No Roads Forward: On the Quiet Killing of Climate and Mobility Futures
What the One Big Beautiful Bill reveals about transport, climate abandonment, and autistic disposability in an age of collapse.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” doesn’t just abandon climate action—it traps disabled and autistic people in place. Transit is gutted, EVs are priced out, and mobility becomes a myth. We’re done waiting. We build the way forward.
Introduction: A Map Without Roads
You open the route planner, and it shows you possibilities—buses at regular intervals, trains connecting cities, a quiet green line that promises relief from traffic and heat. But when you go to the stop, there’s no shelter. The timetable peels from the post. The app refreshes endlessly, offering routes that don’t exist. A sleek electric charging station stands behind a padlocked gate. You’re still allowed to plan the journey. You’re even encouraged to. But there’s no way to get there. And no one is coming to take you.
Yesterday, I wrote about the collapse of care—how the “One Big Beautiful Bill” quietly guts autistic supports whilst preserving the illusion of eligibility. Today, I want to ask a related question: even if those services remained, how would we reach them? What happens when the conditions of mobility are stripped away—when the routes vanish, the fuel becomes unaffordable, and the system shrugs as if nothing’s changed? For most autistic people, mobility has never been a given. Many of us don’t drive—not due to failure or unwillingness, but because driving, in the sensory and cognitive sense, is sometimes impossible. We rely on buses, on trains, on community rideshares, on walking routes that feel safe and navigable. And for those of us already poor—underemployed, structurally shut out—transport isn’t just about convenience. It’s about survival.
Without mobility, we lose access to everything: work, care, education, food, community. The environment may be framed as an abstract future issue by the politicians who passed this bill, but for disabled people, and especially for autistic people, it’s not abstract at all. It’s logistical. It’s bodily. It’s already here. The loss of climate subsidies, public transit funding, and accessible electrified infrastructure doesn’t just endanger the planet in some far-off way—it traps us in place, isolates us from care, and prices us out of movement entirely. The routes may still appear on the map. But the world they connect to is being quietly erased.
Built to Trap Us: The Disappearing Promise of Transit
The story of American transport is often told as one of freedom—open roads, personal choice, limitless horizons. But beneath that myth lies a truth far more brutal: the system was never built for everyone. In the postwar decades, as Europe rebuilt its rail lines and Japan electrified its cities, the United States made a different choice. It poured trillions into highways—concrete rivers designed for private cars, suburban sprawl, and white flight. Trains were left to rot. Buses were politically starved. And communities that didn’t fit the new map—Black, poor, disabled—were displaced, dismantled, or simply ignored. It wasn’t an oversight. It was architecture.
For autistic people, the consequences of that design are lifelong. Many of us cannot drive—not safely, not reliably, not without significant cost to our nervous systems. The reasons vary: sensory overwhelm, slow processing speeds, motor coordination differences, executive dysfunction, the fear of police encounters, the medical disqualification that comes with comorbid conditions. None of these are rare. They are, in fact, quite common. And yet the system treats non-drivers as outliers, rather than what we are: a significant portion of the population, excluded by default.
Public transport should have been the answer. But the US never truly invested in it. Outside a handful of dense cities, buses are infrequent or nonexistent. Train routes are sparse, slow, and chronically underfunded. Paratransit systems are inconsistent, often inaccessible in themselves. And now, with the new budget, even the faint promise of improvement has been erased. Funding cuts will gut local transit authorities, cancel planned electrification projects, and leave disabled riders quite literally stranded. And because there is no constitutional right to mobility—only to the illusion of choice—no one will be held responsible when the options disappear.
What does this mean in practice? It means being offered a job you can’t get to. A therapy session you can’t reach. A shop that’s too far to walk to and too expensive to taxi from. It means parents carrying their children for miles because no bus will stop there anymore. It means missed appointments, missed meals, missed chances. It means watching life happen elsewhere, as you sit—eligible, perhaps, but unmoving. It is not just inconvenient. It is a mechanism of social death. And for autistic people, who are already structurally marginalised, it ensures that exclusion is not an accident, but a certainty. The system was built to trap us. And now it doesn’t even pretend otherwise.
