Universal Transportation

Harold is 71, lives outside Ardmore, Oklahoma, and has end-stage kidney disease. He gets dialysis three times a week. The medical transport service is contracted, chronically understaffed, and frequently late or absent. When he misses a session, he spends the next two days in a level of physical distress his grandchildren try not to look at directly.

His granddaughter, Tasha, turned down a job in town — the best offer she’d had in two years — because she’d have to leave before 7am and Harold can’t drive himself anymore. She’s 26. The job paid $18 an hour. There’s no bus route between their house and town. There is no bus route.

Harold is not one person. He is a pattern. Tasha is not one person. She is a pattern. Half of America is their zip code: no transit, no options, no workaround that doesn’t cost someone else something they can’t spare. Forty-five percent of Americans have zero access to public transportation. Not bad access. Not infrequent access. None. Sixteen million adults of driving age live in households without a car — and for 2.5 million people in primarily rural counties, there is no private vehicle available at all. Only 36 percent of rural residents have the choice between airline, rail, and bus transportation. The rest have a car, or they have nothing.

And car ownership — the thing this country has treated as a default rather than a privilege — now costs an average of $11,577 a year. Nine hundred sixty-five dollars a month. Depreciation, fuel, maintenance, insurance, financing, registration. For a low-income family, that cost plus home energy eats 17.8 percent of income before rent, before groceries, before the kids need shoes. Car ownership is a de facto requirement for citizenship in most of this country, and it’s one of the most regressive costs in the economy.

Foundation is built on the premise that there is a minimum set of conditions people need to thrive. Mobility is one of sixteen components, because transportation isn’t convenience. It’s the infrastructure that either connects you to opportunity and care, or quietly forecloses it while nobody calls it a policy choice.

What Oklahoma Looks Like Without Transit

Oklahoma has 19 rural transit systems that cover all 77 counties. They provided 1.74 million trips in 2022 — 12 percent of them for elderly or disabled riders like Harold. The only passenger rail in the state is the Heartland Flyer, Amtrak’s daily run from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth. That’s it. No commuter rail. No intercity bus network that connects rural communities to each other or to the metros in any reliable way.

In Oklahoma City, something different is happening. The OKC Streetcar — 7 cars, 2 loops, 22 stops — hit record ridership in fiscal year 2025: 288,517 annual riders. And on January 5, 2026, EMBARK launched a six-month free fare pilot program, running through July, to test whether fare-free service should become permanent. They’re looking at peer cities — Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cincinnati — that have seen real results with fare-free transit models.

This matters. Not because a streetcar solves Oklahoma’s transportation crisis — it doesn’t, and it’s not designed to. It matters because it’s a proof of concept: when you reduce the barrier, people use the system. When you treat transit as public infrastructure rather than a product that needs to earn its keep through fares, more people move. More people get to work, to the doctor, to the grocery store, to each other. The streetcar is a 22-stop experiment in what happens when you decide that mobility is a right. The results, so far, suggest that people agree.

The question is whether that principle extends past the city limits — to Harold’s house outside Ardmore, to the 77 counties where “transit” means a van that comes if you call two days ahead, if the driver isn’t already committed, if you’re lucky.

The Autonomous Vehicle Opportunity

Self-driving electric vehicles are coming. The technology is converging toward viability, and when it arrives at scale, it represents the most significant transportation transformation since the automobile replaced the horse. Fleets of autonomous electric vehicles could provide on-demand mobility to every citizen at a fraction of the current cost of car ownership.

The question — the question that matters — is ownership. If autonomous fleets are owned by three corporations that extract maximum revenue, we’ve just replaced one dependency with another. If they’re publicly owned or cooperatively structured — transportation as a utility, like electricity — then autonomous vehicles become genuine liberation infrastructure. Especially in rural areas and small towns where public transit has never been economically viable in its traditional form.

Think about what that means for Harold. An autonomous vehicle, dispatched by an AI system that knows his dialysis schedule, shows up at his door three times a week. No contracted driver to be late. No staffing shortage. No missed sessions. Tasha takes the job in town because the same system gets her there by 7am. The vehicle charges overnight at a station powered by sustainable energy — geothermal from a Phoenix Wells conversion, or wind from the turbines that already dot the landscape. The framework holds together because the problems hold together.

