Ohio

The criminalization of walking continues in Dayton, Ohio.

A person walking down a major thoroughfare in downtown Akron encounters enormous swaths of parking and barely any retail or housing.

Things are looking up transit riders in Washington, where Democratic Governor Jay Inslee fended off attacks on transit funding. But in Ohio, Republican Governor John Kasich delivered a blow to transit service with a stroke of his veto pen.

Roseanne Martinez has lived at the corner of Secor and Bancroft Roads, just over the border from Toledo, for almost 30 years.

On Friday, the Ohio Department of Transportation held a meeting ostensibly to gather feedback from transit riders in the Dayton and Cincinnati regions. But ODOT held the meeting in exurban Lebanon -- a hour's trip by car from Cincinnati and totally inaccessible by transit from either city.

Ohio DOT is one of those old-school transportation agencies that’s still just a highway department. The director is a former asphalt industry lobbyist. The state — despite being fairly densely populated and urban (about 1 million people don’t have cars) — spent only $7.3 million supporting transit in 2013, far less than it devotes to mowing highway medians.

The inner Cleveland suburb of Lakewood (population 51,000) calls itself a "walking school district." Lakewood has never had school buses in its history, and kids grow up walking and biking to school. Mornings and afternoons are a beehive of activity on streets near schools, as kids and parents walk to and from classrooms. You can feel the energy. The freedom of being able to walk and socialize with friends is incalculable. According to city planner Bryce Sylvester, Lakewood strives to design neighborhoods so that all children are within walking distance of their school. These decisions have paid off financially, saving the city about a million dollars annually, according to Lakewood City School District spokesperson Christine Gordillo.

Columbus, Ohio, is a convenient microcosm of the United States as a whole.