President Biden’s plan to build a multi-billion dollar network of charging hubs for electric vehicles is misguided, advocates say, because whether the cars are running on fossil fuels or electricity, our nation cannot drive its way out of the climate crisis.

This month, the federal Department of Transportation began accepting applications from states and cities seeking a piece of the $2.5-billion Charging and Fueling Infrastructure grant program, which seeks to build half-a-million plugs for the growing number of electric vehicles on the roadways. Along with a $7,500 clean vehicle tax credit, the Biden administration claims the EV initiatives will slash carbon emissions in half by 2030.

In addition to being insufficient in the short term, the program could spark new skirmishes over lucrative curb space and lock municipalities into keeping their thoroughfares car-dependent for generations.

“It’s insane to open curb space for electric vehicle charging,” said Jon Orcutt, advocacy director of Bike New York. “It’s uniquely American to think technology is the thing that is going to fix everything, but if you want less car traffic you have to apply the right policies regarding road policy, like increasing the cost of driving and creating alternatives that are better.”

The Federal Highway Administration’s grant program aims to help states, cities, and towns install expensive, high-voltage infrastructure in urban and rural communities. A separate FHWA initiative, the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, is forking over $5 billion to state transportation agencies to build charging stations alongside interstate roads and freeways.

Lodging charging stations at highway rest stops will ensure drivers will be able to travel long distances without getting stranded. But determining where to plunk EV stations in dense urban quarters, sprawling suburban developments, and bustling downtown corridors shared by curbside bike paths and bus lanes is another matter.

For this round of awards, federal transportation officials are prioritizing publicly accessible areas, such as parking lots and garages at government buildings, schools, and parks, as well as public streets in underserved communities.

Once a municipality decides where to put a station, it will likely remain there for years since the site would be creating a contract with a utility company to provide the power. That could preclude local governments from converting a street into a protected bike lane, a pedestrian plaza, or an outdoor dining facility in the future.

“The really important thing is where these chargers are sited. You can’t just plug them in,” said Alex Engel, a spokesman for the National Association of City Transportation Officials. “The work that’s done is expensive and once one is installed, it’s unlikely to be moved. We’re encouraging cities to think about putting them in places where they wouldn’t want to use that curb site for a different purpose.”

Situating high-voltage infrastructure in larger cities could be even more complicated, as multiple government agencies that regulate building codes, sewer and water lines, local zoning, and electric grid, not to mention neighborhood community leaders, will need to be on board.

Chris Rall, outreach director at Transportation For America, believes any new EV station must serve as a mobility hub for the surrounding community, providing outlets for electric bikes and scooters, or car shares instead of only single-owner vehicles.

“In general, they’re designed for cars so their opportunity may be limited,” he said. “We need an overall strategy for other investments in biking and walking infrastructure to make it easier for people to not have to drive so much.

But the existing federal EV grant program does not include any strategies to bolster transit ridership or encourage municipal fleets to electrify. Billions of dollars are essentially being spent to further the public’s dependence on cars with little benefit to those who cannot rely on one.

“In a place like New York City, most people don’t have a driveway and street parking is limited,” said Jaqi Cohen, director of Climate and Equity Policy at Tri-State Transportation Campaign. “Why are we building new infrastructure for car owners without thinking of public transit riders? We need to have both.”

It has been well documented that electric cars will not provide the planet with the quick fix it needs to arrest climate change.

The total market for EVs is growing, but so too is the total market for cars. By 2035, nearly two billion cars will be on roads around the world. In 2010, 14 percent of the world’s emissions came from transportation. Total emissions have continued to rise in the last decade, with transportation’s share increasing commensurately. This is important because if the nation’s of the world hope to limit global warming to the critical threshold of 1.5 degrees, they’ll have to reduce total emissions by 55 percent by 2030.

Even if every single car were electric by 2030, and all production was carbon neutral (which isn’t possible), global emissions would only drop between 15–20 percent — far short of the estimated 55 percent that is needed to be cut. While the reduction would be greater in the U.S. as transportation comprises a higher proportion of our emissions than at a global level, it still isn’t enough. Carbon emissions care little for international borders.

