• Black cyclists are four times likely to be killed by drivers and Black pedestrians are twice as likely to be killed as whites, according to a new American Journal of Preventive Medicine study, which found that the racial disparity is even worse than previously thought. Not only is unsafe infrastructure to blame, but also disparities in health care after crashes. (The Grio)
• When white Vision Zero advocates push for more traffic enforcement, remember that people of color are most often victimized by police. (Next City)
• Pete Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten, called out Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) for praising dads on Father’s Day when she had criticized the transportation secretary for taking paternity leave to be with their hospitalized son. (The Hill)
• Drivers pay for almost all highway construction and repairs through gas taxes. Suspending it would put the burden on non-drivers to replace that lost revenue (Forbes). Not that President Biden’s proposal is expected to go far — most Democrats oppose it, and the second-ranking Republican senator, John Thune, declared it DOA as well (Reuters).
• Particle pollution from burning fossil fuels takes two years off the average person’s life, and up to 10 years in the most polluted cities in South Asia. (Al Jazeera)
• St. Paul currently doesn’t have a bike-share vendor but is hoping Minneapolis will share theirs. (Star Tribune)
• Before it became known for its extreme auto dependence, Kansas City was known for its extensive streetcar system. (Flatland)
• Portland has agreed to pay a $75,000 settlement to a woman arrested for twerking in a bike lane. (Oregonian)
• Vancouver residents are proposing car-free weekends on Granville Island to make visiting the recreation attraction a more pleasant experience. (Daily Hive)
• The parklet movement that turns parking spaces into gardens is gaining steam in Europe. (The Guardian)

This week, Catie Gould of the Sightline Institute talks about Oregon’s plans for reducing parking regulations in cities. What can we learn from Portland, OR, and Fayetteville, AR, about the effect of parking lots on urban heat islands?

For those of you who get your news through your eyes and not your ears, there’s an edited transcript below the audio player. For an unedited transcript, click here.

Jeff Wood: You all have two really good examples. I think that that struck me. The first one is in Oregon where 61 jurisdictions could reduce or completely remove parking mandates. I’m wondering where this move came from? Because, obviously, there’s a lot of complaints about parking and city councilors seem to fret about it the most out of any other issue. Where did this come from in Oregon?

Catie Gould: What’s so challenging in the local realm,…for small towns or cities to take on parking reform on their own, is that it’s hard to change things, especially rules that people don’t really know about. Now they’re hearing it for the first time and people can kind of equate, oh, we’re going to get rid of parking mandates. That means the parking is going to be harder than before. And that’s not necessarily the case when there is such an oversupply of unused parking spaces, but that’s where it’s difficult politically. And when there’s so many things that local leaders are facing in their cities, with COVID and housing crisis, it’s just hard to stick your neck out. You really need some really strong supporters within City Hall or the staff, or some really strong advocates outside, to say, “we are confident that this is a really good idea to at least try.” So, in Oregon, this is a much broader reform that is in the motions of taking place right now.

It is through an administrative rulemaking process through the Land Conservation and Development Commission. That is a body that formed in 1973 at the beginning of Oregon state land use planning. Right? So this is going to apply to cities and towns of certain sizes that are within Metro areas within Oregon. And there’s kind of a number of different parking tools that they can pick from, but we expect, you know, in the next year there’s going to be, there’s no way that a town is going to get out of rolling back some of their parking requirements. It’s all just to what extent. So this very exciting.

Wood: It seems to cover some other things: walkway designs, bikeway standards, four-story buildings. It’s not just parking; it’s a whole bundle of things that they’re working on.

Gould: The proposal is called the Climate Friendly and Equitable Communities. Land use is really at the heart of a lot of climate issues. When we think about Oregon, 40 percent of all carbon emissions come from transportation, and transportation and land use are two sides of the same coin, right? How walkable a place is, how close can the buildings be located to each other to make them walkable. Parking requirements are right in the heart of how we can space our cities around geometrically. So, yes, parking reform is just one of the reforms as part of this rulemaking process. There are other requirements for cities to designate climate-friendly zones in their cities that will also loosen zoning requirements to allow bigger buildings than before. Also some transportation planning rules, right? To help encourage to move away from some of the autocentric designs into ones that are more multimodal.

As President Biden urges Congress to give drivers a gas tax “holiday” that experts say won’t even significantly ease pain at the pump, advocates are urging him to give Americans emergency relief from car dependency instead.

On Wednesday, sources revealed that the White House plans to request Congress to authorize a three-month suspension of the already rock-bottom 18.4-cent federal tax per gallon of gasoline, as well as the 24.4-cent per-gallon tax on diesel, while simultaneously urging states to suspend their own fuel taxes over the same period. Energy advisor Amos Hochstein told CNN that those two moves, together, could save Americans an average of 50 cents a gallon, though advocates were quick to point out that savings would almost certainly be much smaller if gas station owners pocketed any of the difference, or if governors declined to participate in the plan.

More important, though, experts say the President’s proposal would exacerbate ongoing challenges for the entire U.S. economy, quickly eclipsing any modest short-term benefits for people who drive gas-powered cars — all while further reinforcing a car-dependent transportation system the country couldn’t sustain before prices climbed above $5 a gallon.

Truth is we gave up on the federal gas tax like three decades ago. It’s a pretend thing now.

— Angie Schmitt???? (@schmangee) June 22, 2022

In addition to astronomical expenses associated with subsidizing the use of vehicles that are among the largest contributors climate change, a recent Urban Institute report warned that gas tax suspensions often lead to increased inflation as demand rises in response to the cuts, while simultaneously draining public coffers that could be used to build badly-needed infrastructure.

Some particularly pivotal members of Congress seem to agree.

“Although well-intentioned, this policy would at best achieve only miniscule relief while blowing a $10-billion hole in the Highway Trust Fund that would need to be filled if we want to continue to fix crumbling bridges, address the spike in traffic deaths, and build a modern infrastructure system,” Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, said in a statement. “Furthermore, encouraging state governments to suspend their gas taxes undermines the impact of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law by reducing funds available to states to spend on infrastructure improvements. We should instead deliver relief directly to consumers by ending Big Oil’s price gouging and profiteering.”

stop trying to make sense of why they are suspending the gas tax in terms of economics or sustainability, it is not policy it's politics

— I.M. Bae (@nickhasthoughts) June 22, 2022

DeFazio is pushing a bill that would certainly help cut costs for drivers more than a tax holiday, but advocates say it wouldn’t address the more fundamental reason why Americans spend so much at the pump: because they functionally have no other choice but to drive. And that car dependent status quo harms more than just drivers.

“Over the last century, America has built a transportation system that makes it easy to drive and hard to do almost anything else,” said Lisa Frank, executive director of  Environment America’s Washington legislative office. “As an unintended consequence, car-centric policies have also left us with choking traffic, polluted air and a dangerously warming planet. And they leave us vulnerable to oil price shocks caused by events over which we have no control, such as armed conflict half a world away.

“There is a way out of this mess, but it isn’t through short-term solutions like gas tax holidays,” Frank added.

Reminder that suspending the gas tax still requires taxpayers to pay for roads and highways.

But now those on the left pay more of that cost, and those on the right pay less. pic.twitter.com/xiyTUTantA

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) June 22, 2022

Frank emphasizes that to decrease transportation burdens for all Americans, Congress should focus on long-term solutions, like encouraging states to use their Bipartisan Infrastructure law dollars to provide “more and better alternatives to driving, such as rail, regional transit, walking and biking.”

In the meantime, advocates say there’s still a lot policymakers can do to give Americans short-term relief, without reinforcing the car dependent status quo.

“Instead of subsidizing gasoline sales, why don’t we provide a ‘holiday’ on transit fares?” asked Matt Casale, environment campaigns director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. “Or we could provide emergency incentives for carpooling, or boost funding for workplace programs that help workers find cleaner commuting options. We could provide subsidies to offset the cost of e-bikes and conventional bikes. Or even pay people to ditch their cars altogether. That would cut back on demand for oil and ease price pressures for everyone.”

Once again, I want to know what the medium & long term plans are to lessen the dependence on cars in this country? Who is casting that vision? Do our elected leaders have no imagination or backbone to stand up to car culture? Sadly, I know the answer. https://t.co/6oUiRo88fc

— Jerome Alexander Horne (@jahorne) June 22, 2022

Casale’s suggestions, of course, aren’t an exhaustive list. A handful of communities around the world are already trying even more novel strategies to ease the sting of the latest oil shock, like offering ultra cheap monthly fares for long-distance train travel; others need only turn back a few pages in the quarantine-era transportation playbook to learn how to rapidly build pop-up bike lanes, sidewalks, and other open spaces where people can safely travel without an automobile.

Whatever strategies U.S. communities ultimately adopt, advocates say it’s critical that they act now, and act big.

“The current gas price spike is just the latest reminder that our dependence on oil leaves us all over a barrel,” Casale added. “To really help consumers, we need more than a gas tax holiday — we need real transportation solutions that do not further deepen our dependence on cars and oil over the long haul.”

The Black Lives Matter protests and the pandemic have dramatically shifted the terrain around policing. As a result, the last two years have brought about the first serious rethinking of jaywalking laws in a century, challenging a practically universal American rule that dates back to some of the earliest auto industry lobbying campaigns.

The state of Virginia kicked things off by decriminalizing jaywalking in March 2021, followed by Kansas City, Mo. one month later. The state of Nevada did the same in June. About 12 million Americans now live in places where jaywalking has been decriminalized in some form.

The movement suffered a serious blow last October, however, when California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation passed by the state’s legislature that would have decriminalized jaywalking for the state’s 39 million residents. Newsom used alleged safety concerns as the basis for his veto.

But a modified bill is moving its way through the California legislature right now. Safety groups like California Walks and Los Angeles Walks as well as national groups like America Walks were key advocates for the reform in California, recognizing that street safety concerns for Black and Latino pedestrians also include concerns about police profiling and brutality, which are frequently associated with jaywalking enforcement.

In addition, the movement to reframe the way we regulate walking has opened the door for a more fundamental rethinking of the way we frame pedestrian safety. These efforts represented a shift from a “pedestrian responsibilities” framework to a “pedestrian rights” framework.

