In the summer of 2019, a group of Dutch scientists conducted an experiment to collect “digital confessions.” At a music festival near Amsterdam, the researchers asked attendees to share a secret anonymously by chatting online with either a priest or a relatively basic chatbot, assigned at random. To their surprise, some of the nearly 300 participants ­offered deeply personal confessions, including of infidelity and experiences with sexual abuse. While what they shared with the priests (in reality, incognito scientists) and the chatbots was “equally intimate,” participants reported feeling more “trust” in the humans, but less fear of judgment with the chatbots. This was a novel finding, explains Emmelyn Croes, an assistant professor of communication science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. Chatbots were then primarily used for customer service or online shopping, not personal conversations, let alone confessions. “Many people couldn’t imagine they would ever share anything intimate to a chatbot,” she says. Enter ChatGPT. In 2022, three years after Croes’ experiment, OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence–powered chatbot, now used by 700 million people globally, the company says. Today, people aren’t just sharing their deepest secrets with virtual companions, they’re engaging in regular, extended discussions that can shape beliefs and influence behavior, with some users reportedly cultivating friendships and romantic relationships with AIs. In chatbot research, Croes says, “there are two domains: There’s before and after ChatGPT.” Take r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, a Reddit community where people “ask, share, and post experiences about AI relationships.” As MIT Technology Review reported in September, many of its roughly 30,000 members formed bonds with AI chatbots unintentionally, through organic conversations. Elon Musk’s Grok offers anime “companion” avatars designed to flirt with users. And “Friend,” a new, wearable AI product, advertises constant companionship, claiming that it will “binge the entire [TV] series with you” and “never bail on our dinner plans”—unlike flaky humans. The chatbots are hardly flawless. Research shows they are capable of talking people out of conspiracy theories and may offer an outlet for some psychological support, but virtual companions also have reportedly fueled delusional and harmful thinking, particularly in children. At least three US teenagers have killed themselves after confiding in chatbots, including ChatGPT and Character.AI, according to lawsuits filed by their families. Both companies have since announced new safety features, with Character.AI telling me in an email that it intends to block children from engaging in “open-ended chat with AI” on the platform starting in late November. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, which produces Mother Jones, is suing OpenAI for copyright violations.) As the technology barrels ahead—and lawmakers grapple with how to regulate it—it’s become increasingly clear just how much a humanlike string of words can captivate, entertain, and influence us. While most people don’t initially seek out deep engagement with an AI, argues Vaile Wright, a psychologist and spokesperson for the American Psychological Association, many AIs are designed to keep us engaged for as long as possible to maximize the data we provide to their makers. For instance, OpenAI trains ChatGPT on user conversations (though there is an option to opt out), while Meta intends to run personalized ads based on what people share with Meta AI, its virtual assistant. “Your data is the profit,” Wright says. Some advanced AI chatbots are also “unconditionally validating” or sycophantic, Wright notes. ChatGPT may praise a user’s input as “insightful” or “profound,” and use phrases like, I’m here for you—an approach she argues helps keep us hooked. (This behavior may stem from AI user testing, where a chatbot’s complimentary responses often receive higher marks than neutral ones, leading it to play into our biases.) Worse, the longer someone spends with an AI chatbot, some research shows, the less accurate the bot becomes. People also tend to overtrust AI. Casey Fiesler, a professor who studies technology ethics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, highlights a 2016 Georgia Tech study in which participants consistently followed an error-prone “emergency guide robot” while fleeing a building during a fake fire. “People perceive AI as not having the same kinds of problems that humans do,” she says. At the same time, explains Nat Rabb, a technical associate at MIT’s Human Cooperation Lab who studies trust, the way we develop trust in other humans—perception of honesty, competence, and whether someone shares an in-group—can also dictate our trust in AI, unlike other technologies. “Those are weird categories to apply to a thermostat,” he says, “But they’re not that weird when it comes to generative AI.” For instance, he says, research from his colleagues at MIT indicates that Republicans on X are more