A Talk With John Surico

The Importance of Transportation, Open Spaces, and Cats

Avery Hendrick

When journalist John Surico started covering transportation in New York City, he committed himself to a new mission: if he wanted to write about transportation, he needed to live it, too. He started biking, walking, riding the bus, riding the subway, and riding the ferry. If there was a new type of transportation invented, he would probably take that, too.

Surico is dedicated to not only learning about cities and what makes them work, struggle, and succeed but also living those experiences. We sat down to talk about what inspired his passion for covering transportation and open space in New York City and what keeps that love alive.

Surico’s work can be found in the New York Times, Bloomberg CityLab, and many other publications around the world. He attended NYU as an undergrad before moving to London for a graduate degree in Transport & City Planning.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

First, I wanted to start by asking, when you were in school and an emerging journalist, what were you drawn to? Did you want to write about the transportation and open spaces?

I would say, definitely not at all. When I was in school, I was really interested in covering the White House in politics. Then, I fell in love with what was happening in New York City. It just felt way more tangible because it’s so close to home and you could see changes happening.

I found that to be way more digestible than what was happening in Washington. I still lived and breathed politics. But, my interests changed and I was very interested in the city. I thought there was such a fascinating little microcosm of politics in New York City.

So, I covered [politics] for the first couple of years after college. Then, in 2017, two opportunities came up. One was to cover the subway system for Vice and this other opportunity to cover policy came up and I was asked to write about New York City parks.

Both of those topics I had never thought about as a beat at all. Parks were something that I enjoyed and loved going to, but I didn’t think much about them being crucial infrastructure for the city. And transportation was something I took every day, but I didn’t really think that much about it.

Doing both of those projects completely changed my career trajectory so much so that I went to grad school and got an urban planning degree. It was definitely unexpected. It was not something that I was working towards. It just came out of nowhere.

What was it about urban planning that made you want to get a whole degree in the topic?

Everything I was doing was article-based. It was all reporting, which was fine and a way to become an expert, but I still wanted to learn how to plan a neighborhood, design a neighborhood, and things like that.

It’s funny because I was the only journalist in the program, but at the same time, everyone was sharing articles from Bloomberg CityLab, the New York Times, and The Guardian. No one was sharing academic journals, they were all sharing articles because that’s really how people digest these huge projects that are happening in their neighborhood.

It’s through journalism.

I saw that in addition to writing for the New York Times and CityLab, you also have your own Substack newsletter called Street Beat. What inspired you to start your newsletter?

It started in January of 2020, which is crazy. I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to create this newsletter where I just put the stuff that I’m working on in this easy-to-read thing that comes out once a month’ but then something else kind of evolved over time.

I started being asked by friends of mine and loved ones ‘What do you think about the subway?’ or ‘What do you think about this particular change? I think there is a huge desire amongst folks in the general public to hear directly from journalists.

So, your topics for your newsletters are generally inspired by the work that you’re doing at other publications?

Yeah, it’s inspired by things that I’m working on. I also have things like a section where I just talk about something nice that I saw on the news because I feel like we need more of that.

But generally speaking, it’s kind of conversations about what is happening in cities right now. And, I try to make it as conversational as possible because I really don’t like being like, look at everything I did this month.

And then, I’ll take suggestions. Like, one of my old bosses was like, ‘You need to break it up, everything is so serious.’ And he was like, ‘You should have a picture of your cat at the end of your newsletter.’

So now, at the end of every single newsletter for the last two years, there’s a picture of my cat.

You often call yourself a transportation writer, but you do write about open spaces and parks quite frequently. Do you see a lot of connection between these two topics? How do you blend them?

Yeah, they’re all interconnected. A hundred percent. That’s something that I learned when I first started covering transportation, even back in 2017 with Vice. I thought the subway system was interesting. And then I was like, wait a second, New York City was built on the subway system.

So, I started to untangle these things. Transportation is related to housing. It’s related to public health. And, open space, in parts. In my mind, a sustainable livable city has both of those things. They’re working in cohesion with each other. There are great parks. There are great transportation networks.

And, [cities] are starting to realize these are ingredients, it’s these two systems working together, that’s how we’re going to build cities in the years ahead.