Alissa Walker on the Past, Present, and Future of Transportation

Curbed's former cities chief dishes on public transportation, public assistance, and public bathrooms.

I’m lucky to be able to meet my heroes, which in the infrastructure and urbanism space means other writers, thinkers, and place obsessives.

A Walker in LA

(aka Alissa Walker) is one of our premier transportation journalists, which makes her all three on this list. You’ve seen her work in Curbed and Gizmodo, most likely, if you read the dailies and the medium-to-long form reporting on what’s happening in and to our cities.

I was really excited to talk to Alissa and more preamble from me is preventing you from reading what she had to say. Somehow, too, I’ve avoided all puns about walking. This essay has been edited for clarity and length.

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Hi, I am a writer and reporter based in Los Angeles. For seven years I worked at Curbed, which is a vertical of New York Magazine, writing about things that happen in cities, whether that's housing, transportation, climate, urban policy, and usually how we can do all of those things better.

Were you always interested in this area for reporting? Or did you kind of come to cities and urbanism from a different place?

That's a good question that everybody always asks me. I grew up in suburban St. Louis, and I think there's a whole cohort of people who grew up in the suburbs who wanted to change that car-dependent environment. I always had a lot of interest in architecture, design, and transit, but it wasn't really until I started to view them as part of this system and how they work together that I started focusing on these bigger stories that are really about that interconnectedness and how policy determines what gets done and what doesn't. 

Do you remember the first piece that you wrote?

I wrote for a lot of design publications for a long time. I didn't have a full-time job doing journalism until 10 years ago. I went to work at Gizmodo, which was part of Gawker, and before that, I was freelancing and had a lot of recurring gigs, writing a lot about design, designers, architects, and architecture. I remember one story that I just really loved doing for FastCompany about LA's subway system. I remember telling my editors that the subway had been around for a while, and a lot of people use it, but when you pitch editors in New York, they’re like “Oh, LA has a subway system?” And that becomes the whole pitch. It was really cool because I got to go tour all the stations and write about them — this was around 2006 or 2007, when ridership was surging, and we were doing really well at attracting new riders. There were a lot of designers being hired to really make sure the experience was good for both new users of the system and people who had relied on it forever.

It ended up being this beautiful, very cool story where I got to show people that we have this transit system first of all, but also just really herald this new era for the city when I think people had really started to think about getting around in a different way. 

Definitely! Let’s transition into the meat of the conversation which is very much related to Los Angeles and St. Louis in different ways. What have we gotten wrong in our approach to transportation planning in the past? 

It is good to connect those two places in that way. I lived in Atlanta for a while, which I would say has similar challenges. I think the biggest problem has to be the building of freeways and the way that we forcibly remove communities that have been living there for a long time. 

I’ve always lived very close to the 101 freeway in LA, and the entire time I’ve been here I just keep finding new evidence of what that freeway has done to these neighborhoods, to the public health of everyone in them, and to the affordable housing that existed before. Something very enlightening happened during the pandemic, this group of people who live in East Hollywood put together a remarkable project called Making Our Neighborhood: Redlining, Gentrification, and Housing in East Hollywood. J.T. the LA Storyteller, Samantha Helou Hernandez, and Ali Rachel Pearl — who are still collaborating at Making a Neighborhood — looked at the neighborhoods that had existed in East Hollywood. There had been a Japanese community there for a long time, and many people did not know this. There was a large Black community that lived there. And the 101 physically destroyed their neighborhoods. Kids started their education walking through very nice, safe streets, and then by the time they were in high school they had to cross the freeway and walk out of their way to get to school. And all these elders from the community talked about how it dramatically transformed their lives, as the highway was being built. How they had absolutely no say in where it was going, or which houses were being removed. Their neighbors, two doors down, were gone, but their family’s house was still there. So that series really brought that experience to life, and it all happened right in my backyard.

Do you see similarities between the places that you've lived in terms of the approach to “progressive transportation planning?” I mean that not in the “liberal” way, but in the way of requiring progress of transportation, do you see similarities?

Maybe not necessarily controlled by federal dollars, but from St. Louis and Atlanta and Los Angeles, do you find that their approach was very similar regardless?

I think the one thing that I'll say is that those three cities all have downtowns that were severely impacted by “white flight” and the dubious benefits of urban renewal. Maybe all those cities would say they are now trying to welcome more people back to their downtowns, but at the same time, what’s being built in downtown LA is definitely not built with families in mind. It's still very much built for the person who works in the office. So, we have a lot more work to do.

My brain sort of funnels into this idea of we're not adequately defining the problems we're trying to solve without throwing money at different places. Do you agree with that?

