Looking Forward and Back on the Arrested Mobility Movement

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My name is Charles T. Brown and this is Arrested Mobility. Today we’re doing something a little different. We’re looking back across three seasons of the show at the stories and voices that have stayed with us. We started this show in season one with what might seem like a small thing, jaywalking, the act of crossing the street outside the crosswalk. But as we quickly discovered, jaywalking laws are anything but small, they are one of the most common pretexts for police contact with Black Americans and they were invented not to protect pedestrians but to protect the automobile industry. I spoke with Angie Schmitt, a journalist and transportation planner and author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America and with Michael Kelley, policy director at BikeWalkKC, a Kansas City advocacy organization that successfully fought to repeal jaywalking laws in their city.

Thanks for joining us, Angie. Can you tell me a little bit about where jaywalking came from?

So about a hundred years ago when cars are first sort of appearing in American cities, it was pretty controversial. At that time cities like Philadelphia and St. Louis and Cleveland were largely pedestrianized. People could use a streetcar maybe, but most people did a lot of their daily trips by walking. Anyway, cars start coming into cities, especially in a big way after the invention at the Model T Ford. And what happened right away is people started getting killed in really, really high numbers. Thousands of people all of a sudden are dying from this cause of death that really didn’t exist too much a few years prior. So there was a lot of panic and moral outrage about this at the time and there was groups organizing, particularly groups of mothers who had lost children, were organizing under the banner of the National Safety Council in cities across the country.

So in response to that, there was this organized campaign by car dealers, gasoline sellers, they sort of organized and put forward this idea that streets were for cars and that pedestrians shouldn’t be in the roadway except in very limited circumstances. And Hoover, when he was president and commerce secretary, I think before that, he institutionalized that and then it became sort of the norm around that time. So there was a huge shift. There was sort of an intentional propaganda campaign around it. So it was something that auto dealers and auto interests really fought for and originated to protect their interests.

How did we end up with these roads that sort of encouraged what we now deem criminal behavior?

It goes back to sort of who we’re designing roads for but also all kinds of facilities for. I think in the minds of a lot of designers and a lot of people that are sort of empowered with these public spending decisions and design decisions, the important sort of client or person they’re building for fits in a certain profile. And it’s like I think in their minds it’s like a man who’s middle aged more often and he’s probably working age and he might be a little more well to do, like the kind of guy that’s commuting from the suburbs potentially on a highway.

So I think we’ve catered to that kind of person in a lot of our planning a lot of times unconsciously. But I think like the reality of the way people use the transportation system and the kind of roles they play in society over the course of their lifetimes are much more diverse than that. So the system serves that kind of person really well. And people that don’t fit that profile a lot of times can serve really, really badly and put them in danger.

How is this law negatively affecting people?

So the way that it negatively affects people in Kansas City, for example, is that it disproportionately has impacted Black pedestrians. Something that really kind of drew people’s attention to the issue was data that was released by our local police department, which found that despite making up only 30% of the city’s population, Black pedestrians were 65% of the targets for jaywalking tickets. And so when numbers are that stark, it’s very hard not to see how jaywalking has kind of morphed whatever the initial intent was into something that is harmful for the community.

You identify as a Black man in Kansas City and I’m sure that you walk. Do you ever feel like your life is at risk?

Yes, unfortunately. I feel it’s at risk because I oftentimes walk on streets that don’t have sidewalks and I have to look over my shoulder whenever there is a car coming. And it’s unfortunate too because I know that there’s always a chance that I could be stopped for no other reason than looking suspicious, even though I am well educated and I work for a pretty well respected nonprofit.

But that doesn’t deter me because I know that as an individual, walking is good for my health and it’s especially important as a Black man to do more to ensure my own health because that is something that is oftentimes one of the first things to be harmed when that infrastructure is removed from us. But also to be an example for my daughters, to show them that it is possible to exist and not just exist in Kansas City, but to thrive and to show them what thriving means it means to show them joy. And I take great joy in walking, even if I have to have those concerns because I know that showing that joy is the only way that I can instill in them that same sense of wonder, that same sense of peace, but also that same sense of determination to continue to push for something that is better than what they initially found.

