Donald Trump has called America’s inner cities “crime infested,” “almost at an all-time low” and “more dangerous than some of the war zones,” even as violent crime in America has been declining for decades. Which isn’t to say that our cities don’t still face serious problems. But what are they really? We asked mayors, urbanists and other thinkers to name the biggest threats that American cities currently face, and most took the long view—looking beyond Trump to challenges like urban broadband deserts, a shallow mayoral talent pool, crippling pension crises, and state or federal meddling.



Vanishing families

Dante Chinni, director of the American Communities Project at George Washington University and co-author of Our Patchwork Nation: The Surprising Truth About the “Real” America

The revival of U.S. cities over the past decade has largely been a function of younger Americans, particularly those with a college education, seeking out the excitement and diversity of an urban life. Those younger singles and couples have been flowing back into big cities across the country in various degrees—from D.C. to Denver and even Detroit. But if cities want to become more than just a home for the low and high ends of the economic scale, they will need the stability of families. Millennials will have to decide to stay in their urban homes after the footloose days of hipsterdom and into the more complicated years of parenthood. To do that, cities will need to improve public schools and make sure there are affordable options for those needing larger, family-sized dwellings. That, in turn, could lift the larger tide of city residents from various economic backgrounds. It likely won't be easy, but if cities can turn their young, hip urban dwellers into middle-aged parents, they may be able to turn their early 21st-century boom into something more sustainable.

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The menacing skyscraper

Saskia Sassen, professor of sociology at Columbia University

As cities expand, more buildings are constructed. But those buildings are putting the health of our cities at serious risk, both at ground level—all those toxic fumes that buildings emit—and at the larger biospheric level, since buildings are major emitters of greenhouse gases. Thankfully, we have made many discoveries that can address this problem. In the future, no building in a city should simply be a building. It also must become an instrument for biospheric capabilities. One example, already in existence, is a kind of invisible paint laced with bacteria that neutralize greenhouse gases; another is a type of bacterium that, when added to the organic runoff from bathrooms and kitchens, produces a kind of plastic that is biodegradable. Using such bio innovations outside and inside vast corporate buildings can, and should, become a whole new business sector. The exact instruments used and the degree to which they’re required can vary across cities. But collectively, advances like these can transform a building into a site actively enabling algae, bacteria and so many other creatures to do what they do well—cleaning up after our environmental destructions—and can in turn clean up our cities, too.

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The pension bomb

Pat McCrory, former governor of North Carolina and mayor of Charlotte

American cities will not be able to confront important challenges, including decaying infrastructure, new transportation investments, gangs, and especially the increasing mental health and addiction crises until they resolve the hidden financial crisis that few talk about: billions in unfunded pension liabilities. Each year, these off-the-book liabilities continue to drain state and city budgets and are bailed out with no long-term resolution. Most large companies have had the foresight to enact reforms over the past two decades, but local, state and federal governments are still in denial, while some baby boomers are continuing to retire as early as 40 to 50 years old. Cities cannot continue to hide this growing liability. Politicians and city management must address current and future unfunded pension plans with major reforms to avoid bankruptcy—or massive tax increases. Now is the time to confront this pressing issue. If it is not resolved, we will soon deprive our cities and states—and our children and grandchildren—of a prosperous future.

Steven Malanga, fellow at the Manhattan Institute and senior editor at City Journal

The state and local pension problem received significant attention in the years after the 2008 market meltdown, but reform efforts in most places have done little to alleviate the issue since. That’s especially true for municipalities because compensation represents a far greater share of their budgets than it does for states. Most alarmingly, the long bull market (the second longest in U.S. history by some measures) has not significantly bolstered most municipal funds.

Even advocates for pension systems now admit that their financial model has major problems that they didn’t anticipate. It is not merely that these systems are overly optimistic, for instance about projected investment returns. Rather, the complex accounting does not fully account for the volatility we see in the economy and financial markets. The result is, as the New York Times wrote in 2015, in one of the few stories to address this new “heresy”: “It is possible to hit your long-term actuarial target and still go insolvent.” The Rockefeller Institute of Government has addressed this in a series of remarkable studies showing that an underfunded pension system that receives all of its contributions from government and hits all of its projected investment targets still has a 1-in-6 chance of falling to such a low funding level that recovery becomes impossible. The chances that these funds, even if they are fixable, will need significant additional contributions out of local budgets, taxing residents and crippling services is even higher.