likely to use Grok to fact-check information, while Democrats are more likely to go with Perplexity, an alternative chatbot. Not to say AI chatbots can’t be used for good. For example, Wright suggests they could serve as a temporary stand-in for mental health support when human help isn’t readily accessible—say, a midnight panic attack—or to help people practice conversations and build social skills before trying them out in the real world. But, she cautions, “it’s a tool, and it’s how you use the tool that matters most.” Eugene Santos Jr., an engineering professor at Dartmouth College who studies AI and human behavior, would like to see developers better define how their chatbots ought to be used and set guidelines, rather than leaving it open-ended. “We need to be able to lay down, ‘Did I have a particular goal? What is the real use for this?'” Some say rules could help, too. At a congressional hearing in September, Wright implored lawmakers to consider “guardrails,” which she told me could include things like stronger age verification, time limits, and bans on chatbots posing as therapists. The Biden administration introduced dozens of AI regulations in 2024, but President Donald Trump has committed to “removing red tape” he claims is hindering AI innovation. Silicon Valley leaders, meanwhile, are funding a new PAC to advocate for AI industry interests, the Wall Street Journal reports, to the tune of more than $100 million. In short, we’re worlds away from the “digital confessions” experiment. When I asked Croes what a repeat of her study might yield, she noted that the basic parameters aren’t so different: “You are still anonymous. There’s still no fear of judgment,” she says. But today’s AI would likely come across as more “understanding,” and “empathetic”—more human—and evoke even deeper confessions. That aspect has changed. And, you might say, so have we.

To the untrained eye, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Ice Core Facility in Lakewood, Colorado, doesn’t look like much: a boxy brick building packed with shelves of ice-filled metallic cylinders 10 centimeters in diameter. But to the more than 100 scientists who pull from its frozen records annually, it’s a treasure trove of information on our changing climate. The facility holds more than 13 miles—200 football field lengths—of tubes of ice collected from Antarctica, Greenland, and other parts of North America. Their contents can date back hundreds of thousands of years, allowing researchers to engage in scientific time travel. Crucially, the ice provides clues as to what’s in store for our climate down the road. But now President Donald Trump’s assault on science has put this invaluable resource at risk. “If you drill down in an ice sheet, the deeper you go, the older the ice gets,” says Benjamin Riddell-Young, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies methane isotopes. One recent experiment involved analyzing molecules trapped in ancient ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide, including cores recovered from around 2 miles underground. “When the snow falls and compresses into ice, it forms these little bubble cavities that trap the air at the time the ice was formed,” he explains. Those tiny bubble cavities can lead to big discoveries. Researchers have used prehistoric ice samples to determine global temperatures, weather patterns, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the distant past. Ice cores have provided some of the best data for tracking climate change—and the researchers who use the NSF facility have racked up an impressive roster of publications. Just last year, some of them found that atmospheric CO2 is increasing 10 times faster than at any point in the last 50,000 years. In another study, published by the journal Nature in January, Riddell-Young and his former adviser, Ed Brook, a professor of earth, ocean, and atmospheric sciences at Oregon State University, linked increased wildfire activity during the last ice age to abrupt shifts in the prevalence of greenhouse gases. Riddell-Young and Brook were studying the past, but their knowledge helps researchers better understand the effects of climate change today—including its likely role in the fires that ravaged Los Angeles. “We study the past in part because we want to calibrate climate models that we use for the future,” Brook says. The urgency of ice-core research has intensified in recent years because, as the planet warms up, the historical record captured in the ice is slowly melting. The miles-deep ice should be safe for another century, but researchers are already finding water when they drill closer to the surface. “We came too late,” Margit Schwikowski, a recently retired professor at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, lamented in a report. “We need to speed up to safeguard heritage ice cores.” Rising temperatures aren’t the only threat. Funding for Riddell-Young and Brook’s study and others like it also comes from the NSF, which keeps the Colorado facility cold and running. In the two months after their Nature study