The Transportation Security Administration is forwarding passenger lists to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in order to detain and deport travelers while denying them the chance to challenge the process, according to documents obtained by the New York Times. A Times report Friday revealed that information furnished by TSA provided the basis of ICE’s high-profile detention of university student Any Lucía López Belloza, who was deported following her arrest at Boston’s Logan airport en route to visit her family for Thanksgiving. On a near-daily basis since March, the agency has been sending files to ICE that include photographs of the person targeted for deportation, and flight information that ICE employs to detain people before they board.  The TSA’s participation in immigration enforcement is unprecedented, as is that of ICE with domestic travel; the program, kept secret until Friday’s report, represents yet another means of inducing collective fear en masse in travelers and other residents. It’s a widespread problem—other travelers have been detained at airports.  In the case of many immigrants like López, a student with no criminal record, those attacks defy orders by federal judges not to deport the people targeted—defiance facilitated by ICE’s collaboration with TSA, which prevents timely challenges. The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the TSA’s collaboration with ICE and the secrecy around it. As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote earlier this week about the second Trump administration’s immigration policy, “the US government is using its prosecutorial discretion—it is choosing—to normalize casual cruelty and overt racism. And it’s doing so ostensibly in the name of “protecting” the American people.”

Sean Duffy has spent most of his adult life as a professional attention-seeker. He is a former reality TV star, for one, and also a former Fox News host. Tough luck, then, that in the second Trump administration, Duffy got stuck as secretary of the most dreary of federal agencies—transportation. When was the last time that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration went viral? But Duffy has found a way to turn even the most mundane highway procurement matters into an opportunity for pandering to the MAGA base—and getting back on Fox News. His secret sauce? He has been enthusiastically using the agency to spread the Gospel and advance his mission to make America fecund again. “In Trump 2.0,” laments Peter Montgomery, the research director at the nonprofit civil liberties group, People for the American Way, “every place is a place to wage holy war.” Duffy was once the “resident playboy” on MTV’s “Real World,” where he danced naked, called a roommate a “bitch,” and talked about getting laid. Now, he’s a devout Catholic with nine children who never misses an opportunity to urge young men to get married and have big families. Legal experts say Duffy’s activities are a stark violation of the Constitution’s prohibition on mixing church and state, but his fervor seems to override his obligation to uphold the law. Shortly after Duffy joined a Trump cabinet full of MAGA influencers, he made his first attempt to grab headlines and advance his religious mission by promising to prioritize transportation funding for areas with high birth and marriage rates. The policy was roundly panned as unworkable and failed to generate the sort of media coverage a camera-hungry secretary would like to see. Duffy was learning the hard way that, unlike other federal agencies—Health and Human Services, for instance, or Education—the Transportation Department is a tough spot from which to launch a culture war. After toiling away for a few months to excise Biden-era “woke” procurement requirements and “Green New Scam” projects, Duffy finally landed on a more promising vehicle for his Christian worldview: The US Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York. Something of an anachronism, USMMA is the only service academy that falls under the purview of the US Department of Transportation rather than the Defense Department. It trains midshipmen in marine engineering and other skills needed to run large commercial ships. Graduates serve as officers in various military branches and in the private maritime industry. But as the US merchant marine industry has dwindled to 188 ships, down from 282 in 2000, it has endured repeated calls to shut it down. “It’s an educational institution for an age that the US doesn’t participate in anymore,” Capt. John Konrad, the editor of the maritime industry blog, gCaptain, told the New York Times in 2012. A string of sexual assault scandals threatened the academy’s accreditation in 2016. A survey highlighted in a 2017 congressional oversight hearing found that USMMA had the highest rate of sexual assaults but the lowest rate of formal reports of any of the nation’s five military service academies. For all its shortcomings, the Merchant Marine academy’s backwater status has made it the perfect venue for Duffy’s one-man religious crusade. In early April, the secretary visited the academy and made an official DOT video for Good Friday in which he spoke “with an amazing group of young midshipmen about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins.” The midshipmen—indeed, all men, even though the student body is more than 20 percent female—are shown talking to Duffy in the chapel, where they take turns quoting Bible passages to him. > On Good Friday, we commemorate the crucifixion of Jesus. During my visit to > the US Merchant Marine Academy, I spoke with an amazing group of young > midshipmen about Jesus’ sacrifice for our sins. > > A complaint from ONE “concerned citizen” got the Academy’s beautiful & > historic… pic.twitter.com/n66pgSLKOM > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) April 18, 2025 During his visit, Duffy discovered the perfect controversy on which to focus his righteous outrage. In his video, Duffy highlighted “Christ on the Water,” a 1944 10-by-19-foot painting near the academy chapel by Hunter Alexander Wood, a lieutenant in the US Maritime Service. In it, a giant glowing Jesus stands on a vast body of water, presiding over an open lifeboat of the survivors of a sunken merchant ship. The painting originally resided at the academy’s San Mateo, California, campus, but when it closed in 1947, “Christ on the Water” was moved to Kings Point and placed in Wiley Hall, a space that then served as a chapel. But in 1961, Wiley Hall became an administrative office, where for decades, midshipmen facing “honor boards” for misconduct were forced to sit in front of Jesus while they awaited disciplinary action. In early 2023, a group of more than a dozen fed-up alumni, staff, faculty, and midshipmen reached out to Mikey Weinstein, the founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, to complain about the overtly religious painting in the public space. Weinstein is a Jewish civil liberties lawyer and third-generation graduate of the US Air Force Academy, who spent 10 years working as a lawyer in the Judge Advocate General Corps and served as a legal counsel in the Reagan White House. The pugnacious advocate has been a thorn in the side of religious fundamentalists in the military for more than two decades. “Jerry Falwell used to refer to me as ‘the field general of the godless armies of Satan,’” he told me in a call from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from surgery. > “Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy > officially endorses Christianity over other faiths.” Immediately recognizing the constitutional issues with the Jesus painting, Weinstein fired off a complaint to Vice Admiral Joanna M. Nunan, whom President Joe Biden had appointed as the first woman to serve as superintendent of the USMMA. The painting, he wrote, has denigrated non-Christians. “Its location in the administration building implies that the Academy officially endorses Christianity over other faiths,” he continued, noting that his clients were Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Atheist, Agnostic, Buddhist, and one Native American Spiritualist. Nunan quickly responded and hung drapes over the painting while plans were made to move it. The MAGA faithful in Congress were outraged. In February 2023, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) wrote to Nunan, suggesting that she was “overtly hostile to religion” and called Weinstein’s complaints an “objective absurdity.” (Nunan left her post a few months later.) Ohio Republican Rep. Mike Turner even got the House Armed Services Committee to insert language in a Defense authorization bill that would have made it illegal for servicemembers and Defense officials to communicate with Weinstein and MRFF. (The language failed to make it into the final bill.) In September 2023, after a significant restoration, “Christ in the Water” was rehung in the academy’s chapel. But anger over the painting apparently festered, leaving Duffy an opportunity. During his April visit to the academy, he gave a speech in which he promised to get funding to improve the campus, and then closed by saying, “Could we bring Jesus up from the basement?” The room erupted into cheers, which Duffy encouraged while he assured the crowd he would restore the painting to its previous glory in Wiley Hall. A few weeks later, the Newark airport had a massive meltdown, as air traffic controllers walked off the job and hundreds of flights were canceled for two straight weeks through the first part of May. Nonetheless, Duffy found time to keep the Jesus painting saga alive. He announced on his official government accounts that he had commissioned a replica of the painting to hang in his DOT office. Moving the painting was “a personal affront to the midshipman at the academy,” he said in a DOT video. “This was such a touching story for me, I thought, ‘let’s get a replica of the painting and hang it in a place of prominence here at DOT.’ It looks beautiful.” > The @USMMAO Christ on the Water painting is a beautiful reminder of the power > of faith when we need it most. > > While we work on getting the piece out of the academy’s basement and back in a > place of prominence, I figured there was no better place to hang a copy than > right here at… pic.twitter.com/zrhtS6JRmw > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) May 7, 2025 Coming to the rescue of “Jesus in the Water” allowed Duffy “to trash the Biden administration as woke (and by implication anti-Christian), something sure to win him points in the White House,” says Montgomery. “And it generated a whole lot of fawning coverage of Duffy in religious-right and right-wing media.” Among those who weighed in was Ted Cruz. “Your statement—’Can we bring Jesus up from the basement?’—was more than rhetorical. I trust it will be seen as an imperative,” Cruz wrote in a letter covered in the conservative Daily Wire. “Thank you for your principled leadership, for defending our nation’s religious heritage, and for working to ensure that this government-commissioned memorial is returned to its rightful place.” Duffy continued to use the academy for proselytizing. During his commencement speech in June, he offered graduates dating advice and urged them to “always work out,” get married, and have lots of kids. And then he declared, “There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than themselves…A good sailor knows that in the end, only God can calm the seas and bring them to safety. So stay faithful and never underestimate the power of prayer.” > “There are two kinds of people in life: those who believe in God and those who > think they’re God. There’s something beautiful, humbling, and properly ordered > about a man and woman who understand that there is a power greater than > themselves.” His speech constituted “an astonishing violation of the Establishment Clause,” says Caroline Mala Corbin, a professor at the University of Miami law school. She says the First Amendment wasn’t just designed to separate church and state, but also to protect religious minorities, who may be coerced by a state-sanctioned religion to violate their own religious beliefs. “I’m willing to bet there are people in the Department of Transportation who have gone along with some religious activities that they felt really uncomfortable participating in,” she says. “And that’s why we have an Establishment Clause: So the government can’t force you to choose between your job and honoring your beliefs.” Duffy, a lawyer and former Wisconsin congressman, doesn’t seem familiar with that particular part of the Constitution. During a July hearing, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) grilled him about his pledge to return the Jesus painting to the hall. “You don’t think the Establishment Clause prohibits favoring a single religion over all others?” he asked. Duffy responded, “I would just note that we have freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.” Huffman attempted to probe further, asking, “What’s the message to Jews and Muslims and Hindus and non-religious folks in their disciplinary proceedings?” As the two talked over each other in a contentious exchange, Huffman concluded, grumbling, “We have a First Amendment for a reason.” Duffy’s brazen use of government resources to promote his vision of Christianity doesn’t surprise some observers who’ve been warning of the creep of Christian nationalism in the US government for years. “It’s a pretty standard playbook among MAGA influencers to throw a little God into the mix if you want to make the base happy,” says Matthew Taylor, a senior Christian scholar at the nonprofit Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies. “It’s a great path to career advancement because it builds out their constituencies. [Duffy] just has a much more limited set of options than, say, Pete Hegseth.” As Duffy has been hard at work imposing English-only requirements on truckers, banning rainbow crosswalks, and making official DOT videos blaming Democrats for shutting down the government, he has continued to visit the Merchant Marine academy to spread the Word. In early September, he showed up for a football game and made an official video of himself praying with the “Christian” players in the locker room before it started. > I was moved by this moment of prayer with the incredible young men of > @USMMAFootball before their game on Friday. Thank you! God is good > pic.twitter.com/VoG6mzzpAa > > — Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) September 9, 2025 Then, he walked along the sidelines offering pregame analysis as if he worked for ESPN. “The excitement on this field for this Academy is remarkable,” he said in a video, as players jogged by. “They have the most amazing prayer. You have Christian men dedicated to country, ready for a great game. This is America at its finest.” The video so enraged Weinstein that he dashed off an op-ed for the Daily Kos calling Duffy a “piece of shit” and noting that he’d “heard from Academy faculty, staff, midshipmen, and graduates who are neither Christians nor male and as you might imagine they are furious.” Duffy seems impervious to such complaints. On September 29, he put out an official DOT press release celebrating the “restoration” of “Christ on the Water” at the USMMA. The agency also produced an official YouTube video entitled, “Jesus Has Risen at the Merchant Marine Academy!” One of the midshipmen in the video thanks Duffy “for allowing us the opportunity to glorify God on campus.” Civil liberties groups find Duffy’s shameless use of federal resources to promote Christianity shocking. “The Department of Transportation’s duty is to serve the public—not to proselytize,” says Rachel Laser, President and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Weinstein was a little blunter. In a press release, he compared Duffy’s restoring the Jesus painting to “its original unconstitutional place” as “akin to a stray dog urinating on a neighborhood tree to mark its territory.” The Transportation secretary, he fumed, “is making sure to brand the Academy as conquered Christian nationalist territory. All others are not wanted and need not apply.” Of all the madness coming out of the Trump administration this year— the ICE violence, the destruction of the East Wing, the extrajudicial killings of people on boats in the Caribbean—Duffy using his official perch to promote Christianity may seem mild by comparison. But legal experts say his targeting of the USMMA, and the spread of Christian nationalism in the military more broadly, is potentially very dangerous. “Military officers are trained to resist unconstitutional orders,” explains Robert Tuttle, a professor of law and religion at George Washington University law school. “If you can have the troops believing they are fighting the cause of God and Christianity, you can get them to do things they might not do otherwise.” And in the current administration, where Trump has claimed the Lord saved him from an assassin’s bullet, he says, “You can very easily see how folks could get into a mindset that serving Trump is God’s will.” As with so many of the norms smashed by the Trump regime, there is no easy remedy for Duffy’s religious crusade. The Supreme Court has made it much more difficult to bring lawsuits over Establishment Clause violations. Weinstein says he’s considering legal action over the Jesus painting, but he needs a midshipman at the academy willing to head up the litigation—an extremely difficult challenge for a young person, he says. “If you become a plaintiff in a military system like this,” Weinstein says, “you are putting yourself in a position where you are like a tarantula on a wedding cake.” In the meantime, Weinstein has issued an alert urging parents to keep their kids away from the “unconstitutional, fundamentalist Christian nationalist filth-saturated institution that the US Merchant Marine Academy has tragically devolved into.” The Transportation Department, possibly too busy figuring out how to keep unpaid air traffic controllers on the job, did not respond to a request for comment.