One unintended consequence of our “jaywalking” laws is how they create the implicit assumption that if a pedestrian is struck by a car, they somehow “deserved” it — even when sidewalk and crosswalk infrastructure are woefully incomplete or dangerously lacking.

Now it has been more than a year since the first of these reforms went into place, and we can get an early sense of how it is working out.

This data is noisy — especially in smaller communities like cities, which may have relatively few p edestrian deaths in an average year. And it must be noted that these reforms happened in the context of a wider transportation system that’s experiencing rising pedestrian deaths nationally.

However, one thing the early data seems to show is that jaywalking laws themselves are not producing the kind of safety disaster some opponents predicted. In fact, according to the data we could find in each jurisdiction, there didn’t appear to be any noticeable impact at all.

Virginia — March

Here’s a look at what’s been happening with pedestrian deaths and serious injuries in Virginia, which was the first to decriminalize jaywalking in March 2020. Jaywalking was eliminated as a primary offense through an action of the Legislature, as part of a package of criminal justice reforms targeting common sources of “pretextual” police stops like tinted windows and the smell of marijuana.

This specific measure flew under the radar and was barely reported, says Wyatt Gordon, a reporter at the Virginia Mercury who covered the development. But the measure was included in the legislation at the request of biking and walking advocacy groups as well as criminal justice reformers who pointed out that the law was frequently used to target homeless people.

Gordon says he’s not surprised it doesn’t seem to have had much effect on safety numbers and he thinks it’s probable that the majority of Virginians aren’t aware of the change.

“At the end of the day jaywalking is more of a criminal justice issue than a pedestrian safety issue,” said Gordon, adding he doesn’t think fines are an effective deterrent. “The consequence of getting killed is far worse than the consequence of a misdemeanor ticket.”

As you can see in the above graph, which shows data from Virginia’s DMV, the commonwealth had a pretty typical year in 2021 in terms of pedestrian deaths and injuries. The trendline since 2016 actually shows a gradual decrease in fatalities, which is at odds with national trends, where these kinds of deaths have been accelerating rapidly. It should be noted as well that 2021 was an especially bad year, nationally.

Kansas City (MO) — May

Kansas City went farther than other jurisdictions and completely eliminated jaywalking from its criminal code in May 2021. The statute was removed as part of a wider initiative initiated by Mayor Quinton Lucas as part of a wider reform aimed at addressing racially biased pretextual police stops.

Michael Kelley is policy director at Bike Walk Kansas City, which pushed for the inclusion of bike and pedestrian infractions on the list of ordinances that were struck from the city’s books.

“Jaywalking is something that is specifically about punishing people who are navigating the environment that wasn’t made for them,” said Kelley.

The latest data about pedestrian deaths is not available yet from Kansas City, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on it.

Nevada — June 

Last June, the Fines and Fees Justice Center successfully lobbied for jaywalking reform in Nevada, along with a raft of other changes aimed at eliminating the kinds of infractions that likely lent themselves to racial profiling.

Leisa Moseley, Nevada State Director for the group, says a lot of law enforcement officials are upset about the change.

“They’re saying this legislation prevents them from stopping people from jaywalking,” she said. “It does not. What it prevents them from doing is stopping people and arresting people for jaywalking.”

Under Nevada’s new law, jaywalking was changed from a misdemeanor to a civil fine ($100). As a result, Moseley said, police seem to have lost interest in enforcing the rule, which was frequently used as a pretext to stop-and-frisk people in low-income or Black or Latino neighborhoods.

But some law enforcement groups’ contention that pedestrian safety has worsened as a result doesn’t seem to be borne out by a close look at the data. There were 85 pedestrian deaths in 2021, up from 82 the year prior. But that seems to be noise, not any effect of the law changing. Overall traffic deaths were up 18 percent statewide that year while pedestrian deaths rose 3.6 percent.

The bigger safety problem is Nevada’s unsafe streets, Moseley said.

“They’re not designed for pedestrian safety, they’re designed for cars,” she said. “Even our laws are designed for cars.”

California — Soon?

America Walks was immensely disappointed when Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have decriminalized walking in California last fall. However, the good news is, a modified version of that bill is currently making its way through the legislature in the Golden State.

A bill sponsored by Assembly Member Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) — AB2147, the Freedom to Walk Act — was passed in the Assembly. It has been assigned to the Public Safety Committee in the Senate.

“Jaywalking laws go largely unenforced in affluent communities throughout the state, where people walk freely without consequence,” said Rio Scharf, an attorney with Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, a sponsor of the bill. “But in the communities we serve, these citations are a cause of discriminatory police stops and significant court debt.”

If California moves forward with its change, about 51.4 million Americans will live in a jurisdiction that has decriminalized walking. That’s a big change over a short time and one that, at this point, doesn’t seem to be having much effect on safety, while helping protect the civil rights of people of color and preserving police resources for real safety issues.

Conclusion

It is our goal to decriminalize jaywalking in all US states and territories. If you are working on such an effort, or know of such an effort, let us know.

Editor’s note: A version of this article originally appeared on the America Walks blog and is republished with permission. 

Angie Schmitt is one of the country’s best known writers and experts on the topic of sustainable transportation. She was the long-time national editor at Streetsblog. Her writing and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and National Public Radio. She is the author of Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America.

]]> Thu, 23 Jun 2022 06:01:22 +0200 https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/Bt0ZasHYaV0gsy-7rSI1pmw5Ur-z5Bww https://api.follow.it/track-rss-story-click/v3/Bt0ZasHYaV0gsy-7rSI1piuZukmJ4mr4

• President Biden has proposed suspending the 18-cents-a-gallon federal gas tax for three months. It’s unlikely to pass, though, because most Democrats are opposed (Politico). The measure might be popular with voters but could actually make inflation worse (Newsweek).
• Amid much potential gig-worker legislation, Uber and Lyft drivers filed a lawsuit accusing the companies of antitrust violations because drivers aren’t treated as being independent, but also aren’t given the benefits of being employees. (New York Times)
• The ride-hailing companies are also restoring shared rides — suspended since the start of the pandemic — in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix. San Diego, Portland, Indianapolis and Pittsburgh. (CNBC)
• State legislators want to hold hearings on safety issues on Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority subways and authorize spending $400 million to fix them. (CommonWealth)
• A Seattle Vision Zero report found that drivers have killed 175 since the city started a Vision Zero program in 2015. The problem is most severe on South End neighborhoods and on arterial roads, and disproportionately affects Black residents. (MyNorthwest)
• Despite a federal hold on a proposed I-45 expansion through downtown Houston while potential civil rights violations are investigated, the Texas DOT wants to move forward with demolishing apartments in the project’s path (Chronicle). But thanks to local activists, the demolition is now on hold (KHOU).
• A Chicago alderman wants to step up towing and add signage to prevent drivers from blocking bike lanes after a truck driver killed a toddler being towed by her mother who was maneuvering around a parked vehicle. (Sun-Times)
• A proposed Oklahoma light rail line is in the running for a $100 million federal grant. (The Oklahoman)
• Four years after Richmond started running the Pulse bus rapid transit line, it’s painting the bus lane red to tell drivers to stay out. (WTVR)
• E-scooters are a great way for young kids to join in on family bike adventures. (Bike Portland)
• More fake news on Biden’s bike spill. (Associated Press)

Earlier this month in St. Louis, a shooter in an unidentified vehicle opened fire on a downtown crowd, injuring a 13- and a 14-year-old girl before fleeing the scene. City leaders condemned the violence, and immediately instituted a neighborhood-wide ban on an entire mode of transportation that residents believed was at least partially responsible for attracting such senseless violence to their community and facilitating the perpetrator’s quick getaway.

The shooter used a private car, but the vehicles that were banned were shared electric scooters.

This wasn’t the first time officials in the Gateway City restricted micromobility access for its residents, even if it was perhaps the most dubiously justified. Just weeks before, St. Louis instituted a 7 p.m. curfew on scooter fleets in two downtown neighborhoods following the annual Annie Malone May Day celebration, the second-largest African American parade in the country and an important local tradition honoring the philanthropic and personal legacy of one of America’s first Black woman millionaires. The St. Louis Post Dispatch said the event drew “flocks of young people” — most of whom were Black themselves — who “disrupt[ed] the general safety of the area with rentable electric scooters and illegal activity.” Fox2 said residents “believe” that scooters are “a magnet for attracting large groups of kids,” despite the fact that scooter companies generally require users to verify their age via an ID scan prior to riding.

“We do not have the resources to monitor where we can keep young people from engaging in dangerous behaviors, so those will be shut off until further notice,” said Dan Isom, St. Louis public safety director told Fox2.

What those specific “dangerous behaviors” were, though — and what precisely scooters actually had to do with them — were not specified. Isom also did not announce any plans for restricting the mobility of young people on any other modes, nor was he quoted on any plans to restrict their access to firearms. Representatives for Bird, one of the largest scooter outfits operating in the region, confirmed that no injuries related to their vehicles were reported at the Annie Malone Day parade; further, only 0.0013 percent of Bird rides in the St. Louis have ever resulted in an injury requiring medical treatment, which makes it one of the single safest metros in which the company operates.

The city of St. Louis, despite three separate requests for comment, did not confirm whether any violent incidents had been associated with scooters on the day of the parade, either.

Is banning scooters really the solution to disorder in downtown St. Louis?https://t.co/ME3ucDlCab | #moleg

— Show-Me Institute (@ShowMe) June 17, 2022

Scooters, it seems, are becoming something of a scapegoat for a range of city safety problems — and not just in St. Loo.

Around the same time the Gateway to the West implemented its new policy, officials in Detroit announced that scooter companies would be required to automatically shut down their fleets from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays; since March, riders Memphis have also found themselves left without a ride after 10 p.m. on the weekends, when would-be drunk weekend drivers, one would hope, would be most in need of safer ways to get around. In Cincinnati, meanwhile, micromobility outfits have been required to cease operations between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. since at least April, and city leaders have reportedly considered banning the mode altogether.