It certainly feels that way here. If you look at the story I wrote about LA’s Metro almost 20 years ago and look at how so much of that money has been focused on the build-out of our rail system. It was chasing that capital, right? But it came at the expense of underfunding our bus system for the same amount of time. And now we have almost two transportation systems — we have a very well-funded, quickly progressing rail network, and then we have a bus system that still doesn't have enough dedicated bus lanes. These are simple interventions, and it's not that hard to put paint on the ground and enforce it or build the lanes in a way where they're actually separated. But we've decided as a city, as a transit agency, that prioritizing building the connections for the Olympics in 2028 is the goal for our transit expansion, rather than saying, “Hey, guess what, more people actually ride the bus and more people who rely on transit ride the bus. So maybe we should be focusing on those things?”

I would definitely agree with that. In a lot of ways, one of my biggest pet peeves of mine is when we would talk about the Build Back Better bill, then the BIL/IIJA. There's a trillion dollars in there, which is a number that most people can't even comprehend how big it is. We have no idea how much things cost or how big one trillion dollars is. And there's been some great reporting over the years about attempting to figure out why things cost the way they do in the States to build comparatively to other places across the world.

My take on this is we actually don’t know how to spend this money either–outside of building more highways like we were talking about. There’s just no way for us to really get from Congress's appropriation down to the agencies that need it, or actually go into communities and do the basic maintenance work or build sidewalks, which are key in a lot of places.

I'm curious if you've got any thoughts about that—in terms of figuring out a way to get us from point A to point B and making these trillions of dollars work for communities rather than for refunding highways.

Sidewalks are the perfect example and your recent post on this was so good. If they had actually said, “We are going to give this much money for sidewalks” — and $1 trillion is probably the right number [Ed. Told you so]—that’s a perfect example of an everyday need that would really change people’s lives. And if you don't allocate money towards it, and say that it has to be used for sidewalks, cities will go out of their way to spend it in different ways. But the real key would be an “interstate highway system” for sidewalks, right? And that doesn't just mean within the cities, that means connecting cities to each other in a way where you can literally walk or bike places! Other places have this and it's not that weird! And a lot of states are doing things like that, like the Empire Trail [in New York] which is a really good example. It would be so popular, and people would love it, and it would provide great local jobs. It'd be so much fun. You could do tree planting as part of it and daylighting creeks as part of it. You can do so much by making walking paths everywhere. 

So that's one thing I think I was a little bit disappointed in Secretary Pete about, not to see a very pointed carve-out for that. 

One thing that Beth Osborne had mentioned on a Talking Headways podcast with Jeff Wood, about the way we talk about state DOTs, and the way we disseminate money is all about “flexibility,” but when you give states flexibility, what they default to is what they know how to do, which is build highways.

I guess a data point just to underline this, and then we'll move on to what we can do better right now. I looked at all the TIGER/BUILD/RAISE grants—every project that's ever been submitted, not even ones that have been selected for funding. Here's a bit of trivia to put you on the spot. How much do you think the total cost of those projects came out to be from 2009 to 2019?

I don’t think it’s that much, but I don’t have any way to estimate that. 

It's $166 billion [Ed. It’s over $200 billion now]. And that's every discretionary project every public agency could come up with using the resources that they had, using the community engagement that they had done. That's a sixth of a trillion dollars. We don't know how to spend this money. There’s no internal expertise and there’s little engagement that doesn't go past a checkmark on a NEPA evaluation.

It’s not a deliverable and in a lot of ways engagement can't be built necessarily into a cost-benefit. So how do I explain to my boss's boss that it's worth me spending 40 hours this month going around the community and running meetings and asking people, “What problems do we need to solve?”

Would you agree that engagement is just not taken seriously in a lot of places? 

I think there are two parts. One is yes, take congestion pricing, for example, and I've talked at length about this. People were really frustrated that the review process took so long in New York City. And I think that it is very frustrating, and we're all frustrated by how long the wait was. In the story that I wrote about it in 2021, a lot of people wouldn't be quoted because they were either working on it or hoping to get picked for one of the upcoming bids. People couldn't be put on the record but said a very similar thing to me, and I remember talking to one environmental lawyer, who was just like, “No, we have to get this right because this will be the most litigated anything that comes up in transportation policy for decades, and people will try to undermine it in every way that they can.” That engagement in all the community meetings—it's literally hundreds of community meetings—it’s one of those things that when you get that right, it makes your policy bulletproof. 

Feragus O'Sullivan posted a piece recently in CityLab about the upcoming changes to the congestion charge in central London. 