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Department of Transportation has ordered a review of federal funding for bike lanes and plans to target recent projects that “improve the condition for environmental justice communities or actively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The move, outlined in a department memo obtained by Grist, is part of the Trump administration’s broader goal of steering federal infrastructure spending toward fossil fuels. The restriction of federal funding comes as health experts warn that pedestrian deaths have surged.  DOT officials did not respond to requests for comment. The undated memo, reportedly sent March 11 to DOT offices, ordered an immediate freeze on all grants made after January 2021, invoking a series of executive orders aimed at dismantling federal diversity and climate initiatives. It instructs agency employees to identify projects that provide “funding to advance climate, equity, and other priorities counter to the Administration’s executive orders.”  It specifically targets any funds for projects “whose primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure,” one of many steps President Donald Trump has taken to boost the fossil fuel industry. It also calls for flagging projects that might prioritize benefits to disadvantaged communities or reduce emissions. This likely includes hundreds of grants awarded through Safe Streets and Roads for All, a $5 billion initiative created by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The goal of these efforts is to help communities address roadway safety concerns, said John Tallmadge, the executive director of Bike Durham, a nonprofit group in Durham, North Carolina. The group is supporting a series of infrastructure improvements in Durham that were counting on funding from the agency’s BUILD grants, also expected to be impacted.  > “Why are we pulling back grants where local governments choose what they want > to do?” The Durham project would add sidewalks, crosswalks, and bus stops to the city’s busiest transit corridor, which is used by thousands of people each day. “Numerous locations along this corridor have had pedestrian fatalities,” Tallmadge said.  These safety concerns were highlighted in a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found Americans were 50 percent more likely to die walking in 2022 than in 2013. Its author, Rebecca Naumann, said infrastructure that prioritizes safety over speed—like the improvements Durham hopes to build—are proven solutions that protect everyone.  She notes such designs have helped other high-income countries like Austria, Canada, and the UK, reduce traffic deaths in recent decades. The opposite is true of the United States, which as of 2022, saw more pedestrian deaths than any of the 27 other countries Naumann studied. One DOT project manager, who requested anonymity to avoid professional retaliation, told Grist the memo and executive orders will make it “terribly difficult to use federal transportation dollars where it’s needed most.” That’s bad news for more than bike lanes: Sustainable transportation not only makes communities safer, it lowers travel costs; improves access to important services like medical care, schools, and work; and helps mitigate climate change. “It’s frustrating to see these solutions stall when so many communities urgently need them,” he said. As Tallmadge noted, delays and revisions to federal grants will increase the cost of any project—the opposite of government efficiency. Other funding likely to be caught up in these restrictions include projects within the Active Transportation Infrastructure Investment Program, which supports multimodal travel; the BUILD program, which is designed to meet local or multi-jurisdictional needs; and the Reconnecting Communities Pilot Program, which helps communities harmed by past transportation decisions. Grants recently awarded under these initiatives range from $22 million for electric buses in Rhode Island to $157 million for green spaces that connect Atlanta neighborhoods currently divided by highways. “The restriction of funding for projects like the Atlanta BeltLine and its RAISE Grant is an assault on disadvantaged communities,” said US Representative Nikema Williams, the Democrat who represents a wide swath of Atlanta. “These projects improve equity and mobility while spurring economic development.” The DOT memo follows recommendations outlined in the conservative Project 2025 policy agenda that has shaped much of the Trump administration’s work. It broadly argued that the federal government should not fund local transportation projects. Instead, it suggests “user fees” and enabling “private companies to charge for transportation” through ventures like toll roads, removing air pollution regulations, restricting electric vehicle infrastructure, and eliminating federal funding for bicycle lanes, ferries, and other transportation.  Yet the move to restrict programs like BUILD, which rely on community input, clashes with Project 2025’s emphasis on local decision-making, said Caron Whitaker, the deputy executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. The Atlanta BeltLine project, for example, was supported by private and public entities at almost every level of government in Georgia. “Why are we pulling back grants where local governments choose what they want to do?” Whitaker asked. “If safety is a federal issue, then local fatalities matter,” she added. “If the economy is a federal issue, then local economies matter.”  The League, which is circulating a petition protesting the DOT’s review, recently led meetings with congressional aides to discuss the importance of funding active transportation projects. One former DOT employee who spoke to Grist said the scale of Safe Streets and Roads for All means there will be widespread impacts. “Safety is a bipartisan issue. You see Republican and Democratic representatives and senators touting the announcement whenever they’re awarded,” he said. “I think people just think, ‘Oh, this probably just hurts the coasts and the big cities,’ but there’s definitely rural areas that were trying to improve safety.” It takes a lot of work for communities to get a federal grant, he said, often alongside finding matching funds. Whitaker agreed. “It puts local governments in a tough position,” she said. Because the Safe Streets program funding was congressionally allocated, explicitly including “bicyclists,” Duffy’s move to cut programs “whose primary purpose is bicycling” may not even be legal. Last week, a coalition of nonprofits and cities sued to reverse the federal freeze on grants, including the March DOT memo. “Since our nation’s founding, the Constitution has made it clear,” wrote the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is litigating the case, that “Congress controls federal spending—not the president.” These efforts may limit transportation research nationwide. The DOT funds research and technical assistance projects through the National Cooperative Highway Research Program, or NCHRP, which is also subject to review. “If the policy memo is applied broadly to NCHRP, there could be a significant loss in current and future funding,” said Jennifer Dill, director of the Transportation Research and Education Center. “Without more research about countermeasures and solutions to fatalities, it will be hard to reverse that trend.” She worries Duffy’s recent actions will limit states’ ability to effectively use federal money for local priorities. At headquarters, morale among many of those remaining at the DOT is at new lows. At first, the DOT project manager who spoke to Grist hoped to come up with ways to rephrase grants to avoid triggering words like “equity” and “climate.” But the new restrictions have escalated into an unprecedented level of scrutiny, with the political appointees reviewing every contract.  “It’s gone beyond just switching words to get through the censor,” he said. “It’s not only making people afraid to carry on with good work that was underway, but has a chilling effect on everything we do going forward.”

