Changes are stymied by bureaucracy put in place due to fear of litigation. The primary reason that things are studied, studied again, given community input, and checked for environmental impact is that if a city or municipality gets sued due to a road change, the onus is on them to demonstrate that they didn't create an unsafe condition. For example in cases where cars crash and are liable for property damage, car owners try to sue the city to claim that the area was unsafe. Pointing to a massive paper trail like this removes liability from a set of city or municipal concerns.

I think in many places we have gotten to the point where the planning, processes, and public approval process for some of these simple projects is more costly in time and money than just building it as a temporary experiment and revisiting it in a year or two to measure the outcome.

Not that there shouldn't still be some kind of standards and community approval, but I think we can afford to set that at a lower bar for certain categories of easily reversible projects.

And hopefully incorporating more of these ideas can teach us to be more efficient on transit infrastructure projects in general, where the US often significantly trails other countries on cost and implementation time.

We kind of have reached that point. You can look at the cost overruns and public consultation before every new project as failures of the system to deliver what people want.

> a failure on the part of the professionals whose responsibility the planning and implementation of this is.

Don't forget the short-sighted NIMBYism.