Environmental Cuts, and What They Reveal
The headlines won’t say it outright. They’ll talk about “reprioritising investments” or “streamlining programmes.” But the truth is plain: the “One Big Beautiful Bill” doesn’t just stall climate action—it sabotages it. Strips it for parts. Buries it under euphemism. The cuts are sweeping: green infrastructure projects slashed, EV tax credits rolled back or narrowed to near-unusability, public transit grants withdrawn midstream, and high-speed rail pilot programmes quietly dissolved before they laid a single metre of track. Community energy projects, grid upgrades, building retrofit funds—gone. Promises unkept, plans abandoned, futures revoked.
These are not neutral decisions. They are targeted disinvestments in a survivable world. And like the Medicaid “reforms” that hollow out care whilst preserving eligibility on paper, these cuts operate through a sleight of hand: the appearance of progress maintained in language, while the substance is pulled out from underneath. You’re still told the planet is a priority. Still assured the administration believes in clean energy, resilience, climate justice. But the funding says otherwise. The infrastructure never arrives.
And the pattern is familiar. The environment, like autistic people, is rendered “optional.” Not unimportant, exactly—just deferrable. Conditional. Treated as negotiable in the name of balancing the budget or appeasing fossil-fuel donors. Climate support becomes another discretionary line item. Another sacrifice offered up to the markets. And just as the supports autistic people rely on are made to disappear through the bureaucratic fiction of flexibility, so too are the systems meant to protect the biosphere and those who live closest to its collapse.
What’s gutted is not just policy. It’s possibility. It’s the collective infrastructure of tomorrow—solar grids that could have lit homes in heatwaves, trains that could have offered connection without combustion, subsidies that might have brought EVs within reach for poor families instead of just the professional class. Instead, those futures are withheld, and the blame is shifted: to individual choices, to technological limitations, to the imagined incompetence of the public sector. But it is none of those things. It is a decision. A verdict rendered in line items. And once again, the people who bear the cost are the ones least able to absorb it.
For autistic people, the consequences are compounded. We are more likely to be homebound during climate emergencies. More likely to rely on energy-intensive supports—medical devices, cooling systems, digital communication tools. More likely to live in housing we do not control. And now, the systems that might have buffered us—public cooling stations, subsidised retrofits, non-car transport—are gone. The climate crisis is accelerating. The net has been cut. And the state, once again, shrugs and calls it reform.
The Carceral Logic of Car Culture
American transport doesn’t just revolve around cars—it enforces them. The entire system is shaped to reward private vehicle ownership and punish its absence, embedding the assumption of car access into every layer of civic life. Zoning laws separate homes from workplaces, schools from services, making it nearly impossible to exist without a car outside a few select, expensive cities. Suburbs sprawl not by accident but by design, fed by highways that carved through working-class and Black communities, leaving behind isolation, pollution, and dependency. And those who can’t or don’t drive? They’re rendered invisible—or worse, suspect.
For autistic people, this is more than inconvenience. It’s systemic exclusion with carceral teeth. Walking whilst disabled, riding the bus in a rich neighbourhood, sitting at a train stop that serves no trains—these are behaviours that attract scrutiny, police presence, and sometimes violence. Transit poverty becomes grounds for criminalisation. You’re late, because the bus didn’t come? Truancy charge. You can’t get to court or the benefits office on time? Non-compliance. You’re found loitering near a business because you’re waiting on a paratransit service that’s two hours late? Trespassing. The state builds no infrastructure for you, then punishes you for not having moved through it.
And even the so-called “solutions” are stratified. Electric vehicles are paraded as progress—but priced beyond reach for the poor, and laughably inaccessible for most disabled riders. The charging networks are sparse, unreliable, and rarely integrated into existing mobility infrastructure. And the few EVs that might have been affordable—those manufactured in China at a fraction of the cost—have been deliberately blocked by protectionist policies, tariffs, and national security panic. Not to protect workers, but to protect cartels: the handful of U.S. automakers who would rather maintain monopoly pricing than see working-class people gain mobility.