Neither politicians, voters nor most of the press fully understands this yet, even though a number of cities, school districts and even state systems have funding levels so low they may not be salvageable. The money these funds are missing has not merely been promised to workers in the future; that money is supposed to be invested now in the market, earning returns—but it’s not. Local budgets simply aren’t big enough to replace that money fast enough. In the next two decades, we are likely to have important new debates about the nature of government fiscal ruin. We will probably need a new kind of Chapter 9 bankruptcy, perhaps like the law Congress passed giving Puerto Rico the right to enter bankruptcy court. Something similar, allowing retirement systems of states and localities to operate under federal supervision without plunging the entire government into Chapter 9, might be necessary. We will also continue to see new definitions of what constitutes “insolvency.” Several bankruptcy judges have already invoked the phrase “service insolvency” to describe a situation in which the cost of paying off long-term debts becomes so great that it threatens the ability of the government to deliver services, even though the government may have cash in the bank today. These discussions won’t get serious today, next month or even next year because these pension systems still have money to pay retirees for a while, and politicians are masters of putting off tough confrontations until there’s no money left. When that happens, we will be way beyond easy solutions.

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The income gulf

Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland and mayor of Baltimore

The biggest risk facing cities is really the same risk we face as a nation: income inequality and the creation of a permanent underclass of residents who feel no stake in the well-being of their country or of their city. Urbanization, the global movement of people to cities, can exacerbate racial, economic and social divides or it can ameliorate them. Progress is a choice. Australia is one of the most urbanized developed countries on the planet, yet it has lower levels of income inequality than countries like the United States, Britain and Israel. How have the Australians done it? By holding true to wage and labor policies and public investments that sustain an inclusive economy, one in which hard work is rewarded with a livable wage.

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The shrinking mayoral talent pool

Alexander Garvin, president and CEO of AGA Public Realm Strategists, a planning and design firm in New York, and adjunct professor of urban planning and management at Yale University

During the 1940s, Hubert Humphrey was mayor of Minneapolis and Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor of New York. Seventy years later, fewer and fewer people of similar dedication are willing to enter government, as elected public officials, appointed public servants or career government employees. If this pattern continues, local government will deteriorate even further. In response, the disillusioned citizens who currently pay for local government will vote to cut taxes and city budgets still further. They will become increasingly dependent on business improvement districts, conservancies, neighborhood coalitions, block associations and other nongovernmental organizations, which they support financially because those entities are responsive to their demands and accountable to them for their actions. The unfortunate result will be that individuals who now depend on local government for services, but cannot afford to pay for them, will suffer. This is why we need to attract more talented people into government service by, for instance, subsidizing university and graduate school education in exchange for a specified term of government service; substantially increasing the salaries for government employees; and providing appointed as well as elected officials with flexible funds for hiring consultants and/or staff.

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Broadband deserts

Greta Byrum, director of the Resilient Communities program at New America

Usually conversations about lack of broadband access focus on rural areas and small towns. But even in wealthy cities, poorer areas often get inferior service from the telecom giants—and even where there is access, many underserved and marginalized people can’t afford to get online, relying on libraries or insecure public WiFi systems. About a quarter of Americans—many of them city residents—still do not have reliable broadband at home.

This is not just about weakness or fragility in our telecommunications systems (though they do reliably fail in emergencies). Even in a booming market and in everyday conditions, the telecommunications market, long captured by industry giants, builds infrastructure only where it knows it will make a good return on investment: wealthy neighborhoods that can afford high rates for premium services like Verizon’s Fios. The outcome is dramatically inequitable access to the infrastructure that undergirds basic economic, educational and civic participation. The gap in quality of access between connected and unconnected neighborhoods is growing, as legacy cable and phone systems age and as every storm and flood threatens to damage already fragile systems. Data capacity needs are also growing exponentially as we implement smart transportation, electrical and other city systems.

