@sethlaj.bsky.social a must read

Seth LaJeunesse @sethlaj.bsky.social, Paul Ryus, Wesley Kumfer, Sirisha Kothuri, and Krista Nordback: Among pedestrians, stress symptoms are greatest when “walking in proximity to collector and arterial streets and in areas with industrial and mixed (e.g. offices, retail, residential) land uses.”

Happy Bike Month to all who observe.

Traffic stops uncover serious crime in under 1% of cases, yet we keep treating enforcement as the answer to a road safety crisis rooted in poor land use decisions and street designs. The Policing Project and ACLU have a new report worth your attention. www.policingproject.org/news-main/we...

No high

Not everyone who drives has chosen to. New research by Wood et al. maps four archetypes of car dependence across England and Wales, and finds dependence tracks closely with disability, class, and ethnicity. The freedom to not drive is itself unevenly distributed. www.frontiersin.org/journals/sus...

Helpful indeed.

Damn I love NYC’s iconic water towers.

A hidden element of motonormativity: ubiquitous overestimation of the proportion of patrons who frequent businesses by car.

The 15-minute city isn’t the conspiracy. A true conspiracy is spreading everything so far apart driving becomes mandatory and then calling that freedom. usa.streetsblog.org/2026/04/27/u...

Try and tell me NYC isn’t a great city.

Wesley Marshall (@wesmars.bsky.social) and Norman Garrick: “All three of the fundamental measures of a street network – street connectivity, street network density, and street patterns – are highly significant and associated with influencing the choice to drive, walk, bike, or take transit.”

Seth LaJeunesse (@sethlaj.bsky.social): “Critical thought about infrastructure ... must not begin with a policy recommendation but with a refusal to take the built world at face value.” sethlajeunesse.substack.com/p/the-argume...

Science: The most powerful thing a bike advocate can do isn’t publish better research. It’s find the truck driver, the veteran, the contractor who already rides, and hand them the mic. Alliances move people. Arguments rarely do.

People who walk to work are the most satisfied commuters. While admitting the daunting conceptual complications in any such comparison, Evelyne St-Louis, Kevin Manaugh (@kmanaugh.bsky.social), Dea van Lierop and Ahmed El-Geneidy asked which commuters are happiest with their journey to work. ...

I’m afraid in too many places, Vision Zero has been “elite captured” and thereafter transmogrified to suite the tastes and preferences of wealthy motorists.

Sorry to wake you, neighbor.

See you there?

In the 1970s, Roger Hart, a geographer mapped how children in a Vermont town roamed freely. When he returned decades later, he found the children inside. The children didn't change. The built environment did, and with it, the geography of childhood. New essay: sethlajeunesse.substack.com

Just about daily, I read articles about how a driver was going 70+ in a 35. When, as a civil society, will we ask: why the hell is it possible to go 70+ in a 35 mph zone?

Omaha just made its entire all-electric bikeshare free to residents. The CEO’s reasoning: fares only covered 10–15% of costs anyway. At some point “free bikeshare” stops being radical and starts being honest about what public mobility is. usa.streetsblog.org/2026/04/21/b...

Walking is healthy, convivial, deeply human. It harms the least: other people, other species, the air, the water, the land. Civil societies design for people on foot. Full stop. TY to this stellar research team for making that case with rigor and urgency. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Time to align 4 textbooks with reality.

It would seem motonormativity was in fact, normative. Maddening nonetheless.

Black and Hispanic Americans walk more — more trips, longer distances. They also walk on the most dangerous roads. Defunding pedestrian infrastructure isn’t a neutral budget call. It’s a decision about whose movement we’ve decided to protect.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....

Forcing people to spend hundreds of hours a year in unpaid transit just to access their jobs. We call it "the commute." From 2019 through 2024, home prices up 48%, with incomes up 22%. This is not a traffic problem. It's an expropriation of time, unevenly distributed across class.

NYC community boards are pushing to move parking enforcement from NYPD back to DOT. Reflection: enforcement authority should sit with the agency whose mission is street safety, not the one whose culture treats parking as a low-priority afterthought. nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/04/13/p...

In my town, exceedingly few 8 year-olds can safely cross the ubiquitous stroad to get to and from their schools, yet 90%+ of the local discourse about transportation in these parts centers around where to park one's private property.

Beveridge et al. (2024) call the strategic attachment of right-wing grievance politics to roads, energy, and the 15-Minute City “infrastructural populism.” Worth checking out, especially if you work in road safety or active transport. compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Past time to mobilize MADD-level advocacy behind intelligent speed assistance (ISA) in all cars.

For max impact, add: “from trusted others.”

Probably missed the section about investing in transit.

"Traffic fatality rates increase with annual vehicle-miles. Planning decisions that increase vehicle travel increase crashes, and vehicle travel reduction policies increase safety." - @toddlitman.bsky.social www.planetizen.com/blogs/129507... @urbantruth.bsky.social @brenttoderian.bsky.social

Pittsburgh traffic calming.

No Kings Pittsburgh

Cities reallocated streets for walking and cycling during COVID because a crisis made it politically possible. New research asks: why does it take that? The plans were already written. doi.org/10.1177/0042...

Good day, everyone! Excited to share that I'll be speaking at the @policingproject's 2026 Convening on Right-Sizing Traffic Enforcement at NYU Law on April 27–28. If you work in traffic safety, criminal justice reform, or transportation policy, join me there: 2026trafficconvening.splashthat.com

Active transportation planning has been built around the image of a young, able-bodied person. Two wheels, two feet, forward motion. A new paper asks: what happens to everyone excluded by this design template? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Premise: Motonormativity (aka “car brain”) is the result of adapting, as humans so capably do, to auto-dominated physical, financial, social, and political environments. Thoughts?

Neuroinclusive design principles: Provide sensory-friendly spaces (acoustic/lighting control), clear, intuitive layout design, and diverse, adaptable, and quiet areas to manage stimulation. Sounds like car-free spaces.

Been thinking how anti-hope propaganda (e.g., your op-ed is useless, that protest was worthless—as though visible and collective actions never help build momentum) is little more than “I’m so clever and world-wide” signaling.

Having thought a good long while about how to incite measurable mode shift, I’m at last coming to terms with the notion that driving—in the vast majority of places in the U.S.—is an entirely rational behavior given the nature of our material, financial, political and social environments.

Not tonight.

Hear me out: fruit trees (orchards, guilds, idm) in public parks. Let’s get this going. Look at Cleveland Heights. Food need not be scarce. thelandcle.org/stories/5-ye...

Providing what quality social science does best: confirm what we’ve intuited all along. Build 🚲 infra and they will 🚲 share.google/s3T59zGKwfpw...

What our not-too-distant ancestors propped up (left) vs what we prop up today (right) 🧐

Truth

Tracks to this day.

What is happening to Carolina? 🏀

Two weeks today will be in Kingston at Queens University talking a little Reframing Our Roads. Open to the public if you are in the area.