How America's war on cars is landing hardest on the people who can least afford it - and what DC gets wrong about transportation equity.
I'm not here to argue that cars are good.
The emissions are real. The gridlock is real. The pedestrian deaths are real. Anybody who tells you cities don't need to change how they move people around isn't paying attention.
But neither is anybody who pretends the people absorbing the cost of that change are the ones who caused the problem.
Because every time a city decides it's going green, the bill lands in the same place. Not on the guy whose parking is expensed to his firm. Not on the remote worker with a Whole Foods downstairs and a Citi Bike out front. It lands on the nursing assistant leaving Southeast at 4:30 a.m. because Metro doesn't run reliably enough to get her to her patient on time. The plumber whose livelihood is in that van and who just lost his last legal parking spot. The grandmother in Ward 8 whose bus stop got moved half a mile down the road to make space for a protected bike lane serving a neighborhood she's never lived in.
Same as always.
What Congestion Pricing Actually Costs
In January 2025, New York City became the first American city to charge drivers just to enter $9 to cross into lower Manhattan during peak hours, rising to $15 by 2031. Early results are real: fewer cars, faster traffic, cleaner air. The policy works by its own definition.
64% of New Yorkers opposed it.
Supporters say most low-income commuters take the subway anyway, so the toll barely touches them. Technically true for a lot of people. But it doesn't cover the home health aide whose client lives in the zone and whose shift starts before the subway runs reliably. It doesn't cover the food vendor driving a truck full of product in five days a week. For those people, $9 isn't $9 it's $2,250 in new annual costs that appeared out of nowhere and nobody offered to help cover. The low-income discount exists on paper. Getting it requires registration, documentation, and navigating government bureaucracy while working two jobs. Most people won't.
London already charges drivers up to £18 a day to operate older vehicles in the city. Every major American city is watching. When DC eventually does its version and it will the question won't be whether the science is sound. The question will be who gets the bill.
DC's Bike Lane Problem Isn't Bike Lanes
Drive down Connecticut Avenue and you can watch the future being built. DDOT's redesign removes up to 469 parking spaces along one of the city's busiest corridors to install protected bike lanes. Columbia Road got bus and bike lanes last year by eliminating residential permit parking residents had relied on for years.
Bike lanes save lives. I'm not arguing against them.
I’m worried about who gets them and who loses something in the process. DDOT's own equity data shows protected bike lanes are concentrated in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods. The wards with the highest car dependency where residents are most likely to be Black, lower income, and far from a Metro station are last in line for new infrastructure. And they're getting their parking removed anyway.
What does carrying groceries on a bike look like when you have three kids, it's February, and the nearest store is three miles away on a road with no bike lane? It looks like you still need your car. And now you have nowhere to put it.
The city's job is to hold all of that at once the cyclists, the residents, the merchants, the families. Instead it keeps picking the side that makes the best press release.
The Bus Cuts and the Fare Enforcement
This part requires some fairness.
WMATA has been running a $750 million budget deficit. Federal funding cuts and a shrinking base of government worker commuters driven by decisions DC had no control over hollowed out the system's finances. The proposed 2024 budget would have gutted 80% of the bus system. The DC Circulator shut down entirely. Ninety workers, $400 a week in severance, routes gone. Some of this was forced. Cities can't conjure hundreds of millions of dollars when federal support disappears.
But the burden didn't fall evenly.
60% of DC bus riders are Black. 68% have household incomes under $50,000. Bus riders are half as likely as rail riders to have a workplace transit benefit. When their service gets cut regardless of why they don't switch to rail or start biking. They figure it out at personal cost, or they don't make it.
And while service was being cut, Metro Transit Police went from 618 fare evasion stops in 2023 to 7,389 in 2024 a 1,095% increase. Nobody planned for it to work out this way. But the person caught in a fare evasion stop isn't a lobbyist running late. It's someone who had to choose between paying $2.25 and eating lunch.
The city restricts driving. Funding dries up. Transit gets cut. Enforcement goes up. And somewhere in a conference room, someone is finishing a slide deck about DC's green transportation future.
What Getting This Right Actually Looks Like
There is a version of all this that works for everyone. Transit that runs frequently enough that giving up a car is a real choice, not an act of faith. Parking policy smart enough to distinguish between a tech worker's weekend car and a plumber's work van. Congestion revenue that flows back to the communities carrying the heaviest load not into a capital fund that eventually builds a nicer station in Bethesda.
Other cities have built that version. It's not a fantasy. It just requires honesty about who is being asked to sacrifice and whether they had any say.
The family in Ward 7 didn't cause the climate crisis. The nursing assistant driving in from PG County didn't design a city where a car is the only way to get to work on time. The woman who parks in front of her salon in Anacostia because her customers can't walk six blocks from a Metro station didn't choose a neighborhood where the infrastructure was never built.
The planet needs saving. The people who never caused this problem deserve to be part of that future too. Those two things should not be in conflict.
Joe Ogundeyi is the founder of ATME, a vehicle-to-vehicle communication platform connecting drivers in the communities cities keep overlooking. Read more on the ATME Blog.
