Issues & Insights

After hitting a 40-year high in 2022, pedestrian deaths decreased in 2023, according to a report published Wednesday by the Governors Highway Safety Association. The report shows a 5.4% fall in the annual number of pedestrian deaths, the first decrease since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The world’s largest experiment in driverless cars is underway on the busy streets of Wuhan, a city in central China with 11 million people, 4.5 million cars, eight-lane expressways and towering bridges over the muddy waters of the Yangtze River. A fleet of 500 taxis navigated by computers, often with no safety drivers in them for backup, buzz around.

Amtrak expects ridership to top pre-COVID 2019 levels this year for the first time and reach a record high even though it has less capacity. Ridership was 20% higher in the first seven months of Amtrak's budget year that began Oct. 1, and ticket revenue was up 10% versus the same period in 2023.

When I-25 was constructed through Denver, highway engineers moved a river. It was the 1950s and nothing was going to get in the way of building a national highway system. Colorado’s governor and other dignitaries, including the chief engineer of the state highway department, acknowledged the moment by posing for a photo standing on bulldozer tracks, next to the trench that would become I-25.

Left turns are a big problem everywhere. They have a lot of what traffic engineers call "conflict points," with pedestrians as well as other cars. The diverging diamond design eliminates some of those conflicts, lowering the risk of side impact or T-bone crashes, which tend to be especially deadly.

The COVID-19 pandemic took a massive toll on public transit, as commuter buses and trains were nearly empty during the early months of the pandemic. Passenger fares and other transit agency revenue dropped by 30 percent between 2020 and 2021. The federal government intervened, spending more than $69 billion in relief funds – five times the amount spent on public transportation in 2019, according to the Congressional Research Service

HopSkipDrive started out in 2014 as a network of vetted ridesharing drivers who could supplement existing school transportation networks by safely ferrying students to and from school. Although the CareDriver network, as it's called, is still its core product, the company launched an artificial intelligence-powered transportation network optimization software, now called RouteWise AI, in 2023 in response to the bus driver shortage. It is currently used in about 20 school districts and counting.

Our nation’s climate-changing carbon emissions have declined overall since 1990, but one sector — transportation — is headed in the opposite direction. Transportation remains the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, accounting for 29 percent of the country’s total. After a brief, pandemic-related drop of 13 percent in 2020, transportation emissions accelerated in 2021, increasing by 12 percent.

California could eventually join the European Union in requiring all new cars to alert drivers when they break the speed limit, a proposal aimed at reducing traffic deaths that would likely impact motorists across the country should it become law.

Nia Smith, a born-and-bred Brooklyn resident, has long Covid and drives just about everywhere, every day. Finding a spot to park is never easy. She has gotten up as early as 4 a.m. to move her car if it is double-parked, and there just aren’t as many spaces in her neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant, as there used to be.