was published, the Trump administration fired 10 percent of the agency’s 1,500-person staff, including several specialists working in Antarctica. Federally funded researchers have lost grants mentioning climate change, leading their peers to remove the phrase from research proposals. But for scientists using the Ice Core Facility and studying the history of global climate, that can be exceedingly difficult. The Trump administration also has proposed slashing the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, another key funder of climate research, by at least a quarter. Reductions of such magnitude would endanger that agency’s collaborations with universities—including the one where Riddell-Young works. Geopolitical tensions, too, imperil US involvement in Arctic research. Since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, international scientists have been cut off from Russian sections of the Arctic. Trump’s aggression toward Greenland and Canada also poses threats to the reserves. “It makes science diplomacy virtually impossible,” says Klaus Dodds, who studies polar geopolitics at the University of London. Dodds, who is British, describes the United States as a “premier polar power” because of decades of investment in studying the region. But when asked about the future, his optimism fades: “Unfortunately, it could be imperiled because of these swinging funding cuts.” Oregon State’s Brook concurs. “I fear we’ll lose our competitive edge in science,” he says. The science world is hedging its bets as US leadership wanes. In 2021, researchers from France, Italy, and Switzerland created the Ice Memory Foundation to collect and save ice cores from locations that are particularly endangered by climate change. Collaborating with 10 nations, the group, which is funded by private philanthropists and governments, collects cores from glaciers at risk of melting and plans to store them deep in the Antarctic Plateau, where temperatures are more stable. Such efforts are essential, Riddell-Young points out, because “there’s questions that we don’t know we should be asking yet.” And then, “maybe 30 years down the line, we’ll say, ‘If only we had an ice core from this location, we could have answered this, but now that ice core is gone.’” The administration has continued to chip away at Arctic science, alongside widespread cuts to all US science disciplines. In April, the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota lost its funding. In early May, NOAA decommissioned its snow and ice data products. A mid-May analysis by the New York Times found that there is an 88 percent monetary reduction in the average grants awarded this year for polar science, as opposed to the average of previous years. Last month, the Trump administration released its proposed budget, which encourages Congress to slash the NSF by over half, citing “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” While Antarctic infrastructure funding, which maintains the Arctic stations, remains relatively unscathed, 70 percent of the research funding in the Office of Polar Programs is proposed to be cut.

Nearly 30 years ago, in September 1996, Hurricane Fran swept through North Carolina. It was the most expensive natural disaster in state history—causing an estimated $10 billion in damage in today’s dollars and killing 37 people across the region. Raleigh took a direct hit, with the storm toppling thousands of trees and dumping nearly 9 inches of rain. In Rochester Heights, a historically Black neighborhood southeast of downtown, most homes were flooded. This, as it turns out, wasn’t a freak accident. The neighborhood, built beginning in 1957, was among the first suburban enclaves marketed to Black families, who were excluded from other areas of then-segregated Raleigh. It was full of attractive, one-story brick homes with wide, grassy lawns. But because the low-lying neighborhood flanked a swamp that received untreated sewage discharge and stormwater runoff from downtown Raleigh, it was prone to flooding during storms. (Construction of Interstate 40 through the neighborhood more than a decade later made the problem worse.) Eventually, the 1972 Clean Water Act banned unpermitted disposal of raw sewage in wetlands, but by then the marshy land had become an illegal dumping ground for other waste, including tires, glass, and old appliances. One resident, 69-year-old Steve Blalock, who’s lived in the neighborhood for much of his life, recalls surfing the sewage discharge in a metal tub as a child. After Fran, residents decided to take matters into their own hands. Led by local environmental advocate Norman Camp, a coalition of church and community members started cleaning up the wetland, pulling some 60 tons of garbage out of the swamp over the decades, the weight of around 10 African elephants. Eventually, with $1.2 million in funding, the city further restored the swamp and built an education center. Today, the wetland is home to beavers, mink, box turtles, and great blue herons. During my visit in November, the park’s assistant manager, Celia