• Traffic will raise your blood pressure — and it’s the noise, not just the stress or the pollution. (CNN)
• A group of U.S. representatives is reintroducing a tax incentive for e-bikes that failed back in 2021. (Bicycling)
• Car website Jalopnik acknowledges that we can’t electrify our way out of the climate crisis unless those EVs have two wheels.
• Transit agencies are not making it easy to pay fares using newfangled methods like card taps. (Washington Post)
• Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg might be the last guy who still believes in “smart cities,” and the U.S. DOT is betting $94 million on it. (The Verge)
• Even a minor wreck could lead insurance companies to total electric vehicles because there’s no way to assess damage to the battery. (Automotive News)
• Former New York transit official Andy “Train Daddy” Byford is joining Amtrak. (Streetsblog NYC)
• Despite a Chicago hardware store’s claims, studies have proven that bike lanes are good for business. (Chicago Mag; Streetsblog NYC)
• The city of Oakland is calling transit violence what it is and making street safety a budget priority. (Oaklandside)
• The Atlanta city council ordered an audit  after the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority scaled back a number of voter-approved transit projects. (Smart Cities Dive)
• A downtown tunnel is the best option for Seattle’s planned light rail expansion. (Seattle Transit Blog)
• The Maine DOT is investing in vibrant, walkable downtowns like Bangor. (Government Technology)
• NASCAR is better than a lot of cities at punishing drivers who park in a no-parking zone. (Fox News)
• This is why cities should be responsible for clearing sidewalks. (The Onion)

This week we’re joined by David Hensher, director of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at the University of Sydney. David chats about the failed concept of “Mobility as a Service,” which aimed to unite disparate transportation modes under a single service. Hensher proposes a new way to reduce travel and emissions called “Mobility as a Feature.”

The text of a portion of the interview is available below. Click here for a full, unedited transcript.

Jeff Wood: First, let’s define Mobility as a Service. MaaS, as I’ll call it, I guess, the rest of the show. What is Mobility as a Service? At least in theory.

David Hensher: It’s an ecosystem where you can integrate, in a very simple way through a digital platform, information that gives you a number of ways by which you could travel. It provides a one-stop convenience solution to traveling. But on top of that, it also provides incentives to maybe get you to consider more sustainable modes of transportation in your overall travel patterns.

It is more than a trip planning app because a trip planning app basically gives you information which is great, like Google Maps. MaaS is supposed travel behavior in a sustainable way that’s aligned with societal goals like reducing emissions and reducing congestion and so on. And if it doesn’t do that, the MaaS as a digital platform may not be of great value to bring the sort of outcomes that we might aspire to as a society.

Jeff Wood: What are the limitations of MaaS as it’s being implemented now?

David Hensher? (17m 32s): One of the problems we’re finding is it’s become more of what Sampo Hietanen from Whim says is an “ego”-system rather than ecosystem. The suppliers of transportation are showing limited interest because they don’t think there’s any financial attractiveness to the actual customer.

When it comes to government, which is mainly the provider of public transport, they seem to be sotted with the idea that somehow MaaS is going to change travel behavior and get lots of people using public transport. But, they say, “We’re not gonna subsidize it anymore than we do at the moment through MaaS.”

We’re not convinced that having an app to know what’s going on is necessarily gonna be enough to make a difference, to change your behavior because many people are creatures of habit and the changes in service levels that are gonna be required are not enough to make them go variety seeking and change their behavior. It will at the margin but it won’t make much of a difference. The biggest issue is who’s going to be the aggregator or the broker in making this happen and who’s gonna provide the financial incentives to support switching behavior.

I have to say that in transportation it’s levels of service that really determine your choices, not cost. MAAS can only offer financial incentives. It can’t offer unique ride-share services or unique public transport to people who subscribe to MaaS.

So at the moment it’s stuck in a hole, it’s niche, it’s not likely to be scalable as it’s being interpreted at the moment. So, the question is what do we need to do to break that nexus so it has a chance? And I think it’s been pretty much doom and gloom to date with a lot of people getting excited about it, but not much being delivered.

Sampo Hietanen, my co-author, was really the pioneer in this stuff through whim in Finland. He’s basically said it’s just not working. He’s relied on venture capital for a long time and now he’s run out and he still hasn’t developed a profitable market.