In all of those cases, local leaders have cited legitimate resident complaints about bad scooter behaviors, like sidewalk riding, or improperly parking vehicles in places where they obstruct pedestrian and wheelchair traffic. And in all of those cases, cities have failed to explain why they vaulted straight past solutions to those problems that would maintain access to the green mode — like better scooter parking policy or building pop-up micromobility lanes — and went straight for the nuclear option.

I absolutely do not support the city's scooter ban, at least not if we're only banning them in certain areas, and not if we're not addressing automobile carnage. Why is it fine for bar hoppers in Soulard to keep using scooters but not people who live, work and scoot downtown? https://t.co/JLnmOXhGBB

— Evie Hemphill (@evhemphill) June 13, 2022

It’s not terribly hard to guess at why cities are restricting micromobility access in response to far broader safety challenges. Hamstrung by state and federal governments that struggle to deliver real solutions to massive structural problems like gun violence and traffic violence, local leaders have a long history of resorting to broken windows policing strategies that aggressively criminalize or restrict behaviors some residents perceive as related to major crimes, but that often have nothing whatsoever to do with those crimes’ root causes.

Helmet laws, bike bell mandates, and the entire concept of “jaywalking” itself are all examples of ways that cities have paid lip service to the idea of reducing car crash deaths among vulnerable road users, without actually confronting any of the major structural factors driving that crisis, like deadly road design, deadly vehicles, and an utter lack of mobility alternatives. Unsurprisingly, that approach continues to fail abysmally, while simultaneously providing police with a pretext to harass, brutalize, and kill — burdens which overwhelmingly fall on people of color and the unhoused.

Restrictions on shared scooters, of course, are mostly enforced with technology, rather than by human officers — though in St. Louis, notably, a massive influx of police patrols still followed the downtown ban. (Several local media outlets have even announced that the micromobility restrictions are “helping” suppress downtown crime rates, rather than the growing threat of arrest, harassment and police violence in those neighborhoods.) But that doesn’t mean that residents don’t struggle in other ways when an entire mode of transportation is abruptly disabled with the push of a tech company’s button, even if scooters themselves aren’t being pulled out of their hands by a literal cop.

In many transit-poor cities like St. Louis, for instance, micromobility fills a particularly critical last-mile gap in what can be an otherwise punishing commute for people who don’t drive, particularly among night-shift workers who struggle with limited after-dark service, or even those who would just like to venture out of their homes after night falls. Following her own city’s scooter curfew aimed at discouraging drivers from striking riders after dark, Atlanta-based writer Maya Kroth wrote about how scooters had offered her a “sense of protection” from the threat of street harassment, stalking, robbery, assault and rape, and that without it, she and other gender-marginalized people were struggling.

“E-scooters are not the answer to all (or even most) of Atlanta’s transit and safety woes … But banning scooters at night does little to improve public safety,” Kroth wrote. “In fact, for women like me who relied on them to help make the last mile of our journey a little safer, it only makes things worse.”

Then there’s the simple fact that removing scooters from car-dependent roads often forces many residents into cars, compounding the danger for vulnerable road users who remain. Studies have shown that as much as 45 percent of micromobility journeys would have otherwise been taken in a private automobile — and while a reckless rider on a lightweight scooter poses a potential danger to pedestrians, that threat is orders of magnitudes smaller than a reckless driver behind the wheel of even a modest sedan, particularly when the scooter-riders and walkers each have their own lane. The nighttime and weekend hours when scooters are also most likely to be banned are, of course, also the exact same hours when fatal car crashes are most likely to occur.

Much like other cities, St. Louis has yet to produce any real analysis of the total safety impacts of its scooter restrictions, much less a meaningful one that accounts for the damage done by increased carbon emissions, increased traffic violence, increased street harassment, and increased police violence in areas where zero-emissions mobility alternatives have been abruptly replaced by armed officer surveillance. Until they can do that, the policy is a harmful distraction for the far harder work that needs to be done to make cities truly safe for everyone — without leaving anyone stranded.

• Energy Secretary Janet Yellin said the Biden administration is considering suspending the gas tax in response to rising prices (NBC News), and the president said he’ll make a decision by the end of the week (Washington Post). But a gas-tax holiday would only save drivers a few cents a gallon (USA Today). Even with minimal savings, the CEO of Target thinks it’s a dumb idea because it would increase demand (New York Post).
• Fare-free transit is becoming increasingly popular in blue cities and states as an equity and climate issue. It’s not a silver bullet to bring riders back to buses and trains, though, unless the services is also frequent enough to be useful. (Politico)
• Houston’s light-rail system racked up the most collisions per million miles in 2019, while St. Louis had the fewest and Seattle ranked in the middle, according to Federal Transit Administration data. (Seattle Times)
• Pittsburgh opened its first advisory bike lanes, where cars going in both directions share a center lane but are allowed to move into bike lanes to pass each other after yielding to bikes. (CBS News)
• Seattle’s traffic deaths hit a 16-year high in 2021. (KING)
• A bike plan in the Seattle suburb of Bothell falls short of expectations. (The Urbanist)
• Bike thefts are down in Denver but remain a concern for cyclists. (Denver Post)
• Tucson is keeping transit fare-free at least through the end of the year. (Arizona Daily Star)
• UPS’ new cargo e-bikes are now on the streets of Manhattan. (Car Scoop)
• Sorry, those Jen Psaki tweets poking fun at Donald Trump after Joe Biden took a bike spill came from a parody account. (Snopes)

U.S. drivers ram their cars into buildings about 100 times every single day — 40 more daily collisions than previously thought, though some experts suspect it may still be an undercount.

Experts at the Storefront Safety Council reported that roughly 16,000 people are injured every year when drivers either deliberately or — more often — unintentionally careen into houses, apartment buildings, schools, stores, restaurants, offices, religious centers, laundromats, ice cream shops, pinball bars, and other occupied buildings, to cite just a handful of examples from the recent news. That’s four times higher than the number of people the group estimated were hurt in 2020 when Streetsblog first covered its data just two years ago.

Henry Grabar, who originally reported the new numbers for Slate, questioned the Council’s estimate that 2,500 people die in vehicle-into-building crashes ever year based on their public methodology, but acknowledged that it’s troubling how little the public knows about the impact of traffic violence outside of the traditional transportation realm.

“Maybe the broader lesson is simply to marvel at the fact that we don’t even know how many times a day a car smashes into a building in the United States,” Grabar wrote. “It’s just one of those things about car culture that goes uncounted, unthought of, until you’re the one waiting for the register when an SUV comes careening through the front window.”

Pedestrians Aren’t Even Safe From Car Crashes Inside Buildings

Another broad lesson might be just how incomplete even the most commonly cited government crash data can be, whether those collisions happen on or off the road — and how badly government leaders need to adopt better standards to understand America’s traffic violence crisis, and to craft data-informed strategies to address its root causes.

When it comes to vehicle-into-building crashes, it’s not even clear when law enforcement officers are supposed to report collisions to federal agencies, and when they do, that data isn’t always made available to the public at large in any legible way. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has long maintained a policy of excluding “crashes that occurred on private property, including parking lots and driveways” from year-end fatality and injury totals — a statement which also implies that when drivers kill someone after plowing past a parking spot wheel-stop and into a privately owned structure, those deaths don’t count.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, however, says the agency does record vehicle-into-building crashes, but only when they were deemed the “most harmful events” compared to the other objects, vehicles and people the driver might have struck over the course of a single traffic violence vent. That means that when, for instance, a driver leaves the public right-of-way and crashes into a preschool, as one in California did in March, the vehicle-into-building crash probably does count — but if the same driver strikes another motorist first, it might not be counted, at least if more people were hurt during the initial impact. Based on that confusing standard, NHTSA reported just 210 vehicle-into-building crashes in all of 2020.

The Storefront Safety Council, though, adds between 200 and 250 crashes to its database every month, based on “anecdotal and media reports, court records, fire department run records, and published studies.” And even that number might be a significant undercount; for instance, the organization the Council hired to audit its records found that a single Las Vegas bus stop was struck 27 times in a single year, but just two of those crashes made their way into the database.

And that doesn’t even include crashes that occur on land without anything built on it, like beaches where people are picnicking and parks where children are playing.

To at the very least keep drivers from busting through building walls like the Kool-Aid Man, experts at the Storefront Safety Council recommend common-sense infrastructure improvements like putting concrete bollards in front of buildings, patios, lawns, and other places where people might congregate, as well as redesigning parking lots to discourage higher speeds and adding anti-collision technology to vehicles themselves.

Perhaps an even better strategy, though, would be simply building a world where fewer people felt compelled to drive at all — and had fewer chances to ram their vehicles into public or private spaces where cars don’t belong.

• Traffic deaths are surging in the U.S., but we’re an outlier compared to other countries where streets are getting safer. Transportation researcher Yonah Freemark looked at France and found that a combination of pedestrianizing streets, widespread speed cameras and high gas prices that encourage smaller vehicles are among the reasons why. (City Lab)
• House transportation committee chairman Rep. Earl Bluemenauer (D-Oregon) is urging President Biden not to suspend the federal gas tax. (The Hill)
• In the past four years, drivers haven’t killed anyone in Hoboken, where biking is the easiest way to get around and the city prohibits cars from parking near sidewalks and blocking pedestrians’ view. (Curbed)
• Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frye vetoed a plan to add bike lanes and 24/7 bus lanes to Hennepin Avenue. (Fox 9)
• The rate of serious crimes on the Twin Cities’ Metro Transit is low, but perception of crime due to the presence of homeless individuals is keeping riders away. (Star Tribune)
• The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is cutting back on subway service after a federal report took it to task for safety issues. (Streetsblog MASS)
• Here’s where candidates for Massachusetts governor and lieutenant governor stand on keeping the Boston transit system fare-free. (Politico
• Federal funding for a $320 million San Antonio bus rapid transit line appears to be on the fast track. (San Antonio Report)
• Virginia lawmakers rejected Gov. Glenn Younkin’s call to suspend the state gas tax. (WRIC)
• The Cincinnati Metro is offering free bus service along the stretch of streetcar line that’s blocked by a building’s collapsed roof. (Enquirer)
• The new electric Hummers are big enough to eat a typical SUV and still have room for a taxi for dessert. (Jalopnik)

Motorists who live in auto-centric cities are generally far happier with their daily commutes than sustainable transportation advocates might assume, a new study finds — and the researchers say that means investments in transit, biking and walking must be coupled with policies that actively disincentivize driving.