This isn’t just market distortion. It’s structural cruelty. Car culture in America is not freedom. It is enclosure. It is surveillance, exclusion, environmental destruction, and profit extraction—disguised as choice. And for autistic people, who already live at the edges of access, it ensures we are pushed even further out. Not by accident. Not by oversight. But by design.
The False Freedom of “Choice”
Choice is a powerful story. It’s the promise American capitalism sells most easily: that with enough hard work, enough grit, enough personal responsibility, you’ll have options. You’ll have freedom. You’ll get to choose. But when it comes to mobility, that freedom has always been a lie—especially for disabled people, and especially for autistic people. If you can’t drive, can’t afford Uber, and your city dismantled its bus routes years ago, what freedom is left? If your body, your mind, or your income renders you immobile, the system blames you—not the infrastructure that made movement impossible.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” doubles down on that lie. By cutting climate funds and transit subsidies whilst protecting oil giants and highway budgets, it ensures that the only viable mode of transport left is a car you’ll never be able to afford. And even if you could afford one, it likely wouldn’t be built for you.
Most US-made vehicles—ICE or electric—are sensory minefields: bloated infotainment screens, flashing safety alerts, automatic noise generators, and aggressive haptic feedback. They’re not designed with autistic bodies in mind. Meanwhile, across the ocean, China has quietly done what America refuses to: manufacture reliable, minimalist, affordable electric vehicles that don’t overwhelm your nervous system and don’t cost more than a year’s rent.
Right now, in 2025, here are five Chinese EVs that exist—on the road, not as a concept, not as a someday:
The Changan Lumin, starting around $6,900 USD. Simple controls, no visual clutter, 96 to 187 miles of range. Built for city life, not spectacle.
The BYD Seagull, a cleanly designed hatchback priced from $9,800 USD, with up to 250 miles of range and zero unnecessary sensory triggers.
The BYD Dolphin, a slightly larger, calm-interior EV starting near $13,200 USD, already with over half a million on the road.
The MG4 EV, at $15,800 USD, delivering up to 320 miles of range with one of the cleanest dashboards in its class.
And the Wuling MINI EV, the people’s car, a city micro-EV with no frills, no flashy tech, and a price tag starting near $5,200 USD.
These aren’t fantasies. They’re already mass-produced. They’re proven. They’re simple enough to be serviceable, quiet enough to be driveable, and cheap enough to open the world back up. And yet—you cannot buy them here. Why? Because American automakers would rather gatekeep mobility than compete. Tariffs, import restrictions, and national security panic have been weaponised to keep these vehicles out, not to protect workers, but to protect profits.
You’re told you can choose. But the choices have already been removed. You’re told you’re free to move—but the only vehicles within reach are built to overwhelm you, and the ones that aren’t are kept out of reach by design. This isn’t market failure. It’s policy. It’s enclosure. And autistic people, already disproportionately poor, are among the most thoroughly trapped—not by lack of desire, but by the absence of pathways.
This is what false freedom looks like. It hands you a locked door and calls it autonomy. It tells you the world is open, as it quietly builds a fence around it. And when you ask why you can’t cross, it shrugs and says: you should have made better choices.
Climate Policy as Eugenic Filter
There’s a word for policies that quietly eliminate the conditions necessary for certain people to survive. A word for systems that decide, without ever saying so, who is worth saving and who can be allowed to disappear. The word is eugenics. And that’s what climate policy in the United States has become—not in the historical sense of forced sterilisation or genetic sorting, but in the present, structural sense of removing survivable futures from those least able to withstand collapse.
The “One Big Beautiful Bill” doesn’t say it’s targeting disabled people. It doesn’t need to. By gutting public transit, cancelling climate resilience projects, stripping EV affordability, and halting green infrastructure development, it enacts a policy of quiet filtration—ensuring that those who already live on the margins will be the first to fall through the cracks. Those without cars, without stable housing, without air conditioning, without political capital. Those who can’t evacuate. Those who can’t tolerate extreme heat. Those who rely on medical devices, daily refrigeration, or proximity to services. Those who are autistic.