Two powerhouses of passenger trail transport — the Southern Rail Commission and Amtrak — said they will seek funding towards one day restoring service along the Interstate 20 corridor between Fort Worth and Meridian, Miss., a 500-mile link that has been dormant for decades.

“This has the potential to be the first new Amtrak service of its kind in more than 25 years and it would come in an area that has long been underserved by passenger rail,” SRC Chairman Knox Ross said in a press release announcing the effort to get Federal Railroad Administration funding for a study.

If the study ultimately recommends expanding rail service to the corridor, Amtrak has already secured a willing partner in Canadian Pacific, one of two freight operators in North America to earn an “A” on Amtrak’s host railroad report card. Better still: CP recently received approval to merge with Kansas City Southern, which shares ownership of the tracks between Meridian and Dallas/Fort Worth with Norfolk Southern (Norfolk Southern received a “D-” on the hosting report card).

“We believe this merger will have a significant and positive effect on Amtrak intercity passenger rail service,” Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner said in a March 15 statement that referred not only to service on the I-20 corridor but also a passenger rail link between Baton Rouge and New Orleans on tracks also now owned by Canadian Pacific.

Why is this so crucial?

For a belt of mid-sized cities and small towns in the heart of the Deep South, passenger rail has been dormant for decades. It was dealt what seemed a poetic death knell when Shreveport, Louisiana’s Union Station burned down two days after its final passenger service in November of 1969.

But as they say, in the south, the past is never dead, nor even past.

Transportation For America credited the latest effort to the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provided $66 billion in federal funding for rail. The I-20 corridor is “one more arrow in the economic quiver for small and midsize communities across the Deep South,” the group’s Executive Director Beth Osborne said.

For T4A’s Chairman John Robert Smith, it’s especially personal. During his 16 years as mayor of Meridian, conservative politicians, including those inside the Bush administration, did not see the I-20 corridor as a priority nor were they supporters of Amtrak, he said.

But after passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Law, politicians from both sides of the aisle representing Louisiana and Mississippi are cheering the prospect of increased rail service in the region. Smith, whose Zoom background is the multimodal Meridian Union Station that he helped renovate, added that advocates have a role to play as well, lobbying elected officials to provide choices in transportation.

“Local governments invest in choices for the people that [they] serve,” Smith said.

He also called on state and federal officials to “be a partner with us localities that are trying to provide transportation choice for those who absolutely need it, because a private automobile is an expense they cannot carry … or for those who want a safer choice and a better way to be connected. And then [localities] have to invest in infrastructure that is safe and provides that choice.”

Beyond the Deep South, Smith pointed to the significance of the announcement for the country as a whole.

“This announcement becomes the bellwether for other such expansions of long-distance passenger rail, such as in Montana and Idaho and Oregon, or in the southwest or in Georgia,” he said. “There are many states that have an aspiration for the expansion of passenger rail. What’s important for the rest of the country is this is happening in the Deep South. You add another train in California, you add another train in New York, that’s not a story.

“But Mississippi and Louisiana and conservative elected officials coming together and saying, ‘We don’t want to miss this opportunity. This is our economic development. This is connecting my people.’ That’s a story.”

• About a third of people say they’d use golf-cart-like minimobility vehicles, but cities lack the dedicated infrastructure. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Bike lanes should be redesigned to accommodate other types of vehicles, like e-scooters and cargo bikes, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials. (Bike Portland)
• Walking around the neighborhood is healthy for children, not just physically but mentally. (The Conversation)
• Drivers who get stuck in traffic will often find another way to get from place to place that doesn’t involve driving, according to a new study. (State Smart Transportation Initiative)
• Options for Austin’s Project Connect light rail system are all less than half the 28 miles officials promised voters in 2020. (KUT)
• St. Louis can reactivate downtown by turning over big swaths of its super-wide streets to buses, bikes and pedestrians. (Next STL)
• Washington D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare added 700 e-bikes to its fleet, Mayor Muriel Bowser announced at a ribbon-cutting for a downtown bike lane. (WTOP)
• Philadelphia transit agency SEPTA is tweaking its bus route redesign because some riders are unhappy their routes are being eliminated. (WHYY)
• Sound Transit will decide today on a controversial light rail station in Seattle’s Chinatown neighborhood. (The Stranger)
• Charlotte drivers can find cheap parking in bike and bus lanes. The fine for blocking one is just $25. (Axios)
• Seven people were hurt when a light rail train and a car collided in Minneapolis. (MPR)
• Toledo recently unveiled a Vision Zero plan. (Blade)
• Milwaukee installed raised crosswalks and protected bike lanes on Walnut Street. (WISN)
• A San Francisco public history project focusing on municipal infrastructure includes fascinating photos of the city’s long-gone streetcar lines. (Standard)

A popular proposal for a federal e-bike credit is back in front of Congress — and this time, supporters have hard proof of concept that it will be the emissions-slashing, congestion-cutting, mode-shifting tool that Americans deserve.