What’s a city to do? It won’t be easy. Broadband is not just one technology, but an amalgam of different equipment (conduit, fiber lines, legacy cable and copper lines, data centers, and wireless towers and devices), each of which brings its own web of regulatory, jurisdictional and technical challenges. Meanwhile, the rollback of federal internet privacy regulation foreshadows the likely loss of the open internet rules designating internet access as a utility like other public goods. As the Federal Communications Commission shrinks its own role in broadband regulation, however, cities have an opportunity to shape innovative, smart and ethical policies that provide equitable and safe connectivity. The question is whether they will have the time, resources and knowledge to succeed.

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Washington, D.C.

Bruce Katz, Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution

At a time of such furor and uncertainty in Washington, it’s tempting for city leaders to feel hopeless or to engage in the warfare of national politics. But the reality is that cities have significant powers, and those that wait for Washington will fall behind their global competitors. Markets are already moving toward cities, but to maximize their market power, cities need to remain on the cutting edge of new industries and technologies, as Pittsburgh has done with its investments in robotics and automation. To leverage their fiscal power, cities need to harness the substantial assets, particularly land, that are under their control; Copenhagen’s City & Port Development Corp., offers a good model for how to use smart zoning and intelligent land management to regenerate a large waterfront district and provide capital for infrastructure investment. Finally, cities must realize their latent financial power by unlocking private and civic capital; Indianapolis’ BioCrossroads is an example of new types of intermediaries that are bridging corporate and philanthropic investments, academia and startup companies. By avoiding the perils of paralysis and solving problems at the local level, cities can thrive despite the current political environment.

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Punitive state legislatures

A C Wharton, former mayor of Memphis, Tennessee

Cities face a number of challenges, from crime to income inequality to pension and post-employment benefit shortfalls. But at a time when cities most need their autonomy to address these issues, it is being taken away from them by state legislative bodies. Recently, state legislatures have stepped in to preempt how cities can police guns, set minimum wage levels, ensure fairness for women- and minority-owned businesses, and address pension problems. State legislative bodies used to help local governments out, but today they are exacerbating the challenges that cities face by blocking them from acting.

Alan Ehrenhalt, senior editor at Governing magazine and author, most recently, of The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City

America’s large cities are positioned to be the true innovators of American government in the coming years—the “laboratories of democracy” that urban dreamers have always wanted them to be. They are awash in entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and generally free of the partisan gridlock that infects the other levels of the political system. But to claim this role, cities must find a way to stop state legislatures and governors from emasculating them.

States are the brazen hypocrites of the system: They complain endlessly about mandates from Washington, then turn around and impose crippling restraints on urban governments seeking to cope with 21st-century problems. In the past year alone, states have enacted laws barring cities from setting their own tax rates; raising their minimum wages; protecting residents from various kinds of discrimination; and enacting even modest gun control policies.

Much of this, of course, is simple partisanship. The cities are the one remaining bastion of Democratic political strength. State-level Republicans aren’t in a mood to put up with it.

But to treat this wave of preemption as mere partisan overreach is to underplay its importance. The American experiment in federalism is built on the coexistence of local, state and federal power. Disable one of those three, and the whole experiment is compromised.

The question is what to do about it. States like to claim that their preemption powers are nearly absolute. Most state constitutions expressly or implicitly give legislatures and governors the authority to determine what cities may and may not do. But the state power grab can be resisted, and needs to be. In the end, this will have to involve a legal challenge. The power grab might have constitutional underpinnings, but it is also a denial of fair play too blatant to ignore. Fashion a sophisticated defense of local sovereignty, and sooner or later, some court, somewhere, will listen to it.

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Self-driving cars

David Dudley, interim editor of the Atlantic’s CityLab

When the automobile conquered American cities in the early 20th century, it also banished one of the great environmental menaces of the era: the massive amounts of manure created by horse-based transportation. It’s an oft-cited factoid as we enter a new period of disruption heralded by autonomous vehicles. The shift from horseless carriages to driverless ones stands to be equally transformative, and the potential upside for cities is enormous: The private car—and the highways and parking lots it demanded—steamrolled through urban America, isolating low-income communities, gutting downtowns and speeding the flight of the middle class. (Also, smog.) Now, techno-optimists eagerly anticipate reclaiming those car-centric spaces, with fleets of shared autonomous shuttles doing the heavy lifting of personal mobility.