Lechtman, pointed out native plants such as arrow arum and jewelweed, and trees, including green ash, box elder, and red maple. For a time, according to community members, some of the worst flooding subsided. The neighborhood’s revival is a blip of good news on a relatively bleak landscape. America’s wetlands were historically viewed as useless areas that stood in the way of development. More than half of the 221 million acres of wetlands that existed when Europeans settled have been destroyed, and six states—California, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio—have lost at least 85 percent of their wetlands, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Wetlands act as “natural sponges,” absorbing up to an estimated 1.5 million gallons of water per acre, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they provide more than half of America’s $5.9 billion seafood harvest, including trout, bass, crab, shrimp, and oysters. They also filter pollutants from the water and sequester carbon dioxide. About half of our endangered and threatened species on wetlands. As sea levels rise and climate change drives more intense storms, flooding is becoming increasingly damaging—and expensive. In 2024 alone, there were 27 weather and climate disasters that will cost at least $1 billion each to recover from, according to NOAA. “You cannot beat wetlands in their natural state for holding back floodwaters,” says Kelly Moser, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. Indeed, according to a 2020 analysis of dozens of tropical storms along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, counties with more coastal wetlands coverage saw less damage, saving an average of more than $4.5 million per square mile (and a median of more than $235,000). > “You cannot beat wetlands in their natural state for holding back > floodwaters.” And yet, the destruction continues. Between 2009 and 2019, the United States lost about 1,047 square miles of wetlands, a 2024 FWS report notes—an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. Making matters worse, in its 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative ­majority dramatically narrowed the definition of wetlands protected by the Clean Water Act to only those with a “continuous surface connection” to streams, oceans, rivers, or lakes—leading the EPA to exclude up to 63 percent of once-protected wetlands. Project 2025 would strip protections from even more of them. Further exacerbating the problem, the US Army Corps of Engineers appears poised to expedite hundreds of industry permits that could affect wetlands under President Donald Trump’s “national energy emergency.” And hundreds of federal employees at the primary agencies tasked with protecting wetlands—the EPA, FWS, and NOAA—were fired during Trump’s first weeks back in office. Building energy infrastructure near wetlands is risky enough, but putting homes on wetlands is often a “double whammy,” explains Todd BenDor, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who studies the environment and urban planning. Doing so can put people in potential flood zones while reducing the wetlands acreage that acts as a safeguard. North Carolina offers buyouts for homeowners in flood-prone areas. But for every buyout from 1996 to 2017, BenDor and his colleagues found that developers constructed 10 more homes in floodplains—just down the street from the bought-out homes, in some cases. Flooding remains a problem in Rochester Heights. Restoring the wetland has likely helped, but it hasn’t been enough to make up for all the upstream development in Raleigh, which was crowned the nation’s third-fastest-growing large city last year. Rapid growth means more structures—homes, office buildings, hotels—and therefore more “impervious surfaces” for water to collect and run off into the creeks that feed the park. Wetlands, in other words, are among our best options for fighting flooding, but they can’t be the only solution. Still, change is afoot. In Raleigh, as of 2023, city project managers are now required to consider the use of “green stormwater infrastructure,” such as rain gardens, green roofs, artificial wetlands, and permeable pavement, in construction. Under the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, NOAA has doled out $985 million for coastal habitat protections, including wetlands. The Department of the Interior, which includes the National Park Service and FWS, separately announced hundreds of millions of dollars in ecosystem restoration funding, though it’s unclear whether these programs will continue under the Trump administration. In the coming years, assistant park manager Lechtman hopes to see “significant changes” in Raleigh’s policies around unchecked development, including planting more native plant species throughout the city and creating opportunities for more kids—like Blalock’s grandchildren—to play and explore the wetland. “We, over generations, have done so much damage to this land,” she told me. “When we take a little bit of time to care for it, it really returns those gifts to us.”