But only if the fleet is public. If Harold has to subscribe to RoboUber at $200 a month, we’ve changed nothing. If Tasha has to rate her ride quality to maintain her access tier, we’ve changed nothing. The technology is not the variable. Ownership is.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s transit infrastructure a D-minus. Not a C. Not a “needs improvement.” A D-minus — the kind of grade that means the system is failing and the people who depend on it know it. We spend, on average, $166 per capita on transit at the state level. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated roughly $18 billion a year for transit through 2026 — 42 percent more than the previous period — but that’s still catching up on decades of disinvestment, not building forward.

And the cost of that disinvestment isn’t abstract. It’s Harold missing dialysis. It’s Tasha turning down $18 an hour. It’s the veteran in Tulsa who has a job but can’t get to it reliably enough to keep it — the same veteran who shows up in the housing statistics as “employed but homeless,” as if that paradox doesn’t have a transportation chapter. It’s the student in rural McAlester who could take a dual-enrollment course at the community college but can’t get there — which connects to education and accessible education and the question of whether opportunity is real or rhetorical.

Transportation isolation compounds every other kind of isolation. It amplifies healthcare disparities — missed appointments, delayed prescriptions, emergency rooms used as primary care because you can only get there when someone drives you and it’s already a crisis. It deepens food insecurity — the same neighborhoods without transit are the neighborhoods without grocery stores, and when the nearest fresh produce is 30 miles away and you don’t have a car, you eat what the gas station sells. It makes skills training theoretical — the retraining program exists, the classroom has an open seat, and there’s no way to get there.

When we talk about the Foundation framework as interconnected, transportation is where you feel it. Mobility is the connective tissue between every other component. Without it, you can offer people education, healthcare, housing, and food — and watch them not be able to reach any of it.

Energy Integration

Transportation and energy are inseparable. Electric vehicle fleets need charging infrastructure powered by sustainable energy. This connects directly to Sustainable Energy and to Phoenix Wells — where geothermal energy could power the charging networks that power the vehicles that connect communities.

Oklahoma generates 41 percent of its electricity from wind. It has 22,000 abandoned wells that can produce geothermal heat. It has the wind and the geology to power a statewide EV charging network without a single gallon of gasoline. The same state that has no intercity rail and 19 rural transit systems stretched across 77 counties has every physical resource it needs to build the most advanced transportation infrastructure in the country. What it lacks, as always, is the decision to do it for its own people rather than for someone else’s balance sheet.

What We Need From You

People who live where there’s no bus. People who’ve missed medical appointments because the ride didn’t come. People who turned down opportunities because they couldn’t get there. People who spend $965 a month on a car they need but can’t afford, in a town where the alternative is not going at all. Your experience is what makes this real. Here are the directions we’re building toward:

• Publicly owned autonomous vehicle fleets — on-demand transportation as a utility, not a subscription. When self-driving EVs arrive at scale, the ownership question determines whether they liberate or extract. Public ownership means Harold gets his dialysis ride. Every time. No rating system, no surge pricing, no shareholder between a person and where they need to go. What does public fleet governance look like in a rural county? What are the failure modes we need to design against?

• AI-optimized rural demand-response transit — instead of fixed bus routes that don’t make economic sense in low-density areas, AI-dispatched vehicles that go where people actually need to go, when they need to go there. Oklahoma’s 19 rural transit systems already provide 1.74 million trips a year — imagine that network with intelligent routing, predictive scheduling, and skills training for the operators who make it work. What would change in your community if reliable transit showed up when you needed it?

• Geothermal-powered charging networks — Phoenix Wells energy powering the EV infrastructure that connects communities. Wind energy feeding the grid that feeds the vehicles. The energy and the transportation systems designed together, not bolted on after the fact. Oklahoma has the wind, the geology, and the workforce. What it needs is a plan that treats these as one system, not three separate policy conversations.

What does mobility mean where you live? What opportunity did you lose because you couldn’t get there? What do you know about rural transportation that no one in a policy office has thought to ask?

This is citizen-developed work. This is one of sixteen components. Explore the full framework →

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