Autistic people are already more likely to be poor, unemployed, and unhoused. Many of us live in apartments we don’t control, in cities that are hostile to non-drivers, in homes without adequate cooling or insulation. Many of us are heat-sensitive—neurologically, metabolically, sensorially. We regulate differently. We dehydrate faster. We shut down in extreme temperatures. We rely on the grid not just for comfort but for life. And yet the very systems that might have offered protection—public cooling infrastructure, transit to safer zones, green retrofits for low-income housing, community resilience grants—have been defunded or delayed, often indefinitely.
This is not oversight. It’s filtration. When climate adaptation becomes a luxury, the system begins to stratify who gets to adapt and who is left to endure. Who gets the silent, air-conditioned EV with a fast charger and weather alerts, and who is stuck on a crumbling pavement in 110°F heat waiting for a bus that no longer comes. Who gets the retrofitted home, and who is told to “stay hydrated” whilst their fan circulates hot air in a third-floor walk-up. Who gets mobility and infrastructure and time—and who gets the slow suffocation of heat, silence, and systemic neglect.
This is what happens when climate policy is stripped of justice. It becomes triage by spreadsheet. It becomes mass abandonment, targeted not by name but by profile. And autistic people—because of how we live, how we move, and how we survive—are often at the top of the list, not for support, but for sacrifice.
To gut climate support is not a neutral act. It is the abandonment of autistic futures. And it is carried out, as always, in the language of budget constraint, strategic deferral, and political realism. But underneath that rhetoric is something older, crueler, and deeply familiar: the idea that some lives are simply too costly to carry forward.
Case Study: California’s Illusory Transit Future
California likes to style itself as the future. Slick policy rollouts, net-zero pledges, glossy renderings of high-speed rail weaving through sun-drenched hills—it all looks impressive on a grant application. But for those of us actually living here, especially as autistic people relying on public transport and stable infrastructure, that future has remained stubbornly out of reach. Not because we can’t imagine it, but because it was never truly intended to arrive.
There is, still, no high-speed rail connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco. The line was approved over a decade ago, but political sabotage, private land resistance, and budgetary gamesmanship have stalled it into abstraction. The tracks exist only in fragments, and even those are under threat. Meanwhile, local bus routes across the state—especially in working-class and immigrant-heavy areas—are shrinking. Frequencies are reduced, lines quietly eliminated, and stops consolidated in ways that erase the disabled and transit-reliant from the urban map.
In Los Angeles, the consequences are especially stark. This is a city that sold itself as having one of the most ambitious EV and public transit plans in the nation. And yet: Metro rail expansions have been delayed or defunded. Bus fare hikes have been pushed through without public notice. Paratransit remains unreliable and opaque. And EV charging infrastructure, far from democratising access, has mostly concentrated in affluent areas, whilst electricity rates for low-income renters skyrocket—making home charging either impossible or financially punitive.
For autistic residents like me, the implications aren’t abstract—they’re daily, grinding, and impossible to plan around. I drive an ageing Honda Fit with over 260,000 miles on it. If it fails, I have no way to replace it—not with current prices, not with interest rates where they are, not with an income that already stretches too thin. There are no buses that connect my area to Los Angeles. The nearest stop that links “the area” to Bakersfield is twenty-five miles away, and even then, it’s served by a single bus that takes two hours to arrive there—if it runs at all. The map suggests options. The city still parrots its future-facing slogans. But every time we reach for one of those routes, it disappears. The goalposts shift. The funding vanishes. The pilot programme sunsets. The press release still lands in your inbox, talking up equity and resilience. But the road under your tyres says otherwise.
This is not accidental. It is misdirection—an economic sleight of hand that treats mobility not as a public good but as a speculative asset, always just a few years away, always conditional, always partial. You can qualify for the promise, but not the delivery. You can apply for a reduced fare pass, but find the bus doesn’t come. You can be told your building is next in line for green retrofitting, even as your power bill doubles and your windows don’t open.
