Bill Duryea is enterprise editor for Politico.

The people who run America’s cities have been grinding their teeth over what to do about cars ever since 1899, when Henry Bliss was run over by a motorized taxicab on the corner of Central Park West and 74th Street in New York City. Cars changed everything about urban life, turning dirt to pavement and giving cities their dynamism. They also strained municipal budgets, which groaned to meet relentless demands for new roads and repairs for old ones. With the passage of time, cars have become far and away the No. 1 means of getting us to our daily jobs; three-quarters of the people who drive to work drive alone, and that number is going up. But those same ever-lengthening commutes have become a time sink that threatens to put the brakes on our economies and our productivity. Ask mayors of big cities what keeps them up at night. Chances are, it’s not the threat of terrorism. It’s gridlock.

They’re not just fretting about it, however. They’re coming up with solutions.


That’s why POLITICO Magazine chose transportation as the theme of its first What Works package for 2019. Now entering its sixth year, our award-winning What Works series continues its focus on urban innovation—but with a new twist. Instead of focusing on a single city each month, this year, we’ll tackle one big idea at a time, sending reporters every other month to a variety of American cities to find out how they’re solving common problems regarding issues such as housing, sustainability, economic inequality, access to education and health care.

The 2nd ave double bike lane | Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine 13 Big Ideas to Improve Transportation in Your City

By Emily Goldberg

Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine Seattle and the Dream of the Car-free City

By Erick Trickey

For policymakers in Washington and on Capitol Hill and innovators in the public and private sectors across the country, our series aims to provide an engaging, sharable survey of the most replicable ideas from America’s urban laboratories. And for busy civic leaders, we’ve even got a quickly scannable executive summary of the top five takeaways from our reporting.

In this issue, veteran What Works correspondent Erick Trickey explores Seattle’s dramatic success story in actually reducing traffic while its economy and population grew. Erick also spent time unpacking New York’s first-in-the-nation decision to impose congestion pricing on vehicles entering its downtown business district. Lastly, Supriya Sridhar offers a preview of San Francisco’s upcoming plan to ban private vehicles from its central artery—a long-in-the-making experiment to reshape one of its busiest thoroughfares away from the car.

— Bill Duryea, series editor