Episode 2: Who Should Get to Decide Whether a Road Goes on a Diet? (Beth Osborne)

This week on Streetsblog, we looked at two communities who each planned to calm an ultra-wide, ultra-dangerous road with the support of the vast majority of the residents they asked, only to have those plans scuttled in the face of vocal opposition. In San Antonio, Texas, that opposition is coming from the top down, as state DOT leaders and the governor himself step in and insist that 7-lane Broadway Avenue must continue to prioritize motorist speed over local safety; in Philadelphia, Pa., it's coming from the bottom up, as a coalition of business owners and residents of color claim that cutting five-lane Washington Avenue down to three would eventually result in their displacement, successfully persuading the city to rethink their plans. Both stories, though, prompt the same thorny questions: why is redesigning killer roads so difficult in American communities? Who should get the final say on how safe — or fast — a road through a neighborhood should be? And which structural changes could make it easier for road diet projects to actually make it across the finish line — and make sure that new dangerous, car-centric roads are never built in our neighborhoods in the first place? On today's episode of The Brake, we sat down with Beth Osborne, director of Transportation for America, to tackle those tough questions, and talk about what strategies could get road diet resisters on board.