In season two, we went deeper into the infrastructure itself, the physical systems that make it harder to move through certain neighborhoods than others. We started with a story that I think captures this more viscerally than almost anything else we’ve ever covered. In Hammond, Indiana, children in the majority Black and Latino neighborhood of Hessville were crawling under freight trains to get to school, not because they wanted to, but because the trains stopped between their homes and their school sometimes for hours with no federal law requiring them to move. I spoke with Topher Sanders, an investigative journalist with ProPublica who broke this story and with Akicia Henderson, a mother of three who lives right in Hessville. And just last month in May 2026, Akicia noted the 2026 Indiana Walk Bike Summit and met a former resident of Hammond who thanked me for shining light on the issues there.

You wrote an article for a ProPublica called, As Rail Profits Soar, Blocked Crossings Force Kids to Crawl Under Trains to Get to School. Can you please summarize the contents of the article for us?

Sure. It’s an article that is speaking about a national dynamic that drills into a community called Hammond, Indiana and more specifically a part of Hammond called Hessville. And so we took a trip there after talking with some of the local folks about what was happening there and we saw for our own eyes, children having to scale trains that are stopped in their pathway as they try to walk to school in order to get to school. And these kids aren’t goofing off. These kids aren’t playing around. It’s not the weekend. It’s early morning, they’re trying to go to school and they encounter a stop train and because the train’s length, walking around the train is not practical. So they’re forced to either really turn around or climb over and in some instances for the little ones climb under the train to go to school. And so we saw that and we knew instantly it was a story that had to be written.

You’re a father, you have three children. What was it like experiencing that?

I mean, that’s instantly what I think about. The first thing I thought about was, would I want my child to have to climb under a train to get to school? Answer is absolutely not. And another thing that should be noted is the visuals we got for this that are just so stirring because when you see a little girl in the reddish pink jacket trying to crawl under the train and you see her picking up her book bag and then she done drop stuff, now she got to go get the water bottle and she’s still straddling the rail where at any moment if the train moved, when you see that visual, there’s no way you cannot be impacted by this.

Everyone we spoke with was incensed about it, right? Nobody was comfortable with it. Everyone was upset. But they had reached a place in Hammond where they had just accepted it. It’s one of those in plain sight problems that communities just go, “Well, that’s the cost of business to live here.” So you’re talking about Black and brown folks who don’t have power trying to raise issues with companies that have federal protection on a million different things. I think that a lot of times those pleas fall on deaf ears and the only time you start to see anything move is when there’s death and maimings that occur.

The first day I saw the kids climbing the train around the time when we first moved here, when I walked home, walked my daughter home from school and the train stopped. So I thought it was normal for us to just stand there and wait till the train moved. So we’re standing there and other kids walking and they didn’t stand there. They just started climbing over and I was like in shock like, “What the heck are these kids doing?” And I walk up close making sure that everybody’s going to be okay and they’re just jumping off the train. One girl, the way she jumped down, it looked like she was going to break her ankle and I’m like, “You okay?” And she was like, “Yeah.” And everybody just started throwing their book bags over. It seems so normal to them.

And I know an adult lady, she said, this has been going on for 25 years since she was in school. This is nothing new. They always have to climb the trains out here. Hopefully they’re waking up, they’re opening their eyes and they’re going to stop. They’re finally thinking about the kids climbing the trains. But it hasn’t completely stopped happening though. It still happens. I got a note on my door and I’ve read about it that, that they got a funding to build an over-bridge or something like that. I’m just wondering when is that going to happen? How long it’s going to be? I know that’s going to take time. It’s probably going to be 15, 20 years from now. I don’t know. But how soon is this going to happen? Hopefully nothing happens. Nobody get hurt before that happens, before they build the over-bridge. Is that going to really help the pedestrians anyway? It’s going to make the walks and stuff longer for the kids and is that really going to happen ,and when?

The harm isn’t only in how people are policed or how infrastructure is built. It’s also in what gets taken away, green space, clean air, quiet, the ability to let your kids play outside. Two episodes from season two looked at this from very different angles and together they tell a complete story. The first was about Cop City, the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, a $90 million facility approved for construction in one of Atlanta’s few remaining green spaces surrounded by majority Black neighborhoods. I spoke with researchers, Hanna Love and Manann Donoghoe from the Brookings Institution who had mapped the overlap between over policing and environmental harm across American cities.