Two decades ago, while serving in President George W. Bush’s Justice Department, Steven Bradbury wrote a series of memos justifying waterboarding that former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called “permission slips for torture.” Now, Bradbury is Donald Trump’s nominee for Deputy Transportation Secretary. When it comes to writing about why the United States can torture, Bradbury is less well-known than his former Justice Department colleague John Yoo. Still, he played a key role. Bradbury wrote three top-secret legal memos in 2005 that were essential to providing the Central Intelligence Agency with legal cover for subjecting detainees to “enhanced interrogation techniques” including waterboarding. In the public version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 “torture report,” Bradbury’s name and memos appear 178 times. In 2017, Trump picked Bradbury to be general counsel at the Transportation Department. After Trump left office, Bradbury served as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and played a key role in shaping the section of Project 2025 that covers the Department of Transportation. The president is now giving him a promotion. (The White House and Bradbury did not respond to requests for comment.) Bradbury was confirmed in 2017 over the vehement objections of McCain, who was infamously tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The late Arizona senator argued about Bradbury’s legal opinions in a passionate floor speech in which he made that clear that the memos “provided a legal framework for the use of methods including waterboarding, which is a mock execution and an exquisite form of torture in which the victim suffers the terrible sensation of drowning.” “We are speaking of an interrogation technique that dates from the Spanish Inquisition and has been a prosecutable offense for over a century,” McCain continued. “It is among the crimes for which Japanese war criminals were tried and hanged following World War II and was employed by the infamous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.” McCain stressed that “a more meticulous justification for torture is still a justification for torture—and arguably a more pernicious one.” Bradbury included an often sickening level of detail to support his conclusions in the memos, one of which ran 46 pages. It sanctioned thirteen interrogation techniques including “Dietary manipulation,” “Nudity,” “Cramped confinement,” “Stress positions, “Sleep deprivation (more than 48 hours,)” and “Waterboard.” There is also a paragraph largely devoted to justifying the CIA’s decision to force detainees to wear only an adult diaper:  > If the detainee is clothed, he wears an adult diaper under his pants. > Detainees subject to sleep deprivation who are also subject to nudity as a > separate interrogation technique will at times be nude and wearing a diaper. > If the detainee is wearing a diaper, it is checked regularly and changed as > necessary. The use of the diaper is for sanitary and health purposes of the > detainee; it is not used for the purpose of humiliating the detainee, and it > is not considered to be an interrogation technique. CIA records tell another story. They make clear that a central “purpose” of the diapers was to “cause humiliation” and to “induce a sense of helplessness,” according to the Senate torture report. Bradbury also signed off on the CIA’s policy of forcing detainees to remain awake for potentially more than one week at a time. He concluded that forcing detainees to appear naked before male and female interrogators was acceptable partly because “it is very unlikely that nudity would be employed at ambient temperatures below 75°F.” Bradbury wrote that giving detainees only “bland, unappetizing, but nutritionally complete” foods was permissible partly because detainees were weighed weekly to ensure they were not losing too much weight. The amount of time detainees could be doused with 41-degree water—an excruciatingly low temperature—was calculated down to the minute following a review of the medical literature on hypothermia. About waterboarding, Bradbury’s memo explained: > We understand that the effect of the waterboard is to induce a sensation of > drowning. This sensation is based on a deeply rooted physiological response. > Thus, the detainee experiences this sensation even if he is aware that he is > not actually drowning. We are informed that based on extensive experience, the > process is not physically painful, but that it usually does cause fear and > panic.  In blending a desire for order and cleanliness with a willingness to sanction almost unspeakable acts, Bradbury evoked some of the most shameful chapters of modern history. As Marguerite Feitlowitz writes about Argentina’s Dirty War in her book A Lexicon of Terror, “Language helps to ritualize torture; it lends structure, provides a ‘reason,’ an ‘explanation,’ an ‘objective.'” She continues, “Moreover, the special idiom provided categories for practices otherwise out of bounds. It was enabling.” In another memo, Bradbury took on a different legal question: If the 13 interrogation techniques did not count as torture when used on their own, did it constitute torture when they were used in combination? No, Bradbury concluded. It did not. Bradbury went on in the memo to write about using “nudity, sleep deprivation (with shackling and, at least at times, with use of a diaper), and dietary manipulation” to bring detainees to “‘a baseline dependent state.’” He frequently refers to his other writing in italicized shorthand: “As we discussed in Techniques…In Techniques, we recognized…In Techniques, we explained.” He was using the royal we. Only Bradbury’s signature appears at the bottom of both memos. McCain made his repulsion clear in his 2017 Senate speech. “The memos that bear his name made it possible for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—a monster and a murderer, to be sure, but a detainee held in US custody under the laws of armed conflict—to be water-boarded 183 times,” the senator said. “This technique was used so gratuitously that even those applying it eventually came to believe that there was no reason to continue. They were ordered to do so anyway.”  He continued: “The memos that bear Mr. Bradbury’s name also made it possible for a Libyan detainee and his wife to be rendered to a foreign country, where that woman was bound and gagged while several months pregnant, and photographed naked as several American intelligence officers watched…I am told that picture still exists, somewhere in the archives that record this shameful period in our history.”

Luchia Brown used to bomb around Denver in her Subaru. She had places to be. Brown, 57, works part time helping to run her husband’s engineering firm while managing a rental apartment above their garage and an Airbnb out of a section of the couple’s three-story brick house. She volunteers for nonprofits, sometimes offering input to city committees, often on transportation policy. “I’m a professional good troublemaker,” she jokes when we meet in her sun-soaked backyard one fine spring day. She’s also an environmentally conscious type who likes the idea of driving less. Brown bought a regular bike years ago, but mainly used it just for neighborhood jaunts. “I’m not uber-fit,” she says. “I’m not a slug, but I’m not one of the warriors in Lycra, and I don’t really want to arrive in a sweat.” Then, a couple of years ago, she heard Denver was offering $400 vouchers to help residents purchase an e-bike—or up to $900 toward a hefty “cargo” model that can haul heavier loads, including children. She’d considered an e-bike, but the city’s offer provided “an extra kick in the derriere to make me do it.” She opens her garage door to show off her purchase: a bright blue Pedego Boomerang. It’s a pricey model—$2,600 after the voucher—but “it changed my life!” she says. Nowadays, Brown thinks nothing of zipping halfway across town, her long dark-gray hair flying out behind her helmet. Hills do not faze her. Parking is hassle-free. And she can carry groceries in a crate strapped to the rear rack. She’d just ridden 4 miles to a doctor’s appointment for a checkup on a recent hip replacement. She rides so often—and at such speeds—that her husband bought his own e-bike to keep up: “I’m like, ‘Look, when you’re riding with me, it’s not about exercise. It’s about getting somewhere.’” She ended up gifting the Subaru to her son, who works for SpaceX in Texas. The only car left is her husband’s work truck, which she uses sparingly. She prefers the weirdly intoxicating delight of navigating on human-and-battery power: “It’s joy.” Many Denverites would agree. Over the two years the voucher program—pioneering in scale and scope—has been in effect, more than 9,000 people have bought subsidized e-bikes. Of those, more than one-third were “income qualified” (making less than $86,900 a year) and thus eligible for a more generous subsidy. People making less than $52,140 got the most: $1,200 to $1,400. The goal is to get people out of their cars, which city planners hope will deliver a bouquet of good things: less traffic, less