On Tuesday, a coalition of lawmakers led by Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) re-introduced the Electric Bicycle Incentive Kickstart for the Environment (EBIKE) Act, which would provide up to $1,500 or 30 percent of the purchase price in refundable tax credits for new pedal-assist bicycles that cost $8,000 or less. For some low-income families, that means much of the credit would be paid back to them in the form of a refund.

Yes, people must feel safe on an e-bike to replace car trips.

But bike lanes are cheap! Politics, not money is the big barrier. By compelling many more people to ride, e-bike rebates can amplify calls for safe streets.

Info: https://t.co/MzAPOgPveyhttps://t.co/fY3Z7CoWtt pic.twitter.com/saUyNpyas6

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) March 21, 2023

Originally introduced in 2021, the EBIKE Act was rolled into the Democrat-led climate package that eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act, only to be cut during final negotiations. In the meantime, though, more than 100 state and local governments have picked up the ball that Congress dropped and introduced e-bike tax credits, rebates and vouchers of their own, including a wildly successful Denver pilot that resulted in 71 percent of participants regularly swapping car trips for bike rides.

Most of those programs, though, grant residents just $200 to $500 towards their new bikes, far short of the cost of a good-quality e-bike – particularly ones capable of picking up the kids from school, hauling groceries, or other short-range tasks that Americans tend to do in a car by default. A federal credit could help fill the gap.

“Our perfect e-bike future includes local, state, and federal incentives to boot,” said Noa Banayan, director of federal affairs for the nonprofit People For Bikes Coalition. “I’ve only seen excitement from state and local policymakers; they want these incentives to be stackable.”

Even without @repblumenauer's EBIKE Act, electric bikes are a phenomenal deal. $0 for insurance, $0 for registration, and $5/year in fuel costs.

And don't forget the free parking. ? pic.twitter.com/RRHQLDnrVK

— RJ Sheperd (@rjsheperd) April 30, 2021

To make it the ideal complement to those regional programs, the new EBIKE Act has three key differences from the original.

First, the bill authors adjusted the income cap to $150,000 for single filers and $300,000 for married couples filing jointly, threading the needle between an earlier version of the bill that set caps so low that few Americans could actually use it and a proposal that set caps so high that opponents accused the credit of helping “buy expensive toys for wealthy people,” as Banyan puts it. The new standard now mirrors same the income thresholds to which people receiving tax credits for electric cars are held, and the IRS will issue a report on the program after three years to check that the credit’s being distributed equitably.

Second, only bikes that pass rigorous battery testing processes will be eligible for federal subsidies, pre-empting concerns about battery fires caused by cheap, unregulated, and unsafely-charged micromobility vehicles that have devastated a disproportionate number of households in New York, but are rare throughout the rest of the country. Denver, which requires similar testing processes on the vehicle it’s handed out through its rebate program, has not reported a scourge of battery fires among program participants.

Third, and perhaps most crucially, the the new E-BIKE Act has significantly more support from both lawmakers and advocates who have seen its societal benefits and recognize it for the powerful climate strategy it is. A raft of environmental organizations — including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environment America, GreenLatinos, and many more — have all endorsed the bill, after staying mostly silent during its initial release.

“This is good policy, and we know it’s good policy because we’ve seen it proved at the city and state level,” Banayan adds. “When people see that, they’re support expanding it.”