We didn’t want to interrogate the specifics of the Cop City protests or the Atlantic Public Safety Training Center in general. We wanted to look at something larger, which is really how certain structural causes, whether that be land use and zoning policies or public and private investment patterns, how those structural causes make the same communities disproportionately affected by climate injustice and over-policing. So what we decided to do is we chose three different cities and we decided to look at a map and see where we could find an overlap in communities where they have disproportionate exposure to climate injustice as well as disproportionate exposure to over-policing. We found a strong relationship, the same neighborhoods are being impacted by urban heat island effects as well as over-policing. And that might seem a little in the weeds, but we thought it was really important to do this because in the criminology literature, there have been researchers that focus on sort of the relationship between heat and crime.

What we know is that by and large, they share a lot of the same root causes. You get high heat waves, high urban heat island effects because of a history of disinvestment from a place where there hasn’t been the influx of resources to build parks to build green space and to build public lands. The same is true of areas which have higher crime rates. They tend also to be areas where poverty rates are higher, where housing, there’s more housing precarity, people are struggling more to pay their rent, for example, and areas are overdeveloped and lacking green space. When you see that overlap, it kind of changes the way you think about how we should be investing in the built environment.

Where I sort of see the through line between all my research is looking at place through the lens of what public institutions value and how public policy decision making reveals those values. And so if you see a $90 million investment in a majority Black community, you would hope it would be an investment that involved community engagement that was asked for by this community that could contribute to their health and wellbeing. Instead, you see a $90 million investment in police militarization with the potential to destroy this critical piece of climate infrastructure.

The second episode brought the same argument down to the street level, literally. Amy Stelly is an artist, urbanist, and designer who was born and has lived nearly her entire life in the Tremé District of New Orleans. Her neighborhood was cut in half in 1969 when the Claiborne Expressway was built through it. She’s been fighting to take it down ever since. Also spoke with Drew Hawkins, a journalist with the Gulf States Newsroom who reported on Amy’s work.

It at one time was very much a neighborhood commercial corridor that had a really huge, beautiful median in the center of it that housed a huge stand of oak trees. As a child, I walked the corridor quite often because I would go shopping for my parents. There were lots of small neighborhood serving businesses, dentists, doctors, lawyers, music stores. We had everything. It was a shopping district for Black people during Jim Crow. So it was a very, very important economic engine in the city of New Orleans.

The Claiborne Expressway, well, it’s a behemoth. It was named The Monster not long after it went up. So now we have a corridor where the beautiful stand of oak trees has been replaced by an ugly concrete facility that sheds its water everywhere. It’s very noisy, it’s very dirty and it has attracted all kinds of crime. The shopping didn’t die immediately, but it did die over time. So the neighborhood went, once the trees were destroyed from a very pleasant place with a lot of character, a very lovable neighborhood to one that became very dark and in some places, very desolate.

One of the areas I went to for the story that I reported was a little playground called Hunter’s Field Playground. And Charles, you’ve got to see this thing. It just looks crazy between these two twin expressways above. It is so loud there. We’re talking right around the 90s dB area, which actually can damage your hearing after prolonged exposure. And I’ll be honest, when I walked around that playground, the equipment was in great shape, but that’s because it’s not used. This playground is over nine years old now and I did not see a single child, which I would say is actually a good thing given the noise, the air pollution, and the litter, which included used needles. There’s this really striking juxtaposition of the image of a slide and monkey bars that still have that sheen on the paint. It’s because kids don’t use it and so it’s almost a decade old, but you haven’t had kids swinging on it or sliding down it nonstop all day long because it’s so loud. Amy Stelly has this great line where she says, “Yeah, kids don’t come here because kids are smart.”

That playground is never occupied. It’s unfortunate in that space because there’s a twin span going over the playground, so it’s even worse. So not only is it noisy, it gets a lot of particulate matter, which actually I noticed the last time I was there, has coated all of the toys. So for parents who may want to take their children to play there, they would have to think twice because their children would be touching the particulate matter that is settled on the toys. Now they could bring Lysol wipes and clean it, but they’d be cleaning the whole playground, which is crazy.