In a 2019 survey of nearly 3,400 people in the heavily car-dependent southern cities of Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix and Tampa released earlier this month, researchers found that respondents who drove for the majority of their trips were significantly more likely to report “satisfactory” daily travel routines than people who relied on active or shared transportation, even when the researchers controlled for demographic differences and lifestyle proclivities.

Moreover, respondents who took the most daily trips in an automobile said they were even more satisfied with their travel choices than those who used sustainable modes a larger percentage of the time.

Of course, it’s pretty intuitive that residents of cities that roll out the red carpet for drivers tend to really like driving — and that those forced to get around a human-hostile landscape without a car aren’t likely to enjoy the experience very much.

Still, the study authors say some sustainable transportation advocates have struggled to accept this reality, over-focusing on studies that insist that the longer a worker commutes, the less likely they are to be happy with their travel choices — and because 76 percent of U.S. workers drive to work alone, advocates assume, that means most people would be far happier if they had meaningful access to other ways of getting around.

The trouble is, work commutes represent just a fraction of the trips American drivers take every day. And when the researchers asked participants about their satisfaction with their travel routine outside of the daily rush hour crawl, they got a very different answer.

“A narrative we hear quite often is, ‘Well, people actually hate being so car-dependent; they hate spending hours and hours stuck in traffic,” said Ram Pendyala, director of Arizona State University’s School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment and a co-author of the study. “‘If only we provided nice alternative modes of transportation, we would see folks shifting in droves!’ … For that strategy to really work, though, we need to prove the original premise that most [drivers] are miserable — and they’re not.”

Pendyala acknowledges that most U.S. cities haven’t made the kind of large-scale investments into transit, biking and walking that many advocates believe would tempt drivers out of their cars. But even in communities that have taken steps to beef up those modes, he says drivers often remain pretty satisfied with their travel choices — and many non-drivers aspire to join their ranks, despite the damage that cars do to the air, the roads, and public safety.

“Even in places where there are pretty good alternative modes of transportation, you generally find a proclivity towards buying a car and using a car and becoming more car-oriented — not less,” Pendyala added. “In India, automobile travel is hardly subsidized at all — petrol is $10 a gallon, road congestion is horrendous — and people still express a desire to drive. … I feel like our profession has been putting blinders on, and saying, ‘Oh, if only we stopped subsidizing car-centric lifestyles, all of our problems would be solved.’ I don’t think that narrative has served us very well.”

That doesn’t mean that the fight to end car dependency is hopeless — just that it’s far more difficult than simply improving sustainable modes alone. To actually tempt people to make greener transportation choices, Pendyala says policymakers need to look at the fundamental reasons why people choose to get around the way they do, and craft policies to influence them on every possible front. And there are a lot of them.

Namely, he and his colleagues have identified 12 distinct factors that influence mobility choices among road users with various value systems, which he calls the “Dozen C’s.”

• Convenience, or how easy it is to get where they need to go
• Comfort, both physical and psychological, which includes safety concerns
• Coolness, or how stylish and attractive a mode appears — or how shameful a road user views the alternatives to be
• Cleanliness
• Cost-effectiveness (including time savings)
• Clarity, or how easy and simple it is to utilize a given mode
• Conscientiousness, or how mode choice will impact one’s neighbors and community
• Climate-friendliness
• Coverage, or how well distributed access to the mode is across the community throughout the day and night
• Customizability, or how easily the mode can be adapted to a user’s unique needs
• Celerity (which is basically a GRE-level synonym for “speed”)

In most Americans’ minds, Pendyala says cars are winning on almost all of those fronts, with the possible exceptions of conscientiousness and climate-friendliness. (He notes, though, that the latter is shifting as even the most progressive road users embrace the electric car as a silver bullet to decarbonize the transportation sector, despite the fact that it definitively isn’t.)

That means it may be necessary for policymakers to emphasize not just less-controversial mode shift strategies — like the improvements to walking, biking, and transit espoused by the tagline of this very website — but also ones that, frankly, make the driving experience worse.

And that includes a lot of politically unpopular strategies such as tolls and fees, limited parking and reducing roadway capacity. Meanwhile, pols would also have to create  “planning and zoning policies that promote high-density, mixed-use developments characterized by walkable, transit- and bicycle-friendly environments” alongside investment in sustainable modes themselves — and they’ll need to do it in the context of a culture and economy that pours incalculable amounts of money into glamorizing driving and denigrating other modes.

Until we do all those things aggressively — to say nothing of the massive challenges of doing them in ways that don’t place even more devastating burdens on the most vulnerable members of society than our current system already does — Pendyala worries that policymakers are doomed to keep doing the easier stuff that doesn’t actually get people out of cars. In the meantime, vehicle miles traveled will probably just continue to climb.

“If you look at our track record of decades and decades of attempts to get people to switch modes and reduce car dependency, our profession has largely been somewhat less than successful,” he said. “And that’s putting it nicely.”

• Joe Biden fell off his bike in Delaware (New York Times). He’s fine, and we can all probably relate, but Republicans predictably used the accident to take some potshots at POTUS (Newsweek).
• In a strongly worded speech calling for renewable energy, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said continuing to rely on fossil fuels will create a permanent crisis of climate change, inflation and global conflict. (Punch)
• Transit agencies are trying fare cuts and other promotions to lure riders back to commuter rail, but the reality is many of those riders may never return. Agencies will need higher subsidies to operate as an essential service to avoid cutbacks. (City Lab)
• The average monthly car payment hit a record high of $712. (Jalopnik)
• Lyft reached a $25 million settlement with shareholders who filed a lawsuit alleging the company didn’t disclose potential safety issues, like drivers assaulting passengers, before going public. (CNN)
• The Federal Transit Administration is seeking public comment on automated buses. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Transit-oriented development could save Minnesota’s Northstar commuter rail after its ridership was decimated by COVID. (Streets.mn)
• Austin is lowering speed limits on 48 major streets (KUT). Tacoma is also looking at lowering speed limits in several residential neighborhoods and business districts (News Tribune)
• Eliminating a petition requirement for traffic-calming measures will make Charlotte’s street safety policy more equitable. (UNC Charlotte Urban Institute)
• Better bike infrastructure could help solve Utah’s affordable housing crisis. (Utah Stories)
• Portland has a problem with street racing that’s better solved by traffic-calming infrastructure than police enforcement. (Bike Portland)
• San Antonio is consolidating payments for multiple transportation modes into one app. (Government Technology)
• Phoenix is developing a road safety plan in response to a spike in traffic deaths. (Axios)
• Athens, Georgia, approved a beefed-up complete streets policy. (Flagpole)
• Plans for a Pro Football Hall of Fame streetcar in the Canton, Ohio, area are coming into focus. (WKSU)

• Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be killed by drivers while walking or biking than whites, by even wider margins than previously thought. (ABC News)
• Traffic enforcement puts Black and brown people at risk. (Next City)
• For the first time, two federal reports tracked data on crashes involving self-driving cars. For driver-assist vehicles, surprise, surprise, Tesla led the way. Waymo was worst among more advanced autonomous systems. (The Verge)
• Official statistics are hard to come by, but cars crash into buildings 100 times a day, by one estimate, killing hundreds of people each year. (Slate)
• Ford is recalling almost 3 million vehicles with a defect that causes them to roll over people while in park. (Washington Post)
• UPS is testing battery-powered cargo bikes in congested cities like New York. (CBS News)
• Preparations for the 2028 Olympics have the potential to transform L.A. transit. (Los Angeles Times)
• The Federal Transit Administration ordered Boston’s transit system to take immediate action on safety issues. (WCVB)
• Kansas City buses went fare-free, but riders are still frustrated by infrequent and unreliable service. (Star)
• The Atlanta Regional Commission is spending $45 million on street safety upgrades and transit projects. (The Center Square)
• The Charlotte city council approved the next phase of extending the Gold Line streetcar, but only reluctantly because of problems with previous phases. (WCNC)
• Detroit is extending QLine streetcar hours until midnight. (Detroit News)
• If the Biden administration really did try to push electric vehicles on cyclists and pedestrians, would anyone bat an eye? (The Onion)

This week, Fritz Steiner of the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania Professor Emeritus Bob Yaro, and University of Texas Professor Ming Zhang talk about their new book, “Megaregions and America’s Future.”

For those of you who get your news through your eyes and not your ears, there’s an edited transcript below the audio player. For an unedited transcript, click here.

Jeff Wood: What specifically is a megaregion, like what constitutes the geography that you all put together as defining what the megaregion is and what it might be?

Fritz Steiner: Well, the short answer is that it’s more than two metropolitan regions that are growing together. The classic megaregion in the United States is the northeast megaregion from Boston to south of Washington, D.C…. Bob can pick up the story; he started to observe, when he was teaching a studio here looking at the future of the United States, that there was an agglomeration of metropolitan areas … beside the Northeast.

Bob Yaro: In  partnership with Armando Carbonell at the Lincoln Institute [of Land Policy], and Jonathan Barnett, who was a practicing professor at Penn, I convened a studio called the “Plan for America” studio. Basically, I’d been doing some work at RPA at OECD in Paris, where I was rubbing elbows with our European counterparts, who were thinking at the scale. A group of academics from several European countries were working on an EU-funded project to look at the big systems — transportation, economic, environmental, and other systems — that were functioning at the continental scale in Europe, at what we would now call the megaregion scale. They identified several of these places in Europe and a few other things that just happened.

I finished the third regional plan in 1996 at RPA. We were beginning to think about how what we were doing could fit into a larger Northeastern scale and so forth. The Census Bureau in about 1997 or ’98, came out with forecasts suggesting that the country was going to add something like 50 percent of its population by the middle of the century. And the question was, well, where are we going to put these people and how are we going to accommodate this growth? So we convened this studio and did some long-range land-use-change, population and economic forecasts. And you know what we began to see when we looked at the maps? Expanding metros across the country was the emergence of what we now call megaregions. At first we called them supercities.

