COVID-19

The U.S. has a long and disturbing history of imposing bad policies on walkers — and selectively enforcing the good ones.

Travel times will rise dramatically — and by as much as 42 minutes each way in San Francisco! — if cities don't encourage residents to return public buses and trains and stay out of their cars when the coronavirus pandemic is over.

Let's get creative with the 70 percent of public space dedicated to storing and moving cars. There are a ton of extraordinary things the public can do with that valuable real estate.

The burgeoning open streets movement brought on by the pandemic has created more space for people, provided lessons in how to quickly test ideas successfully (like in Minneapolis and Oakland) and unsuccessfully (like in New York City), and shown that the responses by cities to rapidly changing needs can be equally rapid. (Plenty of other cities, including our home base of Washington, DC, have tried almost nothing, instead leaving people at risk on crowded sidewalks while wide streets sit empty and wasted as trips have evaporated.)

The Peach State is in a pickle — essentially choosing between safety for all and the mobility of drivers.

If people are taking buses, bus systems will need support for more rear-door boarding, protective gear for workers, cleanings, hazard pay, increased service to reduce crowding.

The elderly have the highest risk for dying of the novel coronavirus in the U.S. The car-focused world many of them live in just makes it worse.

We need to make walking, biking, and transit safer and more appealing, or we're going to see an increase in driving, congestion, pollution and crashes once the Stay at Home order is lifted.

The data we've got aren't painting the full picture — and we need more of it to help shape good policy.