What California offers is not mobility. It offers the illusion of mobility, and only to those who don’t depend on it. The rest of us—poor, disabled, autistic—are left to navigate the gap between what is promised and what is present. We’re not waiting for a train anymore. We’re waiting for honesty. And we know better than to expect it from a system that sold off the future before it ever laid the track.
Narrative Sleight of Hand: Mobility on Paper Only
They’ll show you the map. They’ll point to the lines—planned, proposed, or long since discontinued—and insist the system is working. They’ll roll out infographics on EV rebates, clean transport equity, rural mobility initiatives. They’ll even offer a tool where you can enter your postcode and see what grants you “may be eligible for.” But eligibility is not access. And a map is not a network. It’s a placeholder. A performance. A document of the state’s intent to appear as though it cares.
This is the same narrative trick we saw with Medicaid: services remain on paper long after they’ve vanished in practice. You’re still “entitled” to the support. You’re still “eligible” for the aid. But there’s no one left to provide it. No budget line to cover it. No infrastructure to deliver it. The same logic now governs mobility. EV incentives exist, but only for vehicles out of reach for the poor, or for buyers with pristine credit and a tax burden large enough to offset. Transit development grants get awarded, then quietly frozen. Charging stations are mapped, but non-functional. Ghost buses still appear in trip planners, running on routes long abandoned.
And for those of us who live close to the edge—autistic, disabled, chronically underpaid—these illusions aren’t just frustrating. They’re dangerous. When the state tells you a resource exists, and you plan around that promise, the collapse that follows isn’t just logistical—it’s existential. You miss the appointment. You lose the job. You spiral. And still the state insists the system is in place. You just didn’t use it correctly. You must have misunderstood the conditions. Applied too late. Expected too much.
But what good is a policy if it cannot be lived? What value does a route have if no one drives it? A grant, if no one qualifies? A rebate, if the car costs more than a year’s wages? These aren’t protections. They’re public relations. And they function not by solving problems, but by obscuring them—by giving just enough illusion of care to mute the outcry of abandonment.
We’re not meant to use the system. We’re meant to be blamed for not navigating it.
Conclusion: We Know the Route Isn’t Coming
They’ll say the train is coming. They’ll print the schedule. They’ll host ribbon-cuttings and release renderings and promise that this time, the future really is en route. But we know better now. We’ve stood at too many stops that never mattered, watched too many tracks rust into the soil. We’ve memorised the sound of absence. And so we no longer wait. If we want to move—truly move—we will have to build the tracks ourselves.
Mobility, for us, has never been just about transport. It is about connection. Survival. Autonomy. The ability to say yes to something without first calculating how many buses it takes to get there, how many spoons it costs to endure the ride. For autistic people, and for all marginalised communities, real movement means rewriting what transit even means: it’s the friend who drives you to your appointment. The neighbour who brings groceries when your car breaks down. The bike co-op down the street fixing flats for free. It’s slow, local, reciprocal. It doesn’t show up on an emissions dashboard—but it gets us where we need to go.
This isn’t just about logistics. It’s about solidarity. About refusing the isolation that capitalism tries to impose—geographically, economically, narratively. We are not meant to see each other. We are not meant to align. We are told the factory worker in Shenzhen is our enemy, that their affordable EV threatens our domestic “freedom.” But the truth is: we have more in common with them than we ever will with the American oligarchs who build nothing but hoard everything. Like us, they are workers navigating exploitation. Like us, they are building a life amidst scarcity and control. And it is not an accident that the U.S. has built no rail to connect us to each other—nor to the rest of the world. Connection is a threat to power.
But we can still build it anyway. With our hands. With our relationships. With our refusal to accept a world that calls our futures “optional.” Our movement—literal and political—will not wait for their approval. It will not wait for a bus that isn’t coming. It begins where we are, with the ones beside us, and it moves outward. Through care. Through shared rides. Through maps we draw ourselves.
We are not disposable. We are not deferrable. We are not alone.
And we are not waiting anymore.