pollution, healthier citizens. Research commissioned by the city in 2022 found that voucher recipients rode 26 miles a week on average, and many were using their e-bikes year-round. If even half of those miles are miles not driven, it means—conservatively, based on total e-bikes redeemed to date—the program will have eliminated more than 6.1 million automobile miles a year. That’s the equivalent of taking up to 478 gas-powered vehicles off the road, which would reduce annual CO2 emissions by nearly 190,000 metric tons. Subsidizing electric vehicles isn’t a new concept, at least when those vehicles are cars. President Barack Obama’s 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act offered up to $7,500 to anyone who bought an electric car or light truck, capped at 200,000 per automaker. In 2022, President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act created new and similar rebates without the caps. The US government has spent more than $2 billion to date subsidizing EV purchases, with some states and cities kicking in more. Weaning transportation off fossil fuels is crucial to decarbonizing the economy, and EVs on average have much lower life-cycle CO2 emissions than comparable gas vehicles—as little as 20 percent, by some estimates. In states like California, where more than 54 percent of the electricity is generated by renewables and other non–fossil fuel sources, the benefits are even more remarkable. Now, politicians around the country have begun to realize that e-bikes could be even more transformative than EVs. At least 30 states and dozens of cities—from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Raleigh, North Carolina—have proposed or launched subsidy programs. It’s much cheaper than subsidizing electric cars, and though e-bikes can’t do everything cars can, they do, as Brown discovered, greatly expand the boundaries within which people work, shop, and play without driving. Emissions plummet: An analysis by the nonprofit Walk Bike Berkeley suggests that a typical commuter e-bike with pedal assist emits 21 times less CO2 per mile than a typical electric car (based on California’s power mix) and 141 times less than a gas-powered car. And e-bikes are far less resource- and energy-intensive to manufacture and distribute. Cities also are coming to see e-bikes as a potential lifeline for their low-income communities, a healthy alternative to often unreliable public transit for families who can’t afford a car. And that electric boost gives some people who would never have considered bike commuting an incentive to try, thus helping facilitate a shift from car dependency to a more bikeable, walkable, livable culture. In short, if policymakers truly want to disrupt transportation—and reimagine cities—e-bikes might well be their secret weapon. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I’m an avid urban cyclist who rides long distances for fun, but I don’t ride an electric. So when I landed in Denver in April, I rented a Pedego e-bike to see how battery power would affect my own experience of getting around a city. Reader: It was delightful. Denver is flat-ish, but it’s got brisk winds and deceptively long slopes as you go crosstown. There are occasional gut-busting hills, too, including one leading up to Sunnyside, the neighborhood where I was staying. Riding a regular bike would have been doable for an experienced cyclist like me, but the battery assist made longer schleps a breeze: I rode 65 miles one day while visiting four far-flung neighborhoods. On roads without traffic, I could cruise along at a speedy 18 miles an hour. The Cherry Creek bike trail, which bisects Denver in a southeast slash, was piercingly gorgeous as I pedaled past frothing waterfalls, families of ducks, and the occasional tent pitched next to striking pop art on the creekside walls. My Apple watch clocked a decent workout, but it was never difficult.  Author Clive Thompson (left) and Mike Salisbury ride together in Denver.Theo Stoomer I did a lunch ride another day with Mike Salisbury, then the city’s transportation energy lead overseeing the voucher program. Tall and lanky, with a thick mop of straight brown hair, Salisbury wears a slim North Face fleece and sports a beige REI e-bike dusted with dried mud. He’s a lifelong cyclist, but the e-bike, which he’d purchased about two years earlier, has become his go-to ride. “I play tennis on Fridays, and it’s like 6 miles away,” he says, and he always used to drive. “It would never, ever have crossed my mind to do it on my acoustic bike.”  E-bikes technically date back to 1895, when the US inventor Ogden Bolton Jr. slapped an electric motor on his rear wheel. But for more than a century, they were niche novelties. The batteries of yore were brutally heavy, with a range of barely 10 miles. It wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery, relatively lightweight and energy-dense, began plunging in price 30 years ago that e-bikes grew lighter and cheaper. Some models now boast a range of more than 75 miles per charge, even when using significant power assist. All of this piqued Denver’s interest. In 2020, the city had passed a ballot measure that raised, through sales taxes, $40 million a year for environmental projects. A task force was set up to figure out how to spend it. Recreational cycling has long been a pastime in outdoorsy Colorado, and bike commuting boomed on account of the pandemic, when Covid left people skittish about ridesharing and public transit. E-bikes, the task force decided, would be a powerful way to encourage low-emissions mobility. “We were thinking, ‘What is going to reduce VMT?’”—vehicle miles traveled—Salisbury recalls. His team looked at e-bike programs in British Columbia and Austin, Texas, asked dealers for advice, and eventually settled on a process: Residents would get a voucher code through a city website and bring it to a local dealer for an instant rebate. The city would repay the retailer within a few weeks. A program was launched in April 2022 with $300,000, enough for at least 600 vouchers. They were snapped up in barely 10 minutes, “like Taylor Swift fans flooding Ticketmaster,” Salisbury wrote in a progress report. His team then secured another $4.7 million to expand the program. “It was like the scene in Jaws,” he told me: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” Every few months, the city would release more vouchers, and its website would get hammered. Within a year, the program had handed out more than 4,700 vouchers, two-thirds to income-qualified riders. Mike Salisbury, former head of Denver’s e-bike voucher programTheo Stroomer Denver enlisted Ride Report, an Oregon-based data firm, to assess the program’s impact: Its survey found that 65 percent of the e-bikers rode every day and 90 percent rode at least weekly. The average distance was 3.3 miles. Salisbury was thrilled. The state followed suit later that year, issuing e-bike rebates to 5,000 low-income workers (people making up to 80 percent of their county’s median income). This past April, state legislators approved a $450 tax credit for residents who buy an e-bike. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, told me he found it very pleasant, and highly unusual, to oversee a program that literally leaves people grinning: “People love it. There’s nothing we’ve done that has gotten as much positive feedback.”  I witnessed the good cheer firsthand talking to Denverites who’d taken advantage of the programs. They ranged from newbies to dedicated cyclists. Most said it was the subsidy that convinced them to pull the trigger. All seemed fairly besotted with their e-bikes and said they’d replaced lots of car trips. Software engineer Tom Carden chose a cargo model for heavy-duty hauling—he’d recently lugged 10 gallons of paint (about 110 pounds) in one go, he told me—and shuttling his two kids to and from elementary school. Child-hauling is sort of the ideal application for cargo bikes. I arrange a ride one afternoon with Ted Rosenbaum, whose sturdy gray cargo e-bike has a toddler seat in back and a huge square basket in front. I wait outside a local day care as Rosenbaum, a tall fellow clad in T-shirt and khakis, emerges with his pigtailed 18-month-old daughter. He straps her in and secures her helmet for their 2.5-mile trek home. “It’s right in that sweet spot where driving is 10 to 15 minutes, but riding my bike is always 14,” Rosenbaum says as we glide away. “I think she likes this more than the car, too—better views.” The toddler grips her seatposts gently, head swiveling as she takes in the sights. Rosenbaum rides slowly but confidently; I’d wondered how drivers would behave around a child on a cargo bike, and today, at least, they’re pretty solicitous. A white SUV trails us for two long blocks, almost comically hesitant to pass, until I give it a wave and the driver creeps by cautiously. At the next stoplight, Rosenbaum’s daughter breaks her silence with a loud, excited yelp: There’s a huge, fluffy dog walking by. E-bikes stir up heated opposition, too. Sure, riders love them. But some pedestrians, drivers, dog walkers, and “acoustic” bikers are affronted, even enraged, by the new kid on the block. This is particularly so in dense cities, like my own, where e-bikes have proliferated. By one estimate, New York City has up to 65,000 food delivery workers on e-bikes. Citi Bike operates another 20,000 pay-as-you-go e-bikes, and thousands of residents own one. When I told my NYC friends about this story, probably half, including regular cyclists, blurted out something along the lines of, “I hate those things.” They hate when e-bikers zoom past them on bike paths at 20 mph, dangerously close, or ride the wrong direction down bike lanes on one-way streets. And they hate sharing crowded bikeways with tourists and inexperienced riders. > “You have to build” bike infrastructure first, notes one advocate. “If we’re > going to wait for the majority of the population to let go of car dependency, > we’re never going to get here.”  