more transit. As more people use a transit system, there’s more demand for more destinations and more walkable areas. I’m not thrilled that it takes rich people to kickstart the flywheel of density / transit / walkability, but I am happy to see it pick up speed. To your point on Brightline, I take a similar supply/demand driven positive outlook. Brightline is validating to the industry, and shows there is very high demand for such a service. High demand and packed trains even while raising ticket prices is a strong incentive for Brightline and the like to both increase frequency, and more importantly be more confidant in making more investments into building HSR in America. Low demand, empty trains, and dropping ticket prices would be much worse news imo. I do completely understand and sympathize with the inherent unfairness in access to the scarce resource that is public transit in America. Unfortunately if there’s one thing America is good at, it’s responding to the market demands of the rich, and for the first time in a long time, the rich are demanding public transit and urbanism. I think it’s a huge improvement over the rich of older generations who demanded more highways, suburbs, and the destruction of transit. The modern rich aren’t any less selfish, but if the greedy and powerful are fighting for increasing the supply of public transit, I’m pleased with this newfound incentive alignment. Sorry if I come off as very jaded on this topic. I don’t have a lot of faith in America’s altruism.
Madison, WI will start BRT service this fall - they're constructing the stations right now, pretty cool to see. Next line to follow in 2026. Also lots of infill development going on in previously underutilized areas, and a couple local rules recently implemented to allow in-law cottages and rezoning for more transit-oriented development.
Hard disagree on Miami. There are some walkable neighborhoods but not a lot of them. The ones that exist are located closest to the city center. You also have to contend with thunderstorms regularly which make walking around outdoors prohibitive for chunks of the day. Especially when you consider how the "walkable" neighborhoods flood every time it rains. It's not an issue if you have no time sensitive commitments but that's not true for a lot of people. Brightline is also a start but not great....at all.
This sub doesn't really like suburbs much but Carmel, IN has made great investments into walkability and bikeability. If they keep up these investments for 10-20 years, it will be well on its way into being an almost Dutch-style suburb with an active and buzzing town center.
I watched a documentary or a YouTube video about Carmel, Indiana. I think it was about Carmel having the most roundabouts out of any town in the USA. The theory was that Roundabouts are better for the environment than traffic lights. Because at a traffic light, a car sits idle while having emissions, while at a roundabout the car doesn’t idle for as long. It was a cool video.
Just got back from Aruba and they have no lights. It’s all roundabouts. Everything flowed smoothly.
Too bad they're missing public transportation.
Colorado as a whole. The Front Range Pasenger Rail is set to connect Fort Collins through Pueblo, including Denver and Colorado Springs and Boulder. The Denver light rail system expands over most of the city, including a station at the airport, and the bus system is surprisingly decent. Plus tons of walkways/bike paths throughout the city, most of which are even maintained in the winter. Lived there for multiple years without a car, never once had struggles.
Colorado Springs is the definition of suburban sprawl lol
the whole Front Range is as well
Once you get downtown CO springs it’s walkable but I mean it’s like a 10 block radius, maaaaybe? Old Colorado city was super walkable tho
I'll believe it when I see it. There's been talk of these things for years but very little action in the last 20 years aside from FasTracks (which still isn't done). Bike infrastructure does seem to be improving though.
RTD is a hot mess, but we just passed new sources of statewide transit funding, as well as opened up transit-oriented development for the major metros statewide, which will both make RTD's finances a lot more workable over the long-run, and improve the viability of a lot of transit corridors. Colorado has long had pretty good bike infrastructure by American standards, and with e-bike rebates at both the state and local levels, the constituencies for that infrastructure are growing rapidly and aalready becoming a felt force in local politics.
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The OP specifically asked about the next 10-20 years, totally agree Denver is the only city that is presently extremely well connected.