State and local e-bike incentives are helping Americans take fewer car trips, reduce emissions, save money & stay active. It’s time for a federal tax e-bike credit so even more people can reap the benefits. Thanks @RepJimmyPanetta @SenBrianSchatz
for introducing the #EBIKEAct! pic.twitter.com/ygKmRb4e3y

— Katherine García (@katherinejulia) March 21, 2023

Banayan is careful to note that bills like the EBIKE Act rarely pass as standalone legislation, and will most likely be rolled into a future tax policy package where it is likely to face steep opposition from Republican lawmakers, none of whom are sponsoring the revised version. Still, if advocates can send a clear enough message to their lawmakers that they believe in the power of pedal-assist, supporters are optimistic about its future.

“More needs to be done to ensure that everybody across our country has access to an e-bike,” said Rep. Panetta, in a release. “With its fully refundable tax incentives for those in the lower economic levels, the EBIKE Act is a commonsense way to encourage the ownership of e-bikes. By incentivizing Americans to own and use e-bikes, we are allowing them the chance to help improve the quality of life in our communities and tackle the climate crisis in our country.”

Practically every day, there’s a new headline about a new effort in a U.S. city to reform its auto-centric parking policies — and practically every time Streetsblog covers it, we get an email that asks what people with disabilities will do in a world with no accessible parking at all.

Let’s be clear: any transportation proposal that does not center the needs of people with mobility challenges has no place in the movement to end car dependency. And indeed, particularly in the context of a car-dominated community with few other options to get around, accessible parking is often a profoundly important need that must be met.

In practice, though, the goals of most parking reformers rarely conflict with those parking needs — and some even argue that without rethinking our current approach to car storage through an anti-ableist lens, we’ll never build a world where all people with mobility challenges can truly thrive.

“I don’t think reducing parking is a threat,” said Steve Wright, a planner, writer and educator in Universal Design. “I think it’s about connecting the dots on mobility, whether it’s rolling in your wheelchair a few blocks to work, or to the accessible bus stop, or to the accessible parking space.”

Here are three myths about what parking reform could mean for people with mobility challenges, and how to bust them.

Myth #1: Everyone with mobility challenges relies on driving

Many Americans with mobility challenges use an automobile to get around. A whopping 39.4 percent of them, though, report that they don’t personally drive at at all, compared to just 8.3 percent of Americans without disabilities — and even when they do, they drive for about 9 percent fewer trips than their able-bodied counterparts.

Reactionary conversations about parking reform often gloss over that fact — and erase the needs of blind and many visually impaired people, folks with intellectual disabilities and other health conditions that make driving challenging or unsafe, and those who simply don’t want or can’t afford to operate an automobile. Cost can be a particularly steep barrier for wheelchair users, for whom accessible vans can cost from $40,000 to $100,000, with little public support available.

Why We Can’t Afford to Ignore the Needs of Non-Drivers With Disabilities

And even those statistics don’t capture the complex lived realities of people with mobility challenges, who are too often held up as a monolithic symbol to advance the anti- and pro-parking reform agendas without giving them a direct say in local parking decisions that effect them the most — not to mention the transit, walking, and biking policies that also influence how they get around.

“Within both car-centrism and new urbanism, there’s ableism on either side — because we live in an ableist society,” said disability advocate Megan Lynch in a must-watch September panel on disability and parking reform. “It’s not something that one political bent has a monopoly on. … Car-centered people leap in and say, ‘We can’t do [parking reform] because disabled people need [a place to park their cars],’ and then people on the other side say, ‘Not everyone can afford a car, and disabled people make less money’ – which is often true. But we’re not really talking to actual disabled people.”

Wright says those assumptions are particularly pervasive in the built environment professions.

“As much as I love and admire the planning industry, I think it’s doing a horrible job of seeking input from people with disabilities,” he adds. “If you don’t have people with disabilities working on your staff, you’re going to presume a lot of things [about how they live and move] that just aren’t true.”

Myth #2: Parking reform = fewer accessible spots

According to the advocacy group Parking Reform Network, the movement to change America’s approach to car storage can be roughly defined as advocating for “the use of policies and activism to discourage the building of too much parking supply and encourage more equitable, efficient and sustainable management of existing parking supply,” typically by changing how existing spaces are priced or rescinding government policies that require developers to build more garages and lots than they’ll ever actually need.

In the public imagination, though, the word “reform” sometimes morphs into an image of a cabal of cackling urbanists bulldozing van-accessible spots to make room for bike lanes for able-bodied people in Lyrca, or banning the building of new spots unto eternity.