In September 2023 near Chinatown, a Citi Bike customer ran into 69-year-old Priscilla Loke, who died two days later. After another Citi Biker rammed a Harlem pedestrian, Sarah Pratt, from behind, Pratt said company officials insisted they weren’t responsible. Incensed, a local woman named Janet Schroeder co-founded the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance, which lobbies the city for stricter regulations. E-bikes should be registered, she told me, and she supports legislation that requires riders to display a visible license plate and buy insurance, as drivers do. This, Schroeder says, would at least make them more accountable. “We are in an e-bike crisis,” she says. “We have older people, blind people, people with disabilities who tell me they’re scared to go out because of the way e-bikes behave.” Dedicated e-bikers acknowledge the problem, but the ones I spoke with also felt that e-bikes are taking excessive flak due to their novelty. Cars, they point out, remain a far graver threat to health and safety. In 2023, automobiles killed an estimated 244 pedestrians and injured 8,620 in New York City, while cyclists (of all types) killed eight pedestrians and injured 340. Schroeder concedes the point, but notes that drivers at least are licensed and insured—and are thus on the hook for casualties they cause. Underlying the urban-transportation culture wars is the wretched state of bike infrastructure. American cities were famously built for cars; planners typically left precious little room for bikes and pedestrians, to say nothing of e-bikes, hoverboards, scooters, skaters, and parents with jogging strollers. Cars hog the roadways while everyone else fights for the scraps. Most bike lanes in the United States are uncomfortably narrow, don’t allow for safe passing, and are rarely physically separated from cars­—some cyclists call them “car door lanes.” The paths winding through Denver’s parks are multimodal, meaning pedestrians and riders of all stripes share the same strip, despite their very different speeds.  Even in this relatively bike-friendly city, which has 196 miles of dedicated on-road bike lanes, riding sometimes requires the nerves of a daredevil. I set out one afternoon with 34-year-old Ana Ilic, who obtained her bright blue e-bike through the city’s voucher program. She used to drive the 10 miles to her job in a Denver suburb, but now she mostly cycles. She figures she clocks 70 miles a week by e-bike, driving only 10. Her evening commute demonstrates the patchiness of Denver’s cycling network. Much of our journey is pleasant, on quieter roads, some with painted bike lanes. But toward the end, the only choice is a four-lane route with no bike lanes. Cars whip past us, just inches away. It’s as if we’d stumbled into a suburban NASCAR event. “This is the worst part,” she says apologetically. The fear of getting hit stops lots of people from jumping into the saddle. But officials in many cities still look at local roadways and conclude there aren’t enough cyclists to justify the cost of more bike lanes. It’s the chicken-egg paradox. “You have to build it,” insists Peter Piccolo, executive director of the lobby Bicycle Colorado. “If we’re going to wait for the majority of the population to let go of car dependency, we’re never going to get here.”  E-bikes can be rented in Denver. The city also has a voucher program to subsidize e-bike purchases.Theo Stroomer Advocates say the true solution is to embrace the “new urbanist” movement, which seeks to make cities around the world more human-scaled and less car-dependent. The movement contends that planners need to take space back from cars—particularly curbside parking, where vehicles sit unused 95 percent of the time, as scholar Donald Shoup has documented. That frees up room, potentially, for wider bike lanes that allow for safe passing. (New York and Paris are among the cities now embracing this approach.) You can also throw in “traffic calming” measures such as speed bumps and roads that narrow at intersections. One by-product of discouraging driving is that buses move faster, making them a more attractive commute option, too.  > The Inflation Reduction Act initially included a program that could have put > nearly 4.5 million e-bikes on the road. It was cut. Cities worldwide are proving that this vision is achievable: In 2020, the mayor of Bogota added 17 permanent miles of bike lanes to the existing 342 and has plans for another 157. (Bogota and several other Colombian cities also close entire highways and streets on Sundays and holidays to encourage cycling.) Paris, which has rolled out more than 500 miles of bike lanes since 2001, saw a remarkable doubling in the number of city cyclists from 2022 to 2023—a recent GPS survey found that more people now commute to downtown from the inner suburbs by bicycle than by car. In New York City, where bike lane miles have quintupled over the past decade, the number of cyclists—electric and otherwise—has also nearly doubled. Colorado has made some progress, too, says Toor, the Energy Office director. For decades, state road funds could only be used to accommodate cars, but in 2021, legislators passed a bill to spend $5.4 billion over 10 years on walking, biking, and transit infrastructure—“because it’s reducing demand” on roadways, he explains. The transportation department also requires cities to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets, which is why Denver ditched a long-planned $900 million highway expansion in favor of bus rapid transit and safer streets. One critique of e-bike programs, ironically, involves the climate return on investment. Research on Swedish voucher programs found that an e-bike typically reduces its owner’s CO2 emissions by about 1.3 metric tons per year—the equivalent of driving a gas-­powered vehicle about 3,250 miles. Not bad, but some researchers say a government can get more climate bang for the subsidy buck by, for example, helping people swap fossil fuel furnaces for heat pumps, or gas stoves for electric. E-bike subsidies are “a pretty expensive way” to decarbonize, says economist Luke Jones, who co-authored a recent paper on the topic. That’s because e-bikes, in most cases, only replace relatively short car trips. To really slash vehicular CO2, you’d need to supplant longer commutes. Which is clearly possible—behold all those Parisians commuting from the inner suburbs, distances of up to 12 miles. It’s been a tougher sell in Denver, where, as that 2022 survey found, only 5 percent of trips taken by voucher recipients exceeded 9 miles.  But the value of e-bikes lies not only, and perhaps not even principally, in cutting emissions. Cycling also eases traffic congestion and improves health by keeping people active. It reduces the need for parking, which dovetails neatly with another new urbanist policy: reducing or eliminating mandatory parking requirements for new homes and businesses, which saves space and makes housing cheaper and easier to build. And biking has other civic benefits that are hard to quantify, but quite real, Salisbury insists. “It has this really nice community aspect,” he says. “When you’re out riding, you see people, you wave, you stop to chat—you notice what’s going on in the neighborhoods around you. You don’t do that so much in a car. It kind of improves your mood.” That sounds gauzy, but studies have found that people who ride to work do, in fact, arrive in markedly better spirits than those who drive or take transit. Their wellbeing is fueled by fresh air and a feeling of control over the commute—no traffic jams, transit delays, or hunting for parking. “It’s basically flow state,” says Kirsty Wild, a senior research fellow of population health at the University of Auckland. Nobody has ascribed a dollar value to these benefits, but it’s got to be worth something for a city to have residents who are less pissed off. What would really make e-bikes take off, though, is a federal subsidy. The Inflation Reduction Act initially included a $4.1 billion program that could have put nearly 4.5 million e-bikes on the road for $900 a pop, but Democratic policymakers yanked it. Subsequent bills to roll out an e-bike tax credit have not made it out of committee. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- E-bike sharing companies are sometimes seen as gentrifiers, but Denver’s experience shows that e-bikes can be more than just toys for the affluent. Take June Churchill. She was feeling pretty stressed before she got her e-bike. She’d come to Denver for college, but after graduating had found herself unemployed, couchsurfing, and strapped for cash. Having gender-­transitioned, she was estranged from her conservative parents. “I was poor as shit,” she told me. But then she heard about the voucher program and discovered that she qualified for the generous low-income discount. Her new e-bike allowed her to expand her job search to a wider area—she landed a position managing mass mailings for Democratic campaigns—and made it way easier to look around for an affordable place to live. “That bike was totally crucial to getting and keeping my job,” she says. It’s true that e-bikes and bikeshare systems were initially tilted toward the well-off; the bikes can be expensive, and bikeshares have typically rolled out first in gentrified areas. Denver’s answer was to set aside fully half of its subsidies for low-­income residents. Churchill’s experience suggests that an e-bike can bolster not only physical mobility, but economic mobility, too. Denver’s low-­income neighborhoods have notoriously spotty public transit and community services, and, as the program’s leaders maintain, helping people get around improves access to education, employment, and health care. To that point, Denver’s income-qualified riders cover an average of 10 miles more per week than other voucher recipients—a spot of evidence Congress might contemplate. But there are still some people whom cities will have to try harder to reach. I ride one morning to Denver’s far east side, where staffers from Hope Communities, a nonprofit that runs several large affordable-­housing units, are hosting a biweekly food distribution event. Most Hope residents are immigrants and refugees from ­Afghanistan, Myanmar, and other Asian and African nations. I watch as a procession of smiling women in colorful wraps and sandals collect oranges, eggs, potatoes, and broccoli, and health workers offer blood-pressure readings. There’s chatter in a variety of languages. Jessica McFadden, a cheery program administrator in brown aviators, tells me that as far as her staff can tell, only one Hope resident, a retiree in his 70s named Tom, has snagged an e-bike voucher. The problem is digital literacy, she says. Not only do these people need to know the program exists, but they also have to know when the next batch of vouchers will drop—and pounce. But Hope residents can’t normally afford laptops or home wifi—most rely on low-end smartphones with strict data caps. Add in language barriers, and they’re generally flummoxed by online-first government programs. Tom was able to get his e-bike, McFadden figures, because he’s American, is fluent in English, and has family locally. He’s more plugged in than most. She loves the idea of the voucher program. She just thinks the city needs to do better on outreach. Scholars who’ve studied e-bike programs, like John MacArthur at Portland State University, recommend that cities set up lending libraries in low-income areas so people can try an e-bike, and put more bike lanes in those neighborhoods, which are often last in line for such improvements. In Massachusetts, the nonprofit organizers of a state-funded e-bike program operating in places like Worcester, whose median income falls well below the national average, found that it’s crucial to also offer people racks, pannier bags, and maintenance vouchers. As I chat with McFadden, Tom himself suddenly appears, pushing a stroller full of oranges from the food distro. I ask him about his e-bike. He uses it pretty frequently, he says. “Mostly to shop and visit my sister; she’s over in Sloan Lake”—a hefty 15 miles away. Then he ambles off. McFadden recalls how, just a few weeks earlier, she’d seen him cruising past on his e-bike with his oxygen tank strapped to the back, the little plastic air tubes in his nose. “Tom, are you sure you should be doing that?” she’d called out. Tom just waved and peeled away. He had places to be.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The United States, with its enormous highways, sprawling suburbs and neglected public transport systems, is one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. But this arrangement of obligatory driving is making many Americans actively unhappy, new research has found. The car is firmly entrenched as the default, and often only, mode of transport for the vast majority of Americans, with more than nine in 10 households having at least one vehicle and 87 percent of people using their cars daily. Last year, a record 290 million vehicles were operated on US streets and highways. However, this extreme car dependence is affecting Americans’ quality of life, with a new study finding there is a tipping point at which more driving leads to deeper unhappiness. It found that while having a car is better than not for overall life satisfaction, having to drive for more than 50 percent of the time for out-of-home activities is linked to a decrease in life satisfaction. “Car dependency has a threshold effect—using a car just sometimes increases life satisfaction but if you have to drive much more than this people start reporting lower levels of happiness,” said Rababe Saadaoui, an urban planning expert at Arizona State University and lead author of the study. “Extreme car dependence comes at a cost, to the point that the downsides outweigh the benefits.” The new research, conducted via a survey of a representative group of people across the US, analyzed people’s responses to questions about driving habits and life satisfaction and sought to find the link between the two via a statistical model that factored in other variables of general contentment, such as income, family situation, race, and disability. The results were “surprising,” Saadaoui said, and could be the result of a number of negative impacts of driving, such as the stress of continually navigating roads and traffic, the loss of physical activity from not walking anywhere, a reduced engagement with other people, and the growing financial burden of owning and maintaining a vehicle. > “We need to get the voices of those who can’t drive—disabled people, seniors, > immigrants, poor folks—into the room.” “Some people drive a lot and feel fine with it but others feel a real burden,” she said. “The study doesn’t call for people to completely stop using cars but the solution could be in finding a balance. For many people driving isn’t a choice, so diversifying choices is important.” Decades of national and state interventions have provided the US with an extensive system of highways, many of which cut deep into the heart of its cities, fracturing communities and bringing congestion and air pollution to nearby residents, particularly those of color. Planning policies and mandatory car parking construction have encouraged suburban sprawl, strip malls with more space for cars than people, and the erosion of shared “third places” where Americans can congregate. As a result, even very short journeys outside the house require a car, with half of all car trips being under three miles. Most of the decisions driving this are made at a state level, although Joe Biden’s administration vowed to help rebuild public transit networks beleaguered by the Covid pandemic and to tear down certain divisive highways. However, the federal government has continued pouring far more money into building and expanding roads than in any alternatives to driving. Next year, more than $60 billion in federal funding is planned for roads and bridges. A small sliver of the American public actively chooses to live without a car because they are able to live in the few remaining walkable communities in the US, but for most of those without a car it is a forced deprivation due to poverty or disability. Being without a car can itself be expensive and isolating, according to Anna Zivarts, who was born with a neurological condition that prevents her from driving. Zivarts, based in Seattle, is the author of the book When Driving Is Not an Option and advocates on behalf of those unable to drive. “Seattle has a solid bus system but everyone who can afford a car has a car. I’m often the only parent going to any sort of event without a car. Everything is built around cars,” she said. “We are just locked into a system of driving that is meant to be more enjoyable but isn’t. I walk five minutes with my kid to the school bus stop and yet other parents make that journey to the stop by car. Is this really how you want to spend your life?” A long-term effort is required to make communities more walkable and bolster public transport and biking options, Zivarts said, but an immediate step would be simply to consider the existence of people without cars. “We need to get the voices of those who can’t drive—disabled people, seniors, immigrants, poor folks—into the room because the people making decisions drive everywhere,” she said. “They don’t know what it’s like to have to spend two hours riding the bus.”