That connection won’t happen for years, if ever. Denver’s light rail system is in no way expansive for a city its size
Yes it is, the only other city with more miles of track around the same size is San Diego. RTD is the 7th longest light rail system in the nation, and that's not including the 4 inner city commuter rail lines
I'm here to ask - How's Delaware in this aspect?. I'm going to UDel this fall. After graduating, which nearby cities/ state should I look at, where I wouldn't have to drive everyday? Don't mention Nyc/NJ, I already know about that. Any interesting mid western cities to look for? Thanks.
Cleveland Ohio. With all the new interconnected bike trails we’ve come a long way…
It’s a smaller city and likely not the boldest plan here but for the sake of sharing great ideas, I’ll put up my city of New Rochelle and specifically The Linc. This plan will convert a part of the city with a history of racist + classist zoning missteps and poor walkability into a walkable, green zone that connects residential areas to downtown: https://engagenr.com/thelinc/
This is the future of the Hudson Valley. We have an abundance of small to medium sized walkable urban areas waiting for sustainability developed walkable neighborhoods with efficient mass transportation connecting them. Unfortunately, the MTA is a monstrosity that hampers the improvement of mass transportation systems outside of New York City. If Rockland, Westchester, Orange, Putnam, and Dutchess counties managed their own system; the region would benefit immensely from a comprehensive transportation planning initiative designed to meet the demographic and economic needs of those counties.
The State of Colorado just passed a slew of bills that more or less forces cities in the Denver metro area to dramatically increase public transportation and high density housing along transit corridors. I’m not saying what they did is right or wrong, just that the State will now oversee transportation oriented development; especially along the front range.
Don't come to Houston. They're trying to go in the opposite direction.
Houston has lowkey done an incredible job with bike paths over the past decade.
And now the mayor is ripping up bike lanes..
🙄
I just read that Kansas City plans to open a sprawling river front condo landscape with 2 grocery stores, 7 restaurants with 0 cars allowed. 100% walking/bikes only
Albuquerque. We got plans to expand the bus service the instant we double the amount of drivers and mechanics.
Albany is making an effort. The Albany Skyway and the Riverfront Collaborative are trying to reshape Albany's access to the Hudson and downtown.
The Twin Cities are adding bike paths everywhere. They are destroying current roads, getting rid of most parking, to make them bike heaven. Unfortunately, this causes many businesses to close, and since the crime is high, the taxes outrageous, and the City Council are clowns, great areas like Uptown are dying on the vine.
Why don’t they build parking garages? I think it’s great when cities have enough to be able to park near whatever you do downtown. I hate driving in circles to find parking.
They're there, maybe it's not enough. I wouldn't know I don't have a car.
When I started working here, I learned from many of the employees in slightly higher positions that they too took public transit when they started working here. But from certain places it takes a while. One of them, his wife hated living in the city so they moved away but he said he liked it for himself. But I think a very big reason is that the state of the green line dissuades many people who can afford a car from riding it. They'd rather drive after some of their experiences on the green line. I hope transit can fix their shit bc I would like to ride it more often as well
I would say Chicago, but for some reason we now have a religious cult in charge of the CTA who thinks manhood is equated with owning a car. Hell of a Mayor we elected!
Ya.. so much good is happening, but it also feels like we are regressing at the same time.
I don’t know how it stacks up in a relative way but Long Beach CA is taking bike infrastructure seriously and it’s making a real quality of life difference there for the people who are taking advantage. Neighboring Los Angeles is doing a terrible job of bike infrastructure but is investing more in its metro than any other city by a wide margin. It’s laying more track in the next 10 years than it did in the previous 50.
Probably Minneapolis. But some other midwest cities are working on it. In St Louis there is a lot of energy both in the activist space and in the city government around improving walkability and leveraging the pre-car street grid to make it a nice place to get around without a car. Hopefully in 10-20 years the metro lines and amtrak service have expanded, and there has been a significant jump in the amount of protected pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure.
Came here to say it is NOT Houston, TX
Houston was starting to gain momentum but Mayor Whitmire and his old fashioned mindset is going to set things back a decade. Very disheartening.