But there’s another, darker school of thought: Should we fail to put regulations in place that shape their usage before these machines emerge en masse, autonomous vehicles might just as easily be the chariots of even greater income and class inequality. For example, they could supercharge sprawl and create even more energy-intensive development patterns, since robot-assisted commuters might be lured into living farther from their jobs. A decade hence, we might find ourselves even more beholden to automotive infrastructure, as city streets swell with the dread “zero-occupancy” vehicles—empty cars roaming about running errands for their affluent owners. And those left behind by the first car revolution—those whose paychecks are already consumed by automotive expenses or who rely on increasingly shaky public transit networks—will be even more hopelessly marooned in the mobility deserts that remain.

There’s a good reason to fear scenario No. 2. Technologies that promise liberation have a habit of delivering their benefits along starkly racial and class lines. Mobility is boringly fundamental: If you can’t get across town to pick up your kids, or get to work, or go to a job interview, the whole house of cards that is urban living comes apart. Our most broken cities tend to be the ones with the least functional transit networks. It’s a little terrifying to think about how much worse it could get.

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The “public” stigma

Jennifer Bradley, founding director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Aspen Institute and co-author, with Bruce Katz, of The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy

In too many cities “public” means shoddy, dirty, dangerous and second-rate. The low quality of, and low expectations for, public services and spaces might not seem like an existential threat to cities, but when people stop believing in the value of public provisions, stop using them and paying for them, cities lose their core function: to be places of opportunity, places of mixing of people, ideas, cultures and habits, which produces more innovation and more mixing—a virtuous cycle. America’s cities have never fully realized their promise of opportunity and integration, but to the extent that mixing and advancement happens, it is supported by a robust public realm where people can come together and know each other as fellow residents; by strong public schools that prepare a city’s children and introduce them to each other; by extensive public transit that overcomes neighborhood isolation. Public shouldn’t mean “for use by the poor.” It should mean “for the good of all of us.”

The solution is more investment, more buying in, less opting out. The hard question is how city leaders can break the spiral of low trust and common feeling in cities and encourage the kind of heavy investment that is needed. This is not primarily a policy problem. Rather, it’s a task for the myriad other city leaders, in neighborhoods, universities, philanthropies, religious institutions and businesses. (Ironically, the salvation of the public realm and public services may start with the private and civic sectors.) Can they connect their members, employees, constituents and congregants, and remind them of the value of what they share across their differences, maybe looking to post-bankruptcy Detroit as an example? Can they start to build a story of what their city is, what values it holds, what it means to live and work there? Can they sustain this work and the development of a shared civic story over time and through the inevitable, crushing challenges? If the answer is yes, then cities can succeed in making public things into great things, and in fulfilling their promise of improving the lives of all their residents.

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The racial labor gap

Amy Liu, vice president and director of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program

America’s cities cannot afford to fail to prepare our nation’s rapidly diversifying workforce for success in a 21st-century economy. Despite adding jobs and output in the years since the recession, many cities and surrounding suburbs still struggle with slow productivity and wage growth. Numerous factors contribute to these troubling trends, but one key reason is that too many people, particularly people of color, lack the work experience, skills or professional networks that would enable them to attain or create productive, high-paying jobs.

America’s ongoing demographic transformation toward becoming a majority-minority country only puts this challenge into sharper focus. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2004 to 2014, 2.5 million more white workers left the American workforce than entered it. Meanwhile, a net 2.2 million black workers, 2.4 million Asian workers and 6.1 million Hispanic workers joined the labor force. These trends are projected to continue through 2024. Already, in metro areas including Houston, Atlanta and Chicago, a majority of millennials are people of color. Our demographic transformation can be a major asset to cities, stemming population losses and injecting new energy and ideas into existing and emerging industries. Yet this more diverse cohort enters the labor market at a time when severe wage gaps persist between white workers and Hispanic, black and other minority workers, despite rising employment rates for all groups and rising wages for many. This suggests that many workers of color are entering the labor force through low-paying or part-time jobs that offer dim prospects for upward mobility.