Maybe that’s what they were. They were networks of cities that were beginning to function together. Armando Carbonell felt that, given the anti-urban bias throughout American history, we ought to come up with a term that wasn’t inflammatory. So that’s where Armando suggested the “megaregion” terminology, which has stuck. It was interesting. … I started looking at these maps that the students prepared. We were in London with Sir Peter Hall, who hosted the studio that year, and with a group of Andreas Faludi from the Technical University at Delft and Vincent Goodstadt from the Royal Town Planning Institute and others experts. I started looking at these maps over time — the suburbs of Philly really have really grown into the suburbs of New York in Mercer county, New Jersey, around Trenton, and similarly the suburbs of Raleigh-Durham and Atlanta and Birmingham and the other megaregions, Texas triangle — same thing, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth Houston.

The suburbs were starting to grow together and it triggered, you know, our thinking that, well, there must be something more going on here. We started to do research on the interactions economically and in terms of natural systems and so forth in these places, and found that in fact, there was a significant amount of interaction. There were real advantages to these places. We also did work a series of studios at Penn; UT joined us on a few of them, where I think Fritz and Ming got involved. Starting in 2005 or ’06, we started doing those.

Steiner: Yeah, Ming and I but also Kent Butler.

Yaro:… So we started bringing together scholars who saw the same trends emerging in all of these places, started seeing in economist terms, agglomeration economies, that were starting to see serious economic benefits coming out of both potential and existing collaborations. The other thing we learned from the Europeans and the Asians was that the mode of choice in megaregions around the world is high-speed rail, particularly in a country where the interstate-highway system has become very congested and has become increasingly inefficient as a means of moving passengers and goods.

So we needed to create improved transportation links between these places. What we learned from research on European and Japanese and Chinese and Korean high-speed rail, and others was that there was a sweet spot between something like 300 and 700 to 800 miles, in which high-speed rail was hands-down a winner compared with commercial aviation and with highway access. It raised the question: Why was the U.S. one of the few industrialized countries that didn’t have high-speed rail? A big part of the research program was in how high-speed rail could be advanced in this country.

One other thing, after the Penn Studio: We convened a number of these scholars from around the country and around the world at a round table at the Rockefeller Brothers Conference Center in New York. Out of that came a collaboration between Regional Plan and Penn and Lincoln called America 2050; that was a multi-year exercise to look at long-range population, economic, land-use and environmental trends in this country and how they could be managed. That furthered a lot of the research that we were doing at Penn and at the other institutions across the country, and a lot of the international collaborations,

Steiner: In addition to the transportation planning advantages of Megaregions, we also saw pretty quickly that there were an environmental advantages, which are really important given climate change. So air and water are big systems. Looking at the megaregion scale, if you’re going to do something like climate reserves, because of the heating planet, the mega-regional scale is very helpful in figuring that kind of thing out.

Cars equipped with advanced vehicle automation systems are involved in far more crashes than previously known, a new federal report reveals — and automakers should be compelled to provide far more data to federal regulators to provide a clearer picture of the impact of this emerging technology on U.S. roads, safety advocates say.

According to a new analysis from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, automakers reported 392 crashes in just 10 months among motorists who used “advanced driver assistance systems” within 30 seconds of an impact. Advanced systems like adaptive cruise control and pedestrian detection can automatically control a range of common driving tasks, including steering, acceleration, and even stopping a car, albeit only in simple-to-navigate highway environments; about 92 percent of new cars sold today offer at least one such technology, though they’re often sold as pricey add-ons and don’t come standard across all models.

The growing of prevalence of advanced vehicle technology, though, hasn’t been matched by a growing body of data about how those systems impact safety — particularly for people that the drivers of semi-automated cars might strike. Automakers largely aren’t required to prove their advanced features are safe for people outside the car before they’re sold to consumers, and until June 2021, they weren’t even required to report to NHTSA when their tech had been involved in a crash.

Wonky side note: it’s widely believed that NHTSA collected data on crashes during which automated vehicle technology was not actively running at the time of impact because automakers like Tesla often shut off ADAS features less than a second before an impact, giving the false impression that the system played no role in the crash.

Tesla has come under fire from advocates who perceived the move as an attempt to evade liability, but Phil Koopman, an expert on automated vehicle safety, explained that it’s perfectly normal for engineers to program a car to override some elements of a vehicle’s automated safety features a split-second before an impending collision — e.g. automatic cruise control designed to keep a car moving quickly — but not others, like automatic emergency braking designed to prevent a crash. Put another way: while the package of automated safety features known as “Autopilot” was turned off prior to the Tesla collisions, it’s not yet clear that every element of that package was deliberately disabled. 

so… @Tesla was responsible for 70% of autonomous vehicle crashes in the past year? cool cool https://t.co/AXLYl9cp0f

— flat white generation (@blainless) June 15, 2022

In any event, the new trove of data raised particular questions about Tesla, which has become notorious for marketing itself as a path-breaking safety innovator despite a rash of high-profile crashes.

A whopping 273 of “advanced driver assistance systems”-related collisions (69.6 percent) involved the company’s vehicles, though NHTSA was careful to note that it’s not clear what percentage of ADAS-equipped cars on the road today are made by the popular automaker, or how much their owners drove them relative to other models. Tesla’s crash reporting process, which utilizes in-vehicle telematics to automatically send data to regulators, is probably also delivering data to NHTSA much faster than the customer claims process upon which some other vehicle manufacturers rely, and that could skew the stats, too.

NHTSA announced last week that it’s expanding its investigation into Tesla’s misleadingly named “Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving” “advanced driver assistance” systems to see whether they could be actually causing crashes by lulling drivers into a false sense of security behind the wheel of what they think are fully autonomous vehicles, but aren’t. (Both Autopilot and FSD rank as level two on the Society of Automotive Engineers’ famous automation scale; only cars that reach level five can be trusted to drive themselves without human interference, and they don’t exist yet.)

Experts say the new crash stats signal a clear need to more closely scrutinize the largely unregulated AV giant.

“I wasn’t shocked by these numbers; they were sort of what I expected to see,” said Koopman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “[This report has prompted NHTSA to say], ‘this smells like smoke; we want to see if there’s fire.’ Now that they have this data, they’re going to be taking a much closer look.”

Koopman stresses that NHTSA should be asking a lot more questions about the impact of ADAS on America’s traffic safety landscape — and until it does, the Administration may find itself hamstrung in its attempts to regulate the sector.

That’s because, unlike conventional crash tests to see if a car’s physical components are likely to harm its occupants when struck, there isn’t yet a single, definitive way for regulators to certify that automated vehicle software is safe, nor is there a standard testing method for AV tech that the notoriously underfunded agency can actually afford to conduct. That means that NHTSA basically has to analyze crashes after they happen, and then mandate changes to the technology to prevent future collisions.

“Is NHTSA is going to drive each car a billion miles every time there’s a new software release?” added Koopman. “It’s unreasonable to expect that. … The [Federal Aviation Administration] doesn’t even do that for planes.”

Even the hundreds of real-world crashes in NHTSA’s new data set don’t give a full picture of what AV tech means for America’s traffic violence crisis. It might be tempting to assume, for instance, that ADAS systems are significantly safer than cars driven by human beings for vulnerable road users, given that just 3.4 percent of crashes during the study period involved a pedestrian or cyclist — especially considering that about 17 percent of all crashes between 2006 and 2020 involved active travelers, per NHTSA data.

The trouble is, ADAS systems generally only operate on limited-access freeways where only one-fifth of pedestrian crashes happen; many systems even automatically sense when a car is exiting the interstate and turn the tech off.

Big difference in data quality likely comes from who is operating ADS vs ADAS

ADS is all developers, no self-driving vehicles are sold to consumers

ADAS is consumers, lots of vehicles have ADAS so I was surprised how much Tesla and Honda are represented vs. other manufacturers.

— Ken McLeod ???? (@Kenmcld) June 15, 2022

More sophisticated automation systems are being tested in complex city environments, like Waymo and Cruise’s notorious “driverless” taxis — and NHTSA found that such vehicle did strike walkers and riders more often than their ADAS-equipped counterparts (11 of 130 reported collisions, or 8.4 percent.)

Still, Koopman says it’s too early to draw conclusions about whether or not those cars are safer than human drivers, in part because most vehicles with advanced systems usually still have trained human drivers sitting behind the wheel ready to take over if the system fails. And even when actually “driverless” cars are widely available in U.S. cities,, comparing their safety records to that of human drivers won’t be simple.

“[AVs] should be safer than human drivers — but which human driver are you talking about?” he added. “Are you talking about good drivers? If they don’t hit cyclists often, well, are they driving in a city that has no cyclists, or a city with lots of them? Are they driving on a foggy night or in the middle of the day? … Ideally we’d be comparing two vehicles under the exact same circumstances.”

To fully grok the safety impact of AV tech, Koopman says that NHTSA should expand its investigation into the industry, and start collecting data every time a robocar makes a mistake. That could include requiring automakers to report minor fender benders, crashes that don’t cause injuries or airbag deployments, and any time an ADAS system runs a red light or breaks other traffic safety laws. Requiring police officers to record whether vehicle tech was running in the 30 seconds before a crash — and mandating that automakers make that information easy to access, such as by installing a simple dashboard alert light – is another important step that NHTSA could encourage police departments to take.

Addressing AV safety more comprehensively than that, though, will require cities to think more deeply about designing safe roadway environments where no car is likely  to kill. Because at the end of the day, the federal government’s safety role is pretty limited.

“NHTSA’s mission isn’t quite to measure vehicle safety — it’s to find problems with vehicle design and make sure they get fixed,” said Koopman. “They find clusters of defects, which is different than being the scorekeeper of crashes per mile. We’d all like them to do that, but that’s not really their goal.”