Dani Izzie, a wheelchair user with quadriplegia, tried to take public transit, as she usually does, when visiting Miami in 2022. Heading to catch a bus, Izzie came to the end of a street without curb cuts—meaning she couldn’t safely cross it to the bus stop. She tried to get an accessible taxi; none were available. The door-to-door paratransit service wasn’t an option, since it needs advance scheduling. It ultimately took a call to police, who helped her down the curb. This wasn’t the first time, says Izzie, that “the absurdity of one little oversight” limited her autonomy and mobility. The real estate website Redfin’s Walk Score rates Miami the sixth-most walkable large city in the United States. But its methodology, Redfin confirmed to me, does not account for accessibility. Since the 1990s, there’s been a push among urbanists to reduce city driving and its hazards: American pedestrian fatalities number more than 7,000 a year, and with each car in a city releasing close to 5 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, car reliance harms everyone else, too. > The rate of vehicle-pedestrian deaths among wheelchair users was 36 percent > higher than that of the overall population. Some US cities—including Los Angeles; Tempe, Arizona; and Jersey City, New Jersey—have made great strides toward limiting cars, mainly by designating car-free streets or areas. But car-free zones have met opposition, and not just from irate conservatives. Opponents of such initiatives have called them “exclusionary,” “not progressive or inclusive,” and bound to “hurt people with disabilities,” pointing out that many disabled people simply need cars to get around. But Anna Zivarts, director of Disability Rights Washington’s Disability Mobility Initiative and author of the book When Driving Is Not an Option, points out that disabled people are actually less likely to drive than nondisabled people “and more likely to get around [by] walking and rolling and taking transit.” Car-heavy cities are also disproportionately dangerous for disabled folks: A 2015 study by Georgetown University researchers found that the rate of vehicle-pedestrian deaths among wheelchair users was 36 percent higher than that of the overall population. Zivarts herself bikes, not drives, around her city of Seattle: She lives with the eye condition nystagmus, as does her son, which makes operating a car unsafe. Fighting for greater accessibility, she says, would also “make the world more accessible for him.” That doesn’t just mean car-free zones, but issues like sidewalk safety: One of her initiative’s first major successes was helping to get an additional $83 million added to a levy on Seattle’s November ballot to fix and expand sidewalks for accessibility, which ultimately passed with 66 percent support. Maddy Ruvolo, a disabled transportation planner for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, focuses on mobility and accessibility. Ruvolo acknowledges that some disabled people find car ownership “important for their mobility”: It “wouldn’t be fair to say that no disabled people need cars,” she says. But she’s concerned to see “accessibility used as a political football.” In Vancouver, opponents argued that a bike lane hurt disabled drivers’ ability to get to a public park—though some disabled people themselves supported the initiative—and got most of the lane removed by the Vancouver Park Board. And vice versa: Ruvolo says it’s also harmful for people to throw “statistics around disability and transportation as a way of arguing for active transportation projects that don’t necessarily take accessibility into account.” Evidence shows that walkable communities are good for disabled people—even beyond simply letting them enjoy the considerable benefits of being outdoors. A 2022 study in the Journal of Transport Geography scored walkability across six Southern ­California counties by housing density, street connectivity, and land use mix: An area with abundant sidewalks and, say, pharmacies and grocery stores was rated more walkable. It found that a modest increase in walkability meant disabled people took transit 33 percent more often than before—likely because better walkability made transit stops easier to get to. Making cities accessible is also an equity issue. Ruvolo is a member of the US Access Board, an independent federal agency that works toward better accessibility for people with disabilities. Disabled people, she notes, are more likely to have lower incomes—they’re twice as likely to live below the poverty line—and to rely on public transit by necessity. In San Francisco, for example, low-income people with certain disabilities have qualified for free bus and subway rides since 2015. Paris does the same for many aging adults and some disabled people. That’s much cheaper than gas and auto maintenance. Retrofitting sidewalks and adding shuttles can make a dent in a city’s budget. But in theory, as pointed out by Sarah Kaufman, executive director of New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, in a Scientific American opinion piece, you can solve that problem by linking accessibility to congestion pricing. Before it was blocked for months by Gov. Kathy ­Hochul, New York City’s charge on Manhattan traffic was set to help fund accessibility upgrades, like elevators, to its subways. Hochul decided to restore that plan in November, ahead of a possible ban on such charges under Donald Trump’s administration. As Kaufman wrote in August, when Hochul was still preventing its implementation, “the defeat of this measure—meant to bolster public transit use and reduce city traffic—served as yet another accelerant down the road to a looming crisis across the US: the growing inability of aging boomers to travel.” London has had congestion prices since 2003—disabled people who qualify are exempt from its costs—and just four years later, reports showed that the system had generated tens of millions of dollars annually for transit improvement. > Better public transit improves quality of life for disabled people, Ruvolo > says, “as long as accessibility is baked in there.” There are undeniably cases in which walkability and accessibility come head-to-head: Take some historic pedestrian-­only alleyways in Charleston, South Carolina, which can be hard to navigate with a walker due to their unevenness. Yet there’s often an affordable solution to be found. In 2022, when San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park permanently closed a major boulevard to cars, opponents, including city Supervisor Connie Chan, said it was disabled and aging folks who would pay the price. But free shuttles, ­accessible to anyone, now bridge the gap. Other roads throughout the park remain open to drivers. For Ruvolo, the key to solving accessibility problems is soliciting disabled residents’ input—and using it. She and her team meet regularly with disability groups in San Francisco, incorporating their ideas into new and existing initiatives. In 2023, for example, the team had disabled students test electric scooters for the city’s scooter-share program. Their feedback helped make the program better for disabled people: Officials picked more scooters with backrests and larger wheels that keep them stable. Better public transit improves the quality of life for disabled people, Ruvolo says, “as long as accessibility is baked in there.”

Flying during the Thanksgiving holiday is likely to be terrible—as usual. The lobbying group Airlines for America anticipates a record 31 million people will take to the air to visit family and friends for the holiday. But no matter how terrible the flying experience might be this season, it will probably be as good as it gets for a long time to come, as the second Trump administration plans to take a wrecking ball to commercial airline regulation. Under Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the federal Department of Transportation has made a priority of tackling some of the biggest gripes Americans have had about air travel. To that end, the DOT has extracted nearly $4 billion in reimbursements and refunds owed to passengers since President Joe Biden took office, including forcing Southwest Airlines to refund more than $600 million to more than 2 million passengers who were stranded after it canceled 60 percent of its flights over two days during the December holidays in 2022. The DOT also fined the airline $140 million for a host of operational failures and consumer protection violations. Under Biden, the DOT has forced most of the major airlines to guarantee free rebooking, meals, and even hotel accommodations when they cause a major delay. And it’s issued at least $225 million in penalties against airlines for violating consumer protection laws—a record. For example, in October, the DOT fined American Airlines $50 million for mistreating passengers with disabilities, including by breaking or losing thousands of wheelchairs. Airlines destroying or breaking wheelchairs has been a chronic issue. In 2016, the Obama administration tried to remedy the problem with new regulations that would force airlines to track how often they broke or lost wheelchairs and mobility scooters. But as Mother Jones’ Russ Choma reported, the previous Trump administration, larded up with lobbyists from the industry, delayed the rule implementation almost immediately upon taking office. It finally took effect nearly two years later, and only after Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), a combat veteran and double amputee whose wheelchair had been lost by an airline, secured an amendment in Congress that forced the DOT’s hand. The Biden DOT has also proposed rules to mandate disclosure of airline junk fees. This past spring, it issued a final rule requiring airlines to grant automatic cash refunds to people when the airlines cancel or cause significant delays to flights. The rule, which went into effect last month, spares travelers endless fights with airline bureaucracy to get their money back. And in August, the DOT proposed a rule to ban airlines from charging families extra fees to sit next to their children, a proposal that could save a family of four $200 on a round trip. > View this post on Instagram > > > > > A post shared by Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@secretarypete) Unsurprisingly, the airlines hate all of this and long to return to the days when they could cancel your flight, keep your money, and force you to pay $50 so your toddler doesn’t have to sit next to a stranger on the plane. Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said this month that President-elect Donald Trump promised “to take a fresh look at the regulatory environment, the bureaucracy that exists in government, the level of overreach that we have seen over the last four years within our industry. I think that will be a breath of fresh air.” Trump promises to usher in that fresh air, as the authors of Project 2025 made clear in their blueprint for the new administration, writing, “Another problematic area is aviation consumer protection.” Trump has signaled his intention to prioritize airline profits over passengers with his selection of former Wisconsin Rep. Sean Duffy as his transportation secretary. A former reality TV star and Fox News host, Duffy previously was a lobbyist for the airline industry, which has ferociously fought Biden’s consumer measures with both lawsuits and gobs of lobbying money. Duffy will be charged with following through on all the plans laid out in Project 2025, which include moving parts of the air traffic control system out of Washington in the hopes that much of the staff would quit—the 21st-century version of the Reagan administration firing striking air traffic controllers. Project 2025 envisions a world with far fewer controllers and even fewer control towers, and it advocates axing funding for research and development, as well as subsidies for essential air service to small, rural airports. People who live in Altoona, Pennsylvania, or Beckley, West Virginia, can probably kiss their airports goodbye—but air taxis for rich people will be a high priority in the Trump DOT. So enjoy your miserable airport journey to see grandma for Thanksgiving this year. Next year’s trip promises to be much, much worse.