In Durham, North Carolina, 28 people are killed every year in motor vehicle collisions. Our most urgent moral need in cities is to solve the public health crisis that we have wrought with our transportation system. This means wrestling with the problems of car-dependency and an underinvestment in public transit. This also means acknowledging that traffic safety is not an isolated issue and is deeply connected to the issues of land use, housing affordability, poverty, and equity. The availability of free parking, the bollards protecting bike lanes, the curb radii used at intersections, and the distribution of affordable housing are all examples of infrastructure that directly impacts how the space in our cities is used, and in turn on the quality of life for the residents of our cities.

This problem is why I joined the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission (BPAC) in Durham in 2021. Many of Durham’s roads are owned and maintained by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT), and many of the improvements our residents want to see require vigilant advocacy both with City Council and with the NCDOT. Joining BPAC was my first attempt to help this cause in my hometown and learn about what problems stood in the way of seeing infrastructure improvements realized.

The large number of projects related to transportation both within DUSP and at other departments are one of the many reasons why MIT is a great place to explore this problem. The Digital Matatus project that Sarah Williams and the Civic Data Design Lab worked on sparked a thought for further investigation: what learnings from these more organic transportation systems can we adapt to our own public transit networks? Even within SDM, transportation systems are an area of deep research. The interdisciplinary environment at MIT would be a perfect place to dive deeper into new ways we can push forward the transportation networks in our cities.