And the city doesn’t bother to maintain it. In its wisdom, the city built a resource center there that has never, ever opened. Why? Because it’s unpleasant under there and they built it in front of an amphitheater. So it’s a very, very poorly designed space that has been rendered unusable, not only by the poor design that’s now inherent in the space, but its location, it’s terrible. I decided as a kid that when I could take it down, I would do that. When I grew up and knew enough to take it down, then I would do it.

Many folks have asked if there’s a mid ground and I always answer there is no mid ground because we will continue to get particulate matter and we’re going to keep the noise so the things that are harmful for the community won’t go away. New Orleans is very compacted, has very efficient grid. So if we build correctly and smartly, I don’t think we’re going to need a highway. Pre I-10, there were 600,000 people living in New Orleans. We are at half that population today. So we moved more people before the highway than we have to move now. I don’t understand why this is not something we can do efficiently.

There’s a pretty visceral reaction to a lot of people, including people in New Orleans and many people even in these communities when you talk about something like removing the Claiborne Expressway entirely. But I would say a radical act is putting an interstate directly through a Black neighborhood. If you put something there, you could definitely take it back.

Season three was intentionally about something different. We wanted to find people who weren’t just naming the problem. They were building alternatives, working within the system and around it, creating new structures where the old ones had failed. The first story comes from Portland, Oregon. Randal Wyatt is an activist and artist who in the months after the murder of George Floyd started an organization called Taking Ownership PDX. They provide free repairs and renovations for Black homeowners, particularly elderly residents who are at risk of being fined, leined and ultimately replaced from their homes and neighborhoods.

I’m Randall Wyatt, Portland native, born and raised here. I committed myself to community activism at a very young age, right out of high school. A lot of that I attribute to becoming a young father. I became a father of twins at 19 and that’s when I kind of realized I’m going to need to invest in my community to make it a better place for them, but also for myself and for everybody else, because I care a lot about community and basically because I have created a name for myself as an activist and as an artist here, a lot of people asked me how they could be stronger allies for the community. And I said, if you come from a privileged background, then that has had hundreds and hundreds of years headstart economically, share your resources with the marginalized communities.

And then through my studies at Portland State University, learned a lot about gentrification and how it works, how displacement works and some of those factors. And one of those factors is deferred maintenance and seasonal maintenance being a huge contributor to displacement. So that’s when I came up with the model of activating allies and raising money to repair and renovate Black-owned homes for free. And I founded Taking Ownership in 2020 just after George Floyd was murdered. We are a community-based nonprofit that provides reparations in the form of free repairs and renovations for Black-owned homes and financial assistance for Black-owned small businesses. I use the term reparations because we are basically repairing what has been done to our community through historical practices and policies.

Unfortunately, it takes a Black-led organization to do this. It should be our city or the government doing this, but I use reparations because we’re repairing something that was intentional. They put us in this position. They wouldn’t give loans for repairing the homes back in the day. They redlined into certain areas.

They’re trying to hit them with liens and fines basically so that way they become financially vulnerable and that way predatory developers and real estate professionals can offer under market prices to buy their homes, take them, and then do urban renewal or build condos or whatever. Did the ancestors choose me to do this because I have no housing background, I have no … How did I land the opportunity to really truly impact my community and activate allies? And everybody’s winning in this. Not even like racist people can even talk much shit about this because I’m not even hurting them. I’m not taking away anything from anybody. When I think about what my ancestors had to go through. This is light work compared to what they had to do.

Our final story today comes from Detroit where a transit organizer named Renard Monczunski has spent years doing the slow, unglamorous work of building power among the city’s bus riders. In a city that is 80% Black, nearly one in three households has no car at all and for years, the transit system they depended on was underfunded, unreliable, and invisible to city leadership, Renard helped change that.

Transit is a unmet, an underserved, under-resourced, and under-invested commons in our city. When I mean commons, these are common resources or common public departments that we all rely on. So when we talk about transit being a commons, it belongs to the people. It serves the people, like libraries, clean air, clean water, access to our city. And real issue is that Detroit, as one of my volunteers said it, we experience transit apartheid. There’s spatial discrimination in terms of where we can go, what time of the day we can access our city in the suburban area region to where we can get work because the bus kind of operates as a filter to filter certain people for jobs. If you say that your bus is your own only way of getting around, you’re not going to get employment. So the lack of public transit holds back Detroit and all of us, including myself, are directly impacted by it.