One way that cities could help close racial wage disparities is by announcing a joint public- and private-sector commitment: to give every young person between the ages of 16 and 24 the opportunity for a meaningful, yearlong work experience. Modeled on flexible approaches in jurisdictions like Ontario and New York City, the initiative would align existing and new funds that support career and technical education, summer jobs, paid internships for disconnected youth and other programs, placing young people into government, nonprofits and the private sector. Each participant would enter with a designated mentor and a clear job description, and exit with new skill sets, a professional reference and an expanded network. Through such an initiative, cities would play a leading role in helping America’s most diverse generation become active contributors to our economic well-being in the decades ahead.

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Declining suburbs

June Williamson, associate professor of architecture at the City College of New York, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor and director of the urban design program at the Georgia Tech School of Architecture

Cities and suburbs, geographically locked together in metropolitan areas, are where most Americans now live, and their well-being is economically, ecologically and socially codependent. While suburbs have become increasingly socio-economically diverse, many are on a marked trajectory toward physical obsolescence, battered by complex challenges: water risks, energy inefficiencies, auto dependency, burdens of chronic disease, aging populations, persistent segregation, growing poverty and job losses.

Neither cities nor suburbs need more sprawl. What both need is for America’s suburbs to be retrofitted. Underperforming parking lots, big boxes and shopping malls should be reinhabited with more community-serving uses, redeveloped more compactly or restored to green space. Urban planners should prepare suburban corridors for autonomous vehicles and transit and the associated changes they will bring—like less demand for parking and roadways, and altered movement patterns for goods. New “mixed-use” suburban spaces should incorporate a much greater range of uses to fuel more diverse economies and functions; think food production, processing and prep, daycare, senior living, co-living, clean industries, renewable energy and storm water parks. The personal and public debt accrued through wasteful over-accumulation—of house mortgages, household goods and gadgets, parking lots, fossil fuels and deferred maintenance on infrastructure—must be stemmed through the development of more productive and efficient built environments in suburbs.

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Unequal mobility

Diane E. Davis and Lily Song, professor and lecturer, respectively, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

A growing number of U.S. cities are joining the ranks of their European counterparts by promoting walking, cycling, public transit and public spaces. These new urban transport investments largely depart from the expansive, public-subsidy intensive, auto-centric and environmentally destructive patterns of urban development that prevailed during the past century. Yet they also risk compounding, if not intensifying, existing socio-spatial inequalities in cities.

In research conducted at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—looking at case studies in Los Angeles, Mexico City, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Stockholm and Vienna—we have found that urban transport policies and programs trying to improve mobility can inadvertently worsen segregation and inequality. For instance, the rise of bike-share and ride-sharing services has addressed public demand for alternative forms of transportation, but often at the cost of neglecting high-need areas and socioeconomically vulnerable populations. As affluent, educated and socially privileged groups descend on the urban core and take advantage of proliferating amenities, those areas face escalating property values. Rising values entail added costs of living that especially burden low-income residents and racialized minorities, who are being pushed out to the suburbs despite having the least access to private cars and alternative transport options. Individuals with the means can pay for private ride-sharing services, but mass transit connections remain lacking, especially in lower income suburbs.

It is time to think long and hard about what types of cities we are producing with the latest generation of mobility innovations. Only a few cities (for example, Vienna) have successfully used transportation investments and services to promote mixed-income, transit-oriented, higher-density urban development in ways that advance inclusion and equity. Such cities succeed by combining innovative transport programs with strong political leadership. Programs can take many forms, but they must integrate public transit goals with alternative urban land uses geared toward the public good. Otherwise, new mobility and accessibility services will continue to be scarce commodities, all too readily offered by private firms and distributed through a competitive consumer market.

