Rethinking the Transit Landscape to Prioritize Equity, Safety and Sustainability

When David Kim was 10, his father drove him and the rest of his family from their home in Davis, California, to Berkeley to check out the new transportation marvel that had just opened: the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, or BART.

Riding in a BART through the San Francisco Bay area was “an incredible experience,” Kim recalled fondly. “I was mesmerized by this gleaming new subway system.”

Kim also understood — as well as a 10-year-old could — that BART would make an important difference in Bay Area residents’ everyday life. “I was inspired by the possibilities,” he said.

At that time, BART was the first U.S. urban transit rail project to be built in decades — and the result of forward-thinking by California policymakers and the professionals at Parsons Brinckerhoff, now WSP USA, who authored the 1956 report recommending “interurban rapid transit” as the best approach to mitigate the Bay Area’s “ever-increasing traffic congestion.”

Fifty years later, after decades of experience in transportation and two-and-a-half years as California Transportation Secretary, Kim has come full circle and earlier this year joined WSP as senior vice president and national transportation policy and multimodal strategy principal in Washington, D.C.

BART, which celebrated its 50th anniversary in September,  is no longer brand new, but it is in the middle of its largest upgrade and expansion, the Link21 program, which will create a faster, more integrated system in a 21-county region of Northern California. Meanwhile, Kim is more passionate than ever about leveraging transportation and transit investments to remedy America’s stubborn social inequities and build a more sustainable future.

Q: Besides being so impressed with BART as a boy, what influenced you to build your career around transportation and transit?

Kim: Right out of college, I was hired as an aide and field deputy to California State Senator David Roberti who represented parts of Los Angeles. This was during the development of the Los Angeles Metro system, so I attended many meetings with agencies and stakeholders.

I saw the good, the bad and the ugly of transportation planning and decision-making. But as that subway system grew, I saw its positive impacts on the communities of Los Angeles. And that made all the political maneuvering and negotiations between stakeholder groups more than worthwhile.

Q: What are America’s major transportation challenges and what is needed to solve those?

Kim: We need to completely rethink our built environment and transportation landscape to emphasize equity, safety and mitigating climate change. And we have a golden opportunity to do this with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).

The BIL and U.S. Department of Transportation’s (USDOT’s) Equity Action Plan can be used to accomplish much-needed progress around issues such as transit access and pedestrian safety in low-income communities.

Q: What are the top priorities you’d like to see accomplished with BIL funding?

Kim: I'm troubled by the data on fatalities and serious injuries going up, especially for pedestrians and bicyclists in low-income communities. In Los Angeles, for example, 65 percent of road fatalities happen on six percent of city streets, most of which are in historically black neighborhoods such as South Central and West Adams.

These communities often lack basic pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure such as sidewalks, protected bike lanes and crossing infrastructure. They would greatly benefit from the approach that’s known as “road diets” or “complete streets.” These involve redesigning large arterial roads to make more space for pedestrians, bicyclists, scooters, and other users, as well as traffic calming measures such as islands and roadway narrowing.

I’d like to see state DOTs, which will disburse most of the BIL funding, provide leadership guidance and best practices to encourage local jurisdictions to advance these kinds of projects in communities with the highest rates of road injuries and fatalities.

Q: These measures are well known and have been implemented in many communities. What will it take to see them applied in low-income communities?

Kim: The pattern has been to make these improvements in middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods, while the transit and mobility needs of lower-income communities of color tend to be given less attention. It will take political will and concerted effort to allocate the resources necessary to improve safety and mobility in communities that have been historically overlooked.

In many jurisdictions, there are plans to make these kinds of improvements, and many cities in the U.S. and globally have publicly embraced what’s known as VisionZero, a policy framework intended to eliminate traffic deaths and severe injuries while advancing equitable mobility. Yet with a few exceptions, these visions and plans haven’t produced their intended results.

Q: What are the exceptions?

Kim: Hoboken, New Jersey is moving aggressively toward its VisionZero with an ambitious action plan to build safer streets, reduce vehicle speeds, change driver behaviors, encourage more of what they call active transportation — walking, taking transit, bicycling, etc. — and other measures to reduce fatalities and injuries.

Hoboken is a relatively small city, very dense and close to New York City, so its road network and built environment are quite different from most large metro areas. This may make it easier in some ways to accomplish VisionZero.

Large cities will face different challenges, but local elected and appointed officials around the country are already paying attention to Hoboken.

Q: Are there some large cities where you see significant movement around equity in mobility?

Kim: I'm excited about LA Metro’s Crenshaw Light rail project, also known as the “K” Line, which recently opened to the public after seven or eight years of engineering and construction.

Crenshaw will serve predominantly black communities such as South LA, Inglewood, Hyde Park, and Leimert Park. It will also connect the metro system to LAX and open new career opportunities for residents of South LA and surrounding neighborhoods.

This is a great example of a transit agency thinking long and hard about how to improve service in underserved communities.

Q: What else comes to mind when you think about equity in transit?

Kim: I’ve recently contributed to a new book on this topic, Conversations on Equity and Inclusion in Public Transportation, edited by Paul Comfort, so this question is fresh in my mind. In general terms, underserved communities need improved frequency, reliability and quality of transit services. And delivering those improvements is a function of funding and political will.

But there’s a more basic issue that transit agencies should tackle: bus shelters in low-income communities. In most cities, the newest and most well-designed bus shelters are in affluent communities, while in low-income communities, they either don’t exist or are generally old and decrepit. This means riders wait unprotected from the elements—whether that’s intense sun and heat or rain, wind and snow.

A transit agency constructing and renovating bus shelters in underserved communities will convey a very important message that they care about their customers. So again, I applaud Los Angeles, where the City Council just approved funding to inventory the worst bus shelters in the city and improve them over time.

Q: What roles do you see WSP playing in advancing equitable mobility?

Kim: We have a huge role to play in promoting and advocating for equity through our Equity Center of Excellence and across all our business units that work in transportation.

Our clients know they need to redress historic under-investment in poor communities. But this has been building for decades, and it can be a huge and overwhelming challenge to tackle. So, we can bring our vast experience to bear to help them—from initial brainstorming and sketch planning with stakeholders to refining comprehensive strategies that will center equity in their planning and project design.

And there’s no time to waste. The applications for BIL funding for safe streets and other equitable infrastructure programs are due soon. This is an incredible opportunity for local governments to apply for competitive funding through USDOT to advance their visions.

Q: Are you optimistic about the future of equitable mobility?

Kim: I’m optimistic about the changing attitudes toward our car-dependent culture and built environment. There’s a young man — Twitter handle @betterstreetsai — who uses artificial intelligence (AI) visualization to show how actual streets can be transformed from the motor vehicle-centric configurations of today to the human-scale, safe, walkable, bikeable designs we want. On his websites, BetterStreetsAI.org and TransformYour.City, users have uploaded the busy streets in their neighborhoods, and his AI engine shows what they would look like—with open space, benches, fountains, sidewalk cafes—if they were redesigned to prioritize humans instead of cars.

This kind of work is helping to change the conversation about our dependence on cars. Our future doesn’t have to be car-centered. Other cities around the world, such as Amsterdam, were once totally car-dependent. Over time they’ve been able to change to favor bikes, transit and pedestrians, and the benefits are obvious.

Doing that in U.S. cities will take a great deal of political will. And to power that will, we need compelling visions of what can be created as we carve out more human-scaled space in urban environments.

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