That’s a perfect example. It’s going to eventually have to be changed or updated, and you have to provide reasons for that, I think, to protect yourself from the inevitable litigation because people with more money are always going to try to challenge these things.

They have to update it because the conditions have changed and if we just go ahead and say, “Okay, we're putting a straight line across 60^th Street in New York and putting tolls at all the bridges that connect to Manhattan,” and then we find out after doing more research that that's not actually the correct boundary, we’re lost. It’ll be too hard to fix.

How can we go back to the public and say, “Actually, we need to expand this, or actually, we need to shrink this.” It won't work. So, we've got one shot at it and we've got to take our time. Even I was initially frustrated with the 18-month environmental review. But I think it's a misnomer — when people talk about environmental review, I don't think much of the public and barely even professionals understand that that word is such a catch-all for doing diligence in a lot of ways. Because it's so broad, it hasn't been defined, and there are several different agencies and stakeholder groups you have to coordinate with. 

But let's move on to what we can do better right now. Your article about replicating Governor Kathy Hochul’s Interborough Express (IBX) plan is a good example of things that we can do better right now. That article was what made me want to reach out and chat with you. 

So maybe we can talk a little bit about that or other things that you're seeing that we can replicate and fix in our system to help people have more dignity and access in their opportunities. 

It’s a good project to talk about because it benefits very transit-reliant communities and it made me think a lot about this idea of filling in the gap. Are you either going to do something that's an easy thing that is going to help a lot of people soon, or something that's big and flashy in 20 years? To me, filling in the gaps is such an obvious thing to do, and it made me think a lot about the Vermont corridor [along Vermont Avenue in Los Angeles], where instead of focusing on fixing this wide, heavily traveled large arterial road in LA, where the most highly densified clusters of transit riders already are—we kept expanding our light rail system further and further east like it will make it to Palm Springs before we fix Vermont. We really needed to sit down and prioritize and think, “Oh, here's this huge gap. It's really hard for people to get from one part of the city to another who doesn't have a car,” but the city decided they were just not going to invest in that and we still don’t have bus rapid transit for Vermont. It’s making very small, close-the-gap efforts. We can do a lot more than make a big flashy ribbon-cutting ceremony. 

That’s a good point. And two things that stood out to me there was one was project prioritization and the second was ribbon cutting. 

So maybe we can dig into the first one about project prioritization. How do you think we change how we go about which projects we build now—because the public only has so much bandwidth to understand and react to ideas and the agencies only have so much bandwidth to implement? There's not enough talent at the agencies and there's only so much money we can spend on so many things. We can use LA as an example because that's a lot of where your local expertise is—what's a step we can take to change the way we prioritize?

For me, the most important point is: how can this help the most people who are struggling? It’s rarely the priority and it's hard to reprioritize, especially now more than ever. 

I think free transit is a good example. LA Metro kept buses free for almost two years. And just talking to riders—not just people like me who have the option to have a car at home, but to people who had to go to work, and who had to get their kids to school using transit, it was really life-changing. Critics might say, “Oh, but the service wasn't any better.” It didn't even matter! People were able to not think about it. You just have this ability to hop between buses, and it just gives you this very freeing sense of travel. A lot of people said that it made them take more trips on transit than they would have if it wasn't going to be free. The second part of it is—of course, service should be improved—but until then, just keep it free! There is no real reason to charge anybody, especially here in LA, where we make so little money from it. 

Do you know the farebox recovery rate for LA Metro?

IIt’s very low, a new report says it’s currently just 4.8% of our operating costs. [Ed. This is correct—LA Metro’s farebox recovery ratio, or how much of the agency’s operating budget is covered by fare revenue, is the lowest in the country]. We have so many other ways to make money; we have our sales tax. 

You’ve got anti-transit folks who will say “Oh, these public transit systems lose money”, and it's very, very disingenuous wording. They don’t lose money; they cost money. 

But we also make so much money because of our sales tax, and we made more money than we expected to during COVID too. We got federal dollars, and our sales tax continued to generate cash. They were so worried that people weren't going to be spending money in LA County, but actually, people didn't go on trips, and they stayed home—so we actually did really well!

Running good expansive fair transit doesn't lose money, it costs money. We've got this car brain worms infected in people's heads about how to approach this. 

The second point that you brought up really was about ribbon cutting and how it's a very public thing elected officials can do to get a press conference together and organize around that. Do you think there's a way to make it just as popular to fill in a local sidewalk and I don't know, Silver Lake?