• From Boston to Olympia, mayors are embracing fare-free transit as a way to address inequality. (Politico)
• Safe-driving ad campaigns mostly don’t work, and the money could be better spent on other strategies, like speed-limiting technology or designing safer roads. (Slate)
• The Biden administration is now taking a serious look at a gas-tax holiday (The Hill), which is a bad policy that doesn’t help drivers much, doesn’t encourage alternative modes and siphons money from transportation.
• Remember the time a self-driving Uber killed a woman who was crossing the street in Arizona? (Clean Technica)
• The Massachusetts Supreme Court blocked a Prop 22-style gig worker referendum that’s backed by Uber and Lyft. (CNN)
• The latest plan for Austin’s Project Connect calls for closing “The Drag,” a popular strip near the University of Texas campus, to cars. (American-Statesman)
• San Francisco museums want voters to allow cars on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park again. (Examiner)
• Nashville Mayor John Cooper wants to ban sidewalk vendors in some parts of the city, saying they get in the way of pedestrians. (Tennessean)
• Houston Mayor Sylvester Croom has approved bike lanes on 11th Street. (Houston Public Media)
• Milwaukee County is overhauling its transit system in an effort to lure riders back and avoid a budget shortfall. (Wisconsin Public Radio)
• The Pittsburgh Port Authority is now Pittsburgh Regional Transit, a name meant to better reflect its mission as, you guessed it, a regional transit agency. (Post-Gazette)
• Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to transform the city’s ring road into a green belt. (Eltis)

On May 11, 2022, Philadelphia transit officers from the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) were captured on a viral video assaulting and using excessive force toward a Black woman accused of not paying a $2.50 bus fare. The woman was 24-year-old Jocelyn Dallas. The video shows officers beating Dallas about the head, tasing her, and degrading her in broad daylight. After the violent encounter, Jocelyn was charged with assault and disorderly conduct.

What Jocelyn experienced is one of many examples of how public transportation has become an avenue for criminalizing low-wealth and racialized people. Arrests like hers, and the charges and fines that often follow, provide a significant and literal investment in the prison industrial complex in the United States — all under the guise of protecting “public safety.”

How does locking someone up over unpaid traffic tickets or a $2.50 fare increase public safety? How is the response to this supposed “crime” proportionate to the likely impact on Jocelyn’s life and future? What are other impacts, physical and emotional, that Jocelyn may be experiencing after this violence?

A long and violent history of carceral ‘justice’

These questions about the role of incarceration in the transportation realm, though still unanswered, are certainly not new.

In 1994, Congress passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, one of the largest public safety bills in the history of the nation. The bill provided funding for 100,000 new police officers as part of an over $15-billion handout to police departments and their programs. One of the main sponsors of the 1994 bill was then-Sen. Joe Biden who, during his current term in the Oval Office, has since invested $10 billion in increased policing through American Rescue Plan Act funding originally intended to bring much-needed aid to those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Neither of these policies resulted in significant decreases in crime, but they did have a disproportionate impact on low-wealth and racialized communities. Today, the currently incarcerated population includes a significant number of individuals who have been arrested for a failure to pay debts such as court fees or fines. Failure to pay these fines can become a “failure to comply with a court order” charge that can lead to imprisonment.

Moreover, transportation leaders say that there’s little proof that policing even solves the problems it claims to address.

“We should be focused on increasing ridership, we should be focused on having our stations be great welcoming places, and I don’t see how a ban on busking or panhandling gets us there,” Bay Area Rapid Transit Director Janice Li shared in an interview with SF Public Press. “We don’t have data that shows that fare enforcement increases public safety or has any revenue recovery, but we do have data that shows huge racial disparities on who is impacted.”

What we do know, though, is the devastating impact of incarceration on low-wealth communities for whom public transportation provides the only access to job opportunities, healthcare, food, childcare, and daily necessities. Just like everyone else, these communities have a right to expect that they’ll reach their destination without experiencing brutality or incurring undue fines.

For Black Americans and undocumented immigrants, though, that expectation of basic access is not always met. A recent Transit Center report argued that both groups are disproportionately criminalized when armed law enforcement enforces “quality-of-life laws” like fare evasion or eating on transit.

With a looming recession and rising inflation rates, the economic impact of the pandemic continues to hit many Americans, particularly those of low wealth. The inability to pay for transit fares resulting in brutal violence and criminal charges at the hands of transit enforcement, as it did for Jocelyn Dallas, highlights the need for radical intervention and reimagination across the country.

Our transit agencies have an opportunity to reverse these impacts – and to decarcerate the United States – by removing police encounters and fare enforcement from the day-to-day transit experience. The case of Jocelyn Dallas makes it painfully obvious that decarceration is not only possible through reimagining public transportation, but it is also necessary in a society that claims to have had a racial awakening following the murder of George Floyd.

Not just transit

Of course, transit policing is not the only mobility space where ad-hoc code enforcement has led to the literal and social death of racialized and low-wealth people. For example, on April 11, 2021, Duante Wright, an unarmed 20-year-old Black man was shot and killed by a police officer after being pulled over for hanging an air freshener from his rearview mirror.

Wright’s death is just one of many examples of racial profiling, assaulting, and killing of people moving through space — specifically, Black and brown people who pose no threat to safety — during a “routine” traffic law enforcement activity by police. Philando Castile, Walter Scott, and Sam DuBose were all Black men shot and killed by police after a traffic stop. Sandra Bland was a Black woman pulled over for not signaling a lane change, which led to her arrest and death in jail shortly after the minor traffic violation.

Even removing human officers from the equation can’t completely decarcerate the street realm. In Chicago, traffic camera and vehicle tickets generate millions of dollars of revenue for the city, and disproportionately impact the working poor — particularly Black people — who cannot afford to pay the fines, which in turn leads to spiraling debt, bankruptcy, criminal legal records, and a plethora of other livelihood-threatening punishments from the city and state.

These instances of violence are not an anomaly, but an alarming trend that proves the outcomes of racially biased transportation policing and enforcement activities. Protest, outrage, community organizing, and a new wave of consciousness regarding police violence follow each of these tragic incidents, but to date, the police remain the primary actor in the enforcement of traffic laws for motorists and non-motorists alike.

Hashtags like #drivingwhileblack, #walkingwhileblack, #bikingwhileblack, or Charles Brown’s #arrestedmobility shed light on the many ways racialized people have borne the brunt of transportation policing. And history has shown that when agencies deploy police for fare and traffic enforcement, the most immediate direct outcomes of this disillusioned approach are arrests, excessive force, and incarceration — not safety.

What if public transit actively facilitated decarceration instead of exacerbating it? 

An article written by Ben Grunwald defines decarceration as a “massive investment in community infrastructure and an overhaul of criminal justice towards decriminalization, restorative justice, treatment programs, and community control.”

The United States has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Decarceration calls for alternative ways of creating public safety and reducing harm. The long-term impacts of decreased mass incarceration, criminalization, death, and degradation of racialized communities will be felt for generations, even if we simply make the decision today to decarcerate through public transit.

To achieve decarceration through public transportation, transit agencies, political bodies, and policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels can start by evaluating the failures and harm of policing over several generations.

Transit agencies can move from a policing model that seeks to detain, arrest, and imprison people to a system that carefully considers accessibility, affordability, mental health, public health, reentry, safety, and healing. Transportation planning can recognize ridership beyond capital interest by considering the physical, economic, and social exclusion that ensues when armed law enforcement, inadequate infrastructure, infrequent service, and disconnected networks become mainstays of the transit experience. A transportation system that aims to decarcerate will prioritize affordability, comfort, access, and ease for the most vulnerable communities.

Here are ways Thrivance Group advocates for implementing decarceration through transit:

• Divest from transit policing. Defund and immediately halt the use of public money and resources to employ police officers to enforce transportation-related laws, conduct, traffic codes, or violations. Reallocate the funds used for transportation-related policing and enforcement to programs such as: free and subsidized transit for low wealth and racialized people, improvement of existing and creation of new transportation-related infrastructure, stations, and amenities, and community-led, place-based transit and neighborhood improvements.
• Reimagine public safety. Fully fund, staff, and implement community-based and impacted community-led public safety, intervention, and healing programs.
• Massive investment in community infrastructure. Public transportation is an essential need for Black and brown communities across the United States. At the same time, it is Black and brown neighborhoods who ??have limited pedestrian infrastructures while also serviced with minimal transit infrastructures (bus shelters, depots, facilities, etc). Learning from the death of Raquel Nelson’s four-year-old son, having the intention of decarceration through transit means providing dignified and functional access to mobility through network design, operations, and infrastructure.
• Expunge past legal records and forgive fees/fines related to traffic- and transit-law enforcement. Decarceration of future transportation-related enforcement must go hand in hand with repairing past harm, which at a minimum should include expungement of legal records and debt forgiveness for past offenses that caused hardship, pain, and financial and emotional burden.

What would it have looked like for Jocelyn Dallas to have her basic needs met? To feel safe? To enjoy using transit? Even in the absence of zero-fare transit, what would a dignified response look like to someone who can’t or doesn’t want to pay? What other systems of support and care can we create by decarcerating public transit? How can we prioritize supporting and caring for someone like Jocelyn instead of assaulting and locking her up?

We must answer these questions, and we must envision a future for mobility justice that protects and welcomes those our systems currently brutalize, restrict, and kill. And doing that requires a radical re-imagining of transportation planning and urban planning in general.

Editor’s note: This op-ed was written by members of the Thrivance Group in advance of its 3rd annual Unurbanist Assembly. This virtual free event will take place from Friday, June 17, 2022, at 11:30 am ET until June 18, 2022, at 10:30 am ET. This event is 23 hours long in honor of Ahmaud Arbery and the day he was killed while jogging, February 23, 2020. In alignment with this year’s theme of Decarceration as Spatial Reparation, the Thrivance Group is gathering contributions to support one person recently released from the carceral system for twelve months, including the cost of housing, transportation, and groceries. 

 

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Children and teenagers are suing their state’s transportation leaders for the outsized role they’ve played in the ongoing climate crisis — and if they succeed, their efforts could empower new generations across America to do the same.

Earlier this month, a coalition of young Hawaiian climate leaders ranging in age from 9 to 18 years old sued the Hawai‘i Department of Transportation and its director, plus Gov. David Ige, for the harm caused by the “active operation of a transportation system that results in high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, [which] is causing significant harm to their communities, violates their constitutional rights, and undermines their ability to ‘live healthful lives in Hawai’i now and into the future.'”