When transit doesn’t work in your community and public transit, your city seems bigger, things seem further away, you’re further away from resources, your time is less than what someone has in an automobile and it’s really no coincidence that us being 80% African-American and the rider should be an 80% African-American, that we’re under resourced.

Tell me about some of your biggest wins when advocating for transit equity.

What we were able to do was create transit as a policy of concern and transit riders through our organizing work are now a constituency of concern. So what we were able to do was even shift the narrative about transit. The narrative was, “Oh, we feel sorry for you. A car will improve your life.” And that was exemplified through that story of the walking man who had to walk so many miles to get to and from work. His dedication and his persistence was admired. But what was unspoken about was the fact that our bus system is disconnected, doesn’t work, it’s not coordinated and that’s why this man had to walk all those miles. But the end is happy story is that he gets a car and we were offended by that. We were able to shift the media and how they talk about bus to talk about why it’s necessary to have a reliable public transit system.

We created something new in Detroit, a transit team of Detroit bus riders that are able to effectuate service changes for the better, to provide solutions and advice and to also get riders involved in using their voice and organizing and advocacy for better transit service and funding. We were invisible. Now we’re not.

Jaywalking laws, freight trains, Cop City, a destroyed expressway, a Black homeowner, one fine away from losing everything, city full of bus riders who nobody was counting. These aren’t separate problems, they are the same problem. The systematic limitation of Black movement, Black stability, Black presence in public life. That’s what this show has always been about and what gives me hope is that in every single one of these stories, there are people who refuse to assess Adaptive. People who organized, who sued, who showed up at city council meetings and if these stories have moved you, challenged you, or helped you name something you’ve always known but did not yet have the language for.

I want to invite you to go deeper with me in my book, Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement. The book expands the central argument of this podcast, that Black movement has never simply been about transportation. It has always been about freedom, power, belonging, safety, and the right to exist in public space without suspicion, punishment, displacement, or death. In the book, I examine the systems that have restricted Black mobility across generations, from policing and public policy to planning decisions and political exclusion. And I offer a framework for understanding how these harms continue to show up today in our streets, neighborhoods, institutions, and daily lives.

So if this podcast has helped you think differently about jaywalking, highways, transit, police stops, public space, or community repair, I hope you will pick up a copy of Arrested Mobility: Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement. Read it, share it, teach from it, discuss it with your colleagues, your students, your elected officials, your planning departments, your transit agencies, your church, your book club, or your community organization. Because the goal is not simply to understand Arrested Mobility, the goal is to end it.

And as we look ahead to season four, we are not slowing down. In many ways, season four will be our most direct season yet. We’re going to ask harder questions, name uncomfortable truths, and take on topics that too often get softened, sanitized, or avoided altogether. Some episodes may be just me speaking directly and honestly about the issues shaping Black mobility in America. No guess, no filter, just a straight conversation about the policies, the politics, the planning decisions, the police practices, and public narratives that continue to limit Black movement.

We may also take Arrested Mobility into the communities across the country, recording local on the ground stories from the people living these realities every day. Because the truth is some of the most powerful stories are not found in national headlines. They are found at the bus stop, under the highway, outside the courthouse, near the school crossing, on the block where the sidewalk disappears, or in the neighborhood that has been studied for decades but never repaired.

And we also want to have more difficult conversations with people inside the systems themselves, planners, engineers, law enforcement officials, public agency leaders, attorneys, advocates, and others who speak honestly about how discriminatory decisions happen, how institutions protect themselves and what it actually takes to challenge them. Season four will not simply ask what happened. It will ask who benefited, who was harmed, who knew, who stayed silent, who has the power to repair it and what will justice require? Because Arrested Mobility has never been just a podcast about transportation. It is a podcast about freedom. It is about the right of Black people to move, rest, gather, protest, play, age, work, worship, and live without being treated as a threat.

So thank you for listening across these three seasons. Thank you for sharing these stories. Thank you for sitting with the discomfort and thank you for believing that a different future is possible. This is Charles T. Brown and this is Arrested Mobility. We’ll see you in season four. This podcast is a production of Equitable Cities with support from Puddle Creative.