“While on hormonal birth control I noticed so many changes that I didn’t like mentally or physically,” says an enthusiastic young woman in an Instagram ad for Natural Cycles, which claims to be the world’s first FDA-cleared birth control app. “Ever since switching,” she gushes, “my health has only been on the up & up!” Natural Cycles uses a proprietary algorithm and daily body temperature readings to track ovulation and identify fertile periods. For around $120 a year, the company aims to help users either achieve or avoid pregnancy—without the hormones present in birth control pills and many IUDs. That pitch seems to be working: Natural Cycles’ customer base grew to more than 3 million in 2024. It’s one of the premier products in the booming market for “femtech,” app-based software with a focus on fertility and menstrual tracking and, increasingly, sexual satisfaction. (Consider the Lioness orgasm-tracking vibrator: “Don’t just masturbate. Masturbate smarter.”) The femtech industry is already valued at around $50 billion by market researchers and expected to be worth more than $100 billion by 2032. While these companies’ fertility algorithms and app interfaces might be new, the technique of tracking ovulation to prevent pregnancy isn’t. The Catholic Church, which forbids most birth control, popularized “natural family planning” decades ago, and women have been using their menstrual cycles to inform their reproductive choices long before that. Femtech’s appeal fits in with a rising tide of right-wing wellness messaging—the kind promoted by the anti-vaccine activist-turned-Trump health czar Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and pundit Candace Owens, who called birth control pills and IUDs “unnatural” in a YouTube video. For all its promises to help women “naturally” control their fertility, femtech has one big problem: In order for the apps to work well, users must be meticulous in their temperature recordings. Even for the most diligent users, that can be tricky. Margaret Polaneczky, an OB-GYN in New York, points out that ovulation is hard to predict—weight fluctuations, medications, or even moving to a new place can affect the timing of the menstrual cycle. Femtech apps also need users’ health to be excellent for accurate readings; having a cold can skew users’ body temperature enough to potentially throw off fertility estimations. Given the many variables that affect the timing of menstruation, it’s not surprising that femtech birth control can be unreliable. One 2018 review study of 73 of the apps found that none accurately predicted ovulation. While Natural Cycles boasts a “perfect use” effectiveness of 98 percent, its “typical use” effectiveness is only 93 percent (IUDs and the Nexplanon implant are 99 percent effective, in comparison). Plus, these efficacy numbers for Natural Cycles are based on clinical studies carried out by the company on self-selecting individuals, rather than from randomized controlled trials. “We feel like there should be an effective non-hormonal method,” said Elina Berglund Scherwitzl, co-founder of Natural Cycles. No contraceptive method, she argued, is “100 percent effective and there will unfortunately always be pregnancies, even if that’s the tough part of what we do.” In 2018, the same year that Natural Cycles was approved by the FDA, the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority concluded that the app misled consumers about being “highly accurate” and a “clinically tested alternative to birth control.” In July 2018 researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published a study noting “Natural Cycles’ marketing materials ought to be entirely transparent” and more clear “about the limitations of their app and pregnancy risks.” A hospital in Stockholm even filed a complaint with the Swedish Medical Products Agency after 37 women who had been using Natural Cycles sought abortions after they unintentionally became pregnant. Many femtech companies also don’t mention the health benefits users may be giving up when they ditch pills and IUDs. Hormonal IUDs like the Mirena can be used to treat and prevent endometrial and ovarian cancer. The birth control pill also reduces users’ relative risk of endometrial cancer by some 70 percent, with 12 years of use, and ovarian cancer by 50 percent with 15 years of use. The privacy concerns are obvious, especially as some states have moved to criminalize abortion. Several femtech companies have faced criticism for allegedly sharing users’ data with third-party researchers and companies. And there’s potential that law enforcement could request data from period-tracking apps as evidence. For its part, Natural Cycles offers an anonymous setting option “if you need an extra layer of protection,” which separates any personal identification from a user’s fertility data—but this setting has to be manually turned on. Despite the questions around efficacy and privacy, the femtech industry shows little sign of slowing. Last year, Natural Cycles closed a $55 million financing round, and formed a new partnership with J.P. Morgan. Its roster of products has expanded, too. Natural Cycles now offers “NC Follow Pregnancy” and “NC Postpartum,” a suite of subscriptions that could appeal to users for years to come. Polaneczky, the OB-GYN, acknowledged that fertility apps might help people who can’t use hormonal birth control because of medical conditions or unwanted side effects. Yet, she cautions, you “have to be a certain person, I think, to do this well.” The problem? “My experience is that the majority of women,” she says, “are not that person.”

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.”