Despite the legislature’s legally binding commitment to achieve a fully decarbonized economy by 2045, transportation sector emissions in the Aloha State have trended steadily upward in recent years. By 2017, a staggering 51 percent of the state’s total greenhouse gases were attributable to roads and ports; by 2030, analysts project the sector will be responsible for 60 percent, essentially putting broader climate goals out of reach.

“For years, young people in Hawai’i have been asking for help,” said Andrea Rodgers, senior litigation attorney at Our Children’s Trust and co-counsel for the youth plaintiffs. “Hawai‘i, in many ways, has been a leader in terms of recognizing the climate emergency, but transportation has been the primary reason why the state hasn’t been making the progress it needs to be making.”

That dire future, though, isn’t the only reason the plaintiffs believe they deserve legislative relief — because climate change is devastating their communities right now.

Across a sprawling 70-page suit, the children and teens described the harrowing traumas they’ve endured as a direct result of climate change, including the loss of their homes in catastrophic floods, the extended closure of critical roadways that have impeded their basic mobility, and the destruction of the beaches and ocean ecosystems that are deeply important to Hawaiian life.

For Native Hawaiian youth, in particular, climate change is also actively eroding critical cultural practices and, often, the livelihoods upon which their families rely. Extreme weather events are ravaging the lo‘i kalo (taro farmland) and loko i’a (pond fisheries) that their people have tended for generations; some have even seen their ancestor’s bones (‘iwi) disinterred by rising sea levels, and culturally significant marine life, like green sea turtles and monk seals, threatened with extinction.

Taken together, the present-day harms of climate change are already triggering “elevated levels of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, increased incidences of suicide, substance abuse, social disruptions like increased violence, and a distressing sense of loss” among Hawaiian children and teens, the suit contends.

And over the long haul, children born in 2020 can expect to experience between two and seven times more extreme climate events than people born in 1960 — a gap that’s widening as government leaders like the Hawai‘i DOT fail to take meaningful action.

“The challenges young people are experiencing from climate change, it’s not just impacting their environmental rights; it’s impacting their lives,” added Rodgers. “Their lives are being shortened because of climate impact … [And meanwhile], they’re not politically represented; they can’t become lobbyists, and most of them aren’t old enough to vote.”

Rodgers emphasizes that for the state of Hawai‘i to fulfill its legal obligation to its children and teens, policymakers and DOT leaders may not actually need to chart a radically different approach. They’ll just need to fund and implement the carbon-cutting strategies that they’ve already outlined, instead of ignoring them and building endless lane miles for drivers instead.

As part of the 1978 Hawai’i State Planning Act, DOT leaders are theoretically required to give “priority and preference” to mass transportation on highways, as well as to maintain continuous networks of separated bike lanes and sidewalks throughout the state’s communities. The bill also encourages the state to “endeavor” to cut vehicle miles traveled, “decrease the percentage of single occupancy vehicles in the State’s mode share,” and “assess and maximize total throughput of people across all modes of transportation,” in addition to providing electric vehicle charging infrastructure for the cars that remain on the road.

But the plaintiffs say leaders haven’t done any of those things. Instead, they’ve added 980 miles of lanes to the state’s road network between 1990 and 2017 alone — and because of the well-known law of induced demand, that’s increased vehicle miles traveled by 32.8 billion, and added 13 million metric tons of CO2 to Hawai‘i’s cumulative greenhouse gas emissions total.

“[HDOT leaders] are not planning for a complete transformation and decarbonization of the transportation system,” added Rodgers. “Doing that would require substantial changes in how people are getting around the islands. That would require significant investments in other forms of mobility — and they aren’t happening.”

"This lawsuit is the latest development in Hawai'i’s multigenerational, often Native-led movement to protect the Indigenous land rights and natural resources from pollution and environmental degradation." #MondayMotivation #ClimateCrisis https://t.co/YQL5nQpNEd

— Surili Sutaria Patel (she/her) (@SuriliSutaria) June 6, 2022

Rodgers says that if her clients win their suit, it won’t be up to either them or the courts to determine what, exactly, HDOT will need to do to get the climate strategy back on track.

Compared to the other communities, though, it will probably have an easier time charting a path forward. Aside from being one of the handful of government that’s even set a concrete, legally enforceable timeline for statewide decarbonization, Hawai’i is also one of the only states that’s written meaningful statewide pedestrian and bicycle master plans; they’ve just been more or less sitting on the shelf since 2013 and 2003, respectively.

If the youth of Hawai’i can persuade a judge that transportation leaders are denying them their constitutional rights to a healthy present and future — and force them to set the kind of enforceable carbon-reduction benchmarks that can command real change — Rodgers is optimistic that other youth in other states can do the same. Our Children’s Trust has similar suits pending in Florida, Montana, Utah, and Virginia, and continues to pursue similar litigation nationwide.

The New York State constitution was recently amended to guarantee “each person [the] right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.”

“A lot of people are really frustrated with the lack of progress on decarbonizing, particularly in the transportation sector,” Rodgers adds. “This suit is saying: Now is the time to right the ship.”

• From reducing fares to extending service hours to gift-card giveaways, transit agencies are trying anything they can think of to lure back riders after the pandemic. (Pew Stateline)
• The Washington Post interviewed Veronica Vanterpool, the newly appointed deputy director of the Federal Transit Administration, who plans to sell her car now that she’s moved from Delaware to D.C.
• A shocking 70 percent of pedestrians killed by drivers in Portland are unhoused, a problem that appears to be nationwide, although accurate figures aren’t always kept. (Streetsblog USA)
• Seattle transit ridership is climbing back up, prompted at least in part by high gas prices. (Seattle Transit Blog)
• The Massachusetts legislature passed a $350 million transportation bill that includes $30 million for complete streets and $25 million for buses. (The Center Square)
• The Charlotte Area Transit System is proposing a new route for the Silver Line it says would be cheaper and carry more riders. (WFAE)
• Arizona transit is often inaccessible for people with disabilities, and the state should use federal funds to fix that. (Republic)
• Carnage in the streets: A pickup truck driver who jumped the curb in Los Angeles injured nine people (CBS News). A speeding motorcyclist in upstate New York crashed into six people standing at the entrance to a bike path, killing two (Post-Star). And hundreds of people marched in Chicago to demand safer streets after drivers killed two toddlers (Block Club Chicago)
• Downtown Denver pedestrians say they’re being “terrorized” by e-scooters on sidewalks. (Denver Post)
• The Golden State Warriors’ Klay Thompson could afford any kind of car he wants, but he rides a bike to work. “I just love being on a bike,” the star shooting guard says. “It’s the best.” (NBA via Twitter)

In early May, Lyft, the concessionaire for Chicago’s publicly-owned bike-share system Divvy, quietly and significantly changed the network’s pricing structure. The most important difference was the elimination of the electric bike “fee waiver zone” in parts of the city south of Pershing Road (3900 W.) or west of Western Avenue (2400 W.)

How the pricing system previously worked

Chicagoans who live north of Pershing and east of Western, previously known as the “fee zone,” tend to have relatively convenient access to both the older, blue non-electric bikes (Divvy calls these “Classic” bikes), as well as the newer, black or gray electric bikes, from their homes. Divvy annual members can take as many up-to-45-minute trips as they like on the blue bikes, which can only be checked out or parked at full-service docking stations, for no additional charge. But prior to the pricing change, members living in the fee zone who choose to ride the e-bikes paid a per-minute surcharge, as well as a non-station parking fee if they ended their trip by securing their cycle to a rack or pole using its built-in cable lock, rather than parking at a station.

In contrast, parts of town outside those boundaries haver fewer full-service stations, or none at all. In outlying communities, Lyft is only installing “E-stations,” glorified bike racks where only the electric bikes can be checked out or parked, and these are spaced farther apart than stations in more central neighborhoods. So residents south of Pershing or west of Western generally have less convenient, or nonexistent, access to the blue bikes from their homes.

Since theses Chicagoans often have no choice but to use the e-bikes, Divvy’s old pricing system helped level the playing field by waiving the time surcharge and non-station fee for trips beginning or ending in the waiver zone.

The changes are announced

On April 11, the Chicago Department of Transportation, which oversees the system, and Lyft announced the upcoming changes, as well as the impending launch of Divvy’s dockable e-scooters.

Under the new fee structure, the waiver zone would be eliminated, meaning that the special e-bike charges would apply everywhere in the coverage zone. In an effort to reduce financial hardship for people with Divvy for Everyone (D4E) $5 memberships, available to Chicagoans making $35,310 or less, D4E members would be given $10 in free credit, good for surcharges and parking fees, each month for the next year.

However, no community meetings were held to explain the new, somewhat complex, pricing structure to the public before it went into effect. And residents certainly weren’t asked whether the changes were acceptable to them.

The changes (quietly) go into effect

On May 10, CDOT and Lyft held a ribbon-cutting at the downtown Thompson Center to celebrate the scooter rollout. But the press release for that event included only a brief, rather euphemistic reference to the fact the new fee structure was also kicking in that day. “In tandem with this launch, Divvy will be implementing a simplified pricing structure. Divvy and D4E members will continue to receive unlimited free unlocks, free rides up to 45 minutes on classic blue bikes, and significantly discounted per-minute and out-of-station parking fees for e-bikes and scooters through their existing memberships.”

The news release’s language emphasized that members would pay lower e-bike time surcharges and non-dock fees than non members. But it glossed over the fact that previously trips to and from the waiver zones didn’t involve per-minute or out-of-station charges at all. 

That day, many Divvy members were unpleasantly surprised to see they were getting extra charges for e-bike trips that didn’t exist before. Lyft later said they sent Divvy members advanced notice of the new fee structure via email and the app. However, as a regular Divvy user, I never received an email or a notification on my smartphone. I asked other Divvy members and they said they didn’t receive any warning either.

The zones were off the app map today https://t.co/Gxa6oadzif

— ugh (@kqskqs) May 11, 2022

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After-the-fact outreach meetings on the new pricing

Perversely, CDOT’s and Lyft’s community outreach plan about the new pricing system was to explain to the public how it works after members were already being charged the new e-bike fees. This public engagement process included three online public meetings, with the earliest one taking place on May 12, two days after the new time surcharges and non-station fees kicked in.

