After decades of building new roads and expanding highways, commuters are still losing more time in traffic and their commutes keep getting longer. The evidence shows that adding more roads doesn’t relieve traffic; it simply encourages people to drive more.

That reality seems to finally be sinking in with a growing segment of the American public. There simply isn’t the room to fit more cars on congested roads, and that’s leading to renewed investments in other forms of mobility.

In recent years, ballot measures have been proposed around the United States to expand public transit and other non-auto transportation — and they’ve been very successful. Los Angeles’ Measure M passed with the support of 70 percent of voters in 2016 and will funnel $120 billion into transport projects over the next forty years. It’s not alone. In 2019, nearly 90 percent of transit ballot measures were successful, continuing a growing trend over the past few years of residents voting to raise their own taxes to fund better transit.