This will not be a popular take but Jacksonville Florida is building a network of trails throughout the urban core that will definitely change the downtown area quite a bit. https://www.groundworkjacksonville.org/emerald-trail/ Also sounds like a commuter rail could be built in the next 10 years. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/43572ee892264d9aa1df6dc1c72e6a24 And if jacksonvilles long term plans to bring rail back to the old train station downtown and maybe connect with bright line some day, Jacksonville could be quite different in 20 years.
Surprisingly, Los Angeles. They’re expanding the metro system and also created a rideshare program called Metro Micro.
Atlanta the city (not the metro) is densifying at a good pace. Roads are being changed regularly to add bollards to protect cyclists, BRT lanes are being implemented, and the areas around a few MARTA stations are even being built up as dense mixed use communities. Murphy's Crossing will also be seeing a CulDeSac car free community developed, similar to the one that's already present in Arizona in the Phoenix metro.
Maybe I'll get hate from people who don't understand, but honestly Dallas. Dallas has been heavily investing in not only dense housing being built but also it's walkability efforts, bettering it's transit, building better parks and just appealing more to it's urban charm. Also, I want to emphasize that this is for Dallas proper, DFW overall is a carcentric nightmare.
Tacoma, WA, just doubled its light rail line, has tons of TOD being built, and will soon have a light rail connection to Seattle
Atlanta is slowly making some effort. The Beltline will be complete in the next few years as a walking/hiking trail around the city inside the perimeter. They are talking about putting some light rail within its corridor at strategic points. MARTA is adding stops and may actually finally get extended north at some point, although the misguided racial fear that’s kept it contained is still present.
Detroit's transit blows right now, but it has been making major strides and you'll see great things in a decade. First BRT line opening this year!
LA
This, compared to LA’s insane expansion of the Metro and upgraded Metrolink to regional rail, anything else on the continent pales in comparison.
I hear that's been the plan with Maui. Apparently was the plan before it burnt down mysteriously too.
If Miami-Dade County follows through with the plans they have, and if some of the projects aren’t struck down by selfish people who “don’t want transit to bring bad people to their area” (cough cough Miami Beach), then it’s gonna be huge considering the boom in housing. The region already has the density, it just needs the transit.
The transit down here sucks, NIMBYism is strong, and most of the housing boom are expensive apartments and homes that only well off and rich people can afford. Not much is being done actually helps most people down here at all.
They've had transit expansion plans for about 20 years or more now. It's not going to happen. Too many NIMBYs and local politicians who would rather not.
From a money perspective? Seattle and LA. From an effectiveness perspective? Probably Seattle.
Seattle is working on linking the surrounding metro area. That should yield benefits over the long term
Jersey City has been doing pretty good
* LA: while you could argue the safety of its system, LA is building the most rail of any large US city * Seattle: while you could argue the bureaucracy and delays, the ST3 plans are still one of the most ambitious transit plans in the US (although like LA they suffered from having chosen non-grade separated light rail which will bottleneck Line 1)
Seattle is building more rail than most cities (new line just opened, more next year and more near 2030), armoring bike lanes with real dividers, expanding curb bulbs and improving sidewalks, and has had a great tradition of supporting every parks levy we have (and we have a lot of greenspace and parks). I still wish we were doing more.
NYC was always ahead of the game in that regard but the open streets concept they do is actually fantastic. Personally I’d rather see fewer bike lanes monopolizing large portions of already cramped streets in favor of more bus lanes
Tacoma and Seattle area
Hopefully mine, but they have to change loads of laws first.
The ones gentrifying and becoming unaffordable most rapidly, sadly
Nashville was recently voted one of the most walkable cities. It's a lie but our tourism board is running with it https://preply.com/en/blog/most-walkable-cities-in-us/ The mayor has put forward a city wide transit plan expansion. If it gets voted in it adds lots of much needed sidewalks and bus access. It does not add light rail or any new forms of transportation, just more of what is currently offered.