Lyft chose not to record these meetings to “allow open and sincere conversations” according to a Lyft representative. The Spanish forum held on May 25 was attended by 10 people, mostly residents of Southwest Side communities like Little Village and Northwest Side neighborhoods like Belmont Cragin. A bilingual consultant from MUSE Community + Design presented the information to the participants in Spanish. A Lyft representative was also available but did not speak Spanish, so the consultant served as an interpreter between attendees and the Lyft staffer.

The presenter showed a map highlighting parts of the current coverage area in purple, to show that they only have E-stations, not full-service docking stations, and therefore blue bikes can’t be used in these areas. Meeting attendees were unhappy about the changes and voiced their disapproval throughout the forum.

Yes, the blue bikes are being phased out

One resident asked if the blue bikes would continue to be available in the future. The Lyft rep responded that “the plans are to be determined.”

However, that’s not actually the case. Back in 2020, when Divvy was being expanded into the South and West sides, Lyft explained during a stakeholder meeting that the company would eventually phase out the non-electric bikes. When asked for clarification, a representative said that when a blue bike wore out, it would be replaced with a new e-bike rather than a new non-electric cycle. While Divvy’s blue bikes are very durable and can remain in service for years, that meant that eventually the entire flee would consist of e-bikes. At that point, anyone using bike-share anywhere in the city will get charged an additional per-minute fee for every ride.

$25 is a little steep for a one hour bike ride, don’t you think @DivvyBikes ?

Metra and CTA are both < $3 for this route.

Even $10 is pretty outrageous for a member. pic.twitter.com/nXaxqAGjSD

— Steven Lucy (@slucy) June 6, 2022

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Interestingly, Block Club Chicago recently reported that Lyft spokesperson Colin Wright “said the company has no plans to eliminate the classic blue bikes and ‘continues to keep them in top shape and available for riders to enjoy.'” That suggests a change in policy since that 2020 stakeholder meeting.

However, Wright indicated to Streetsblog on Monday that nothing has changed. “There are no plans to phase-out the [non-electric] bikes,” he insisted. But he also confirmed, “As [non-electric] bikes become beyond unrepairable, we will replace them with e-bikes.” So, in effect, there are plans to phase out the blue bikes.

Asked about the fairness of making such radical changes to how the bike-share system works without getting public input first, Wright responded, “We are living up to the terms of our agreement with CDOT,” referring to a nine-year contract extension that passed Chicago’s City Council in April 2019.

What’s wrong with the new fee structure

What’s most upsetting about the pricing change is that Divvy had previously been providing a low-cost mobility options for people in with poor transit access. While less station density and bike availability on the South and West sides has been an issue, Divvy has still introduced many people, especially those who cannot afford their own bicycles, to cycling for transportation in Chicago. Instead of walking 20 minutes or waiting for sometimes-unreliable bus or train service, you could simply hop on a bike to finish your trip. 

But last month Streetsblog noted that some working-class Chicagoans who live in parts of town without blue bikes, but make too much money to qualify for D4E, have complained that the new per-minute fees for e-bikes make the system unaffordable for daily commutes.

A few days ago Lyft sent some members this message on the app: “CDOT is providing a $5 bike credit for rides that start in recent expansion areas, one credit per rider every 30 days for a limited time. Credit can be used for bike unlock, minutes, out of station parking and on multiple rides.”

“Credits are our way to bridge the gap for anyone who feels priced out of the system,” Wright explained. However, not all members received the a notification about this offer. And $5 doesn’t even pay for a single half-hour e-bike ride for a regular member, which costs $5.80.

Here is the new Divvy pricing structure that started May 10. For a Divvy member to ride an ebike for 30 minutes will cost $5.80. A nonmember using “casual pricing” will pay $12.70 for 30 min on an ebike. Please share comments at outreach@divvybikes.com. @ChicagoDOT @DivvyBikes pic.twitter.com/404NVcQoMj

— Audrey Wennink (@awennink) June 4, 2022

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How will the new pricing affect Chicago transportation?

Lately I’ve been thinking about how all these changes will impact Chicago’s transportation cycling landscape. North Side Divvy members used to be able to ride e-bikes for free any time their trip started or ended west of Western. Now that they have to pay a per-minute fee for these rides, are they using blue bikes more often? And because, thanks to higher station density, North Siders have better access to non-electric cycles, has it become harder for South and West siders to find blue bikes at docking stations in their communities?

A few people have asked me to explain Divvy pricing, but decided not to sign up for a membership because they found the system too confusing. I wonder how many people will forgo or not renew Divvy memberships because the cost of riding is now too high. How many potential bike trips will instead be made by car as a result?

In a 2020 blog post Lyft’s head of bike, scooter, and pedestrian policy Caroline Samponaro, formerly with the New York advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, claimed the company is “committed to providing affordable, reliable transportation in Chicago and our cities across the country.” I wonder how Lyft defines “affordable,” and why they would make major pricing changes with minimal communication to members. I also wonder what CDOT’s role was in these changes, and how we can hold them accountable to their Strategic Plan and Climate Action Plan that highlight equity challenges and call for expanding the city’s walk, bike, and transit options.

The Lyft representative closed the forum I attended by stating that nothing is set in stone and that they are looking for suggestions and feedback. Please send feedback to them at outreach@divvybikes.com.

Black cyclists are more than four times more likely to die while riding a bike than White ones, a new study finds — and the stats aren’t much better for other modes or other racially marginalized groups.

Researchers at Boston and Harvard universities found that non-Hispanic Black cyclists suffer about 34 deaths for every 100 million miles they traveled on a bicycle, compared to just 7.5 deaths for non-Hispanic White cyclists covering the same distance. The fatality rate for Black pedestrians, meanwhile, was 2.2 times higher per mile, and even Black vehicle occupants died at nearly twice the rate (1.8) as their White counterparts, underscoring the findings of earlier research into the structural racism of our transportation systems.

Hispanic cyclists and pedestrians also had higher per-mile fatality rates than White ones — 70 percent and 52 percent more, respectively — while Asian bikers and walkers, by contrast, died significantly less often than their White counterparts (64 percent less for people on bikes and 45 percent less for pedestrians).

Indigenous Americans were not part of this study, but earlier research showed residents of native nations are most likely to be killed while walking, when controlled for both how often they travel on foot and their share of the population.

And those horrifying disparities are just the tip of the iceberg. The study also found that Black pedestrians were 3.4 times more likely to die while walking after dark than their White counterparts — an astonishing stat for a group that was already 2.2 times more likely to die at all times of day.

And even as walking deaths per-mile in urban areas were lower overall, Black walkers still died about twice as often as their White neighbors on city streets.

That’s despite the fact that Black residents logged proportionally fewer miles on foot, bike, or car than most other groups, relative to their share of the population, according to the National Household Travel Survey data from which the stats were sourced.

Notably, that data spans both transportation and recreational cycling, which could help explain why White cyclists, who are the demographic group most likely to ride exclusively for recreation or sport rather than transportation, logged significantly more miles per capita than cyclists from other demographics. White riders may also be more likely to have access to long, connected networks of low-stress routes, at least in some areas.

Or, as study co-author and Boston University Ph.D. candidate Matthew Raifman succinctly put it, “The ability to safely bike 40 miles on a rail-to-trail line in the suburbs is very different from the ability to ride a few blocks on a sharrow in a city.”

Raifman is careful to note that his team’s data alone doesn’t present a clear picture of why, exactly, some racially marginalized groups are more likely to die on active modes. Earlier research, though, shows that Black residents are significantly more likely to live on or near dangerous roads with fast vehicle traffic and little lighting, as well as in in communities with less investment in transit, protected bike lanes, and well-maintained sidewalks. 

Taken together with his study, Raifman says these data points signal a clear need for cities to more closely analyze the disparate aspects of traffic violence, not just for the nation as a whole, but in the specific places where Black and Hispanic residents are most likely to travel — especially when it comes time to make life-saving infrastructure investments.

“We don’t have this kind of data for even a city, let alone a neighborhood or a corridor,” he said. “What’s problematic is that the way we prioritize infrastructure investment in America is often from the bottom up; we look at a specific street and say, ‘There’s high risk of crashes here, let’s make some changes.’ … But if it we see 10 fatalities at one intersection and two fatalities at another, but the first has a throughput of 1,000 people an hour and the other has a hundred, well — which street is really more dangerous? And what if the second intersection is located in a community of color?”

Raifman acknowledges that even his detailed analysis can’t provide a perfect picture of who’s dying most per-mile on America’s roads — and that’s mostly because of our national lack of walking and biking data.

In contrast to their (often federally mandated) obsession with measuring car throughputs and level of service for drivers, American transportation officials generally do little to understand how many vulnerable road users are even using their street networks, never mind how many people from different demographics are dying when they do. The most comprehensive travel survey in the country, the U.S. census, notoriously only collects data on which mode Americans use to get to work, rather than any of their other reasons a person might leave their home — and it doesn’t include data on how far they travel, just how long the trip takes.

The National Household Travel Survey offers a more comprehensive glimpse of how Americans get around, but it isn’t perfect either. Despite a significant recent revamp to incorporate anonymized cell-phone records about travelers’ actual behavior, the federal database still won’t capture Americans’ year-round travel data, nor will it include people without smartphones. Moreover, Raifman says it certainly can’t stand in for the more granular, block-level analysis that policymakers need to make the most effective decisions — particularly as U.S. DOT doles out unprecedented amounts of money for vulnerable road user safety.

“There are billions of dollars in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for pedestrians and cyclists,” he adds. “It would be really nice to see a focus on targeting communities that are lower income, as well as the racially and ethnically diverse communities [that die the most often per mile].”

Raifman acknowledges that more research needs to be done to understand the root causes of America’s traffic violence disparities — but that shouldn’t be an excuse for policymakers not to act.

“The jury’s out on what the causes [of these disparities] are, but I don’t think that should stop us from acting,” he added. “I think it’s easy to say we don’t know why it’s happening and do nothing. But we need to do something. “