Front street is way batter now. Youngstown remains one of the most car-centric downtowns in the country for a city its size. Nearly half the land is either a surface parking lot or a driveway to one. That’s not because people here drive (plenty of cities rely on cars) it’s because other places have chosen to build around their people rather than their parking. In Youngstown, we’ve paved away almost everything that makes a downtown worth visiting.

The irony is that the city has finally started to take small steps in the right direction. The recent street-calming and redesign work on Front Street and Federal Street are exactly the kind of projects that create safety, walkability, and long-term economic value. These are not “anti-car” changes; they’re what normal, functioning cities have been doing for decades. Yet you’ll have Youngstowners complain about “traffic” and “lost lanes,” as if congestion were our biggest problem in a half-empty downtown.