In the United States, we must move beyond old servicing paradigms and imagine new ones. Our future cities must be greater than the sum of recent individual technological and program innovations, however appealing these may at first appear. We must reverse the order of change, first articulating our visions for a more socially inclusive, environmentally sustainable city and then pursuing the complementary mix of urban policies and technological innovations that achieve these aims. Without such a framework, innovations that hover on the horizon, including autonomous vehicles, will likely do little to address the bigger picture of growing socio-spatial inequality. And although their involvement may be necessary to jump-start innovation, deferring to private-sector investment and leadership in transport will not necessarily help realize future visions of a more equitable and just city. Instead, politicians, planners, and the public, as well as the private sector, will all have to rise to the occasion, collectively providing and coordinating transport innovations that intersect with urban land use policies, so as to address mobility inequalities while also producing ever more livable cities that we all can be proud of.

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The death of the social contract

Allison Arieff, editorial director of the urban research group SPUR and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times

The very idea of the social contract—the collective, the commitment to the greater good, the idea that we’re in this together—is eroding, most especially in the era of Donald Trump. It feels like we can advance very little without restoring faith in truth and facts, institutions and democracy, which is a shocking thing to write and a terrible thing to contemplate. This erosion certainly affects cities, where populations are denser, but most of the problems that result from this loss of cohesion—failing healthcare and education systems and the like—are faced by cities and non-cities alike. We are better together, and both in cities and across the country we need to discover new ways to make that a reality. There’s no easy way to address this: Can we bring civics back to grade school curriculum? Can we restore local newsrooms? Can Facebook endeavor in earnest to combat fake news? Is there a new model for community meetings? This isn’t a problem with a single solution, no quick fix; it’s systemic and requires a multipronged approach from education to outreach, hell a new Works Progress Administration. If we’re at the stage, which were are, where people question why their taxes should pay for clean air, safe roads or libraries, we need to find our way back to civil society. Alas this won’t be quick.

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Traffic

Greg Lindsay, senior fellow at the New Cities Foundation and co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next

Since the financial crisis, America’s largest metros have been reliable job and people magnets, breathing new life into exurban sprawl with new residents who “drive until they qualify” for an affordable mortgage on a home outside a city. But these suburbanites and exurbanites are left exposed to the high costs of commuting in terms of both time and money, as well as to the devastating effects of another potential oil shock like the 2008 price spike that precipitated the crisis. At the same time, gentrification has transformed America’s densest, most walkable and transit-rich neighborhoods into some of the country’s most expensive, thereby expelling their former inhabitants to the suburban fringe. This has turned out to be a trap: Nearly half of affordable-housing residents spend more than 15 percent of their incomes on transportation. Public transit alone is of little help, as researchers at Brookings have found that a typical resident is able to reach only 30 percent of a city’s available jobs in less than 90 minutes using transit. In turn, long, expensive commutes depress growth and punish their most vulnerable residents.

The proposed solutions to these problems tend to veer quickly toward the fantastical—cars that fly or drive themselves, or one of Elon Musk’s new tunnels. Others tout Uber as a fix that will render buses obsolete. The truth is that Uber and its competitors have only added to congestion in cities such as New York and San Francisco, and autonomous vehicles could make the problem worse in the form of driverless traffic jams. Meanwhile, New subway systems from New York to Washington groan under the strain of new riders and deferred maintenance.

An alternative solution would be to combine public transit with these new technologies on the same app or platform, using the convenience of car-sharing, bike-sharing and ride-hailing to increase ridership and promote alternatives to car ownership. “Mobility-as-a-service” programs combining various modes have been successfully tested in Europe, but haven’t yet made it to the United States. Coupling better transit service with on-demand rides for last-mile and last-minute solutions could prove incredibly appealing to commuters, and combining it with smarter regulations for parking, zoning and congestion could make them even more so. While President Donald Trump continues to tout a public-private $1 trillion infrastructure package that is actively hostile to rail projects, Los Angeles residents, for instance, voted overwhelmingly in November to tax themselves $100 billion over 30 years for transportation projects, including five new rail lines. Cities such as Seattle and Atlanta have followed suit with similar measures, with the former promising to invest in what it calls “new mobility.” Cities thrive by comfortably compressing large number of people together in space and time. We need to invest intelligently in methods both old and new to ensure they can keep growing.