Well, that's the thing, people actually do get excited about that stuff. I’ve been thinking a lot about BART reopening bathrooms that have been closed for 20 years. This is the coolest thing ever. More ribbon cuttings for bathrooms! It was the most exciting thing. I've seen bathrooms that have been closed in LA for the entire time that I live here. So, more of that — make the biggest deals out of these small things like a public bathroom, because they are going to make a difference in someone's life.

What city was the bathroom in? Was it Oakland? San Francisco?

I think there are some open now in both.

And was the mayor there? I know this is a different agency, but was Jeffrey Tumlin there, was he supporting this idea? I bet he was. He's the one person I would expect to have been there. But let's make this as important, and then we can demonstrate to people and say “Oh, we can build things in this country. We can go from point A to point B and solve the problem”. Then I feel it can become easier to ask people for more things when they say “Oh, well, what are we paying for, where are these taxes going to?” Well, they’re going to public bathrooms, sidewalks, bike lanes, safety, so your grandma can get to the store without being run over by a bus. 

Exactly! It's about your own family. 

Where is the public campaign around this? Where are the Democrats, telling us where all the things that they're doing? 

Public bathrooms are a great thing to run on. Every politician should do it. 

Anyways, back to the future. 

Some people have gone a year into the future, and some people have gone to what the next statewide Transportation Improvement Program is doing. Some people have gone 50 years into the future. What does it look like looking back on the future that you’ve envisioned? 

The timing of this is interesting because I was just watching this CBS Sunday Morning segment on the pedestrian fatality crisis and it really is amazing to hear these words and phrases that I've said to my friends for 20 years. I've been reporting on those traffic deaths numbers for 10 years. I'm so sick of writing the same story every year, and it literally gets worse. The Dangerous By Design report always confirms it—some deaths went down, but pedestrian deaths have definitely gone up in the past 10 years. But it does seem a bit more hopeful now, and I think I will be able to see changes in my lifetime. Last year I wrote about a great book by Jessie Singer, There Are No Accidents. In the 1920s they called it car murder. If someone hit a pedestrian and killed them with their car, a riot of people would show up at the site and pull them out of their vehicles! And of course, you look at how that was suppressed, and the power that was applied by the automakers which continues to be applied today. But then you see people doing things like putting traffic cones on self-driving cars in San Francisco. Maybe we finally got back to the point where we're not going to stand for it. That and Secretary Pete talking about Vision Zero and putting his own strategy behind it, just makes me a bit more hopeful that things might start to accelerate as far as good changes go. 

I haven't read the safety plan, I sort of got backed up with 12 other things last week, but I no longer have to write about it, because you've written such a good piece about it which is fantastic. 

In my nerdier realm, I wrote 3,000 words about a Supreme Court case that I loved, South Dakota versus Dole about withholding funds from states for not setting the drinking age to 21. And that's the type of thing that I would love to see from Secretary Buttigieg — write new rules and say, “No, you're not getting this money until you do X, Y, and Z”, and then publicly shame the agencies. Shame works! I am not against it.

It does work. Shaming elected officials is a great tool!

The Notices of Funding Opportunity that came out this year for the discretionary discretionary grants authorized in the BIL (RAISE, MEGA, etc.) seem to be favoring different outcomes than the ones under Secretary Chao. I'm just curious about the language in there—about how the evaluation process is different looking through the lens of Secretary Buttigieg, and I do think he understands these issues. He's been at the forefront of lots of progressive transportation stuff for a long time. 

Yeah, he’s smart. Although I do want to see something at the federal level that addresses vehicle size and weight. Some very smart people are trying this in the New York State legislature, which I wrote about earlier this year.

The question is, can we get these rules to trickle their way down into the powerhouses of transportation policy at the MPO and the state level—and I just don't know.

I mean look at Colorado [Ed. See below] which is basically saying that you have to prove to us that your project is going to materially improve outcomes when it comes to climate and VMT and pollution, or else you cannot build it. And I would have thought that California would have written that first, but we didn’t, so that gives me hope as well. One by one states can put these ultra-progressive people in the heads of these DOTs—which have just been historically so bad. 

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It’s super uneven across the country and you’d think the DOTs would be more progressive but are terribly mired and nonsense and the ones and the DOTs and states that one would think are not so progressive — Colorado is a great example of this purple state with a very now progressive DOT. 

We'll get there. 

I think so too. Well, is there anything you’d like to plug? 

I am starting a brand-new newsletter all about LA with a very heavy focus on infrastructure, specifically in the ramp-up to the Olympics. I’d love for people to pledge a paid subscription, of course, but even if you can’t, just join the list and let me know what you want me to cover. There is so much going on and I am so excited to write about it all.