“What we’ve seen in practice is that when we eliminate these mandates, not a whole lot changes,” said Tony Jordan, president of the Network. “A lot of the development that still comes along has some parking — and usually, the first space that’s built has to be an accessible space under ADA standards.

What Comes Next After Abolishing Parking Mandates

Jordan adds that the broader menu of parking reform strategies can actually direct developers to build more parking for people with mobility challenges, while simultaneously improving mobility alternatives for people who don’t really need cars. That might include, say, mandating additional van-accessible curbside spots at places frequented by people who use wheelchairs, transforming parking spots into bus stops for accessible transit vehicles, as well as better bike parking that can accommodate adaptive cycles and e-bikes, better enforcement of placard abuse to prevent people without mobility challenges from using spots not meant for them, and so much more.

“It’s not really about building a world without parking spaces,” Jordan adds. “It’s about building a world without car dependency, and giving space that’s usually devoted to cars to things other than cars.”

Myth #3: Our parking status quo is working great for people with disabilities, especially if they drive

If ample parking were all it took to make the world comprehensively accessible to people with mobility challenges, America, which has an estimated eight parking spots for every car on the road, would be among the most accessible nations on Earth.

Very few of those spots, though, are actually usable by the people who need them most — and the sheer glut of autocentric infrastructure that surrounds them can make life outside the parking lot significantly harder for people with disabilities, too.

In a 2021 article for Strong Towns, writer Daniel Herriges noted that “surprisingly little of the existing parking supply is reserved for people with disabilities,” pointing out that the parking standards outlined in Americans With Disability Act amount to just “2 to 4 percent of spaces which must be accessible” on privately built lots, with a thin patchwork of state and local laws providing a minuscule supply of accessible spaces on the street.

Why Vision Zero is a Human Rights Issue For the Deaf — and the Rest of the Disability Community

Meanwhile, even that tiny handful of spaces are surrounded by oceans of asphalt dominated by able-bodied drivers — and not just asphalt poured for parking facilities, but also an endless supply of ever-wider and ever-faster roads that make getting anywhere outside a parking spot perilous. A 2015 study found that wheelchair users were 36 percent more likely to die while traveling outside of an automobile, and people with other disabilities face heightened risks, too — and that’s to say nothing of the deadly consequences that climate change are already have on people with mobility challenges.

Parking and roads, of course, are almost universally free to use or severely underpriced to the driver, regardless of their disability status — and when it comes to parking, that means the true costs of lots are typically absorbed by the rents on adjacent buildings whether or not residents actually use them. The Parking Reform network estimates that “conventional parking minimums can increase the rent or mortgage required for an apartment or house by $200 to $500 per month” — a particularly steep premium for households that already struggle to find accessible housing options they can afford. The poverty rate for U.S. adults with disabilities is more than twice the rate for adults without them.

“We’re talking about a population that, on average, has less housing supply that they can comfortableylive in, and lower incomes as a whole,” added Jordan. “When parking is required, we build less housing because of the space and the cost that it takes up, and the impacts of that are mostly going to be felt in places that would otherwise be accessible 15-minute cities.”

Jordan stresses that until we shift the auto-centric status quo, it will be challenging to provide Americans with a variety of accessible mobility options that make it possible to negotiate conflicts over competing access needs. And doing that starts with centering the disability community itself.

“The main thing we need to do is to find and talk to people across the entire spectrum of people with disabilities,” Jordan adds. “They have existing needs and future dreams and problems [we can solve]. And I believe we can without adding a bunch of unnecessary parking. We just have to want to.”

• The U.S. is already producing record amounts of crude oil, but Republicans want to drill even more. (Roll Call)
• It will surprise no one who’s been on Twitter lately that Elon Musk is single-handedly responsible for the problems with Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” technology. (Washington Post)
• The cost of lithium — a key component of EV batteries — is falling, but no one knows for how long. (New York Times)
• Sure, a lot of drivers think they can break the law with impunity, but hundreds of thousands of “sovereign citizens” literally think the law doesn’t apply to them. (Jalopnik)
• An obscure 1920 maritime law is clogging up U.S. roads with trucks filled with goods that could be transported more efficiently by water. (The Atlantic)
• If you don’t mind paying the $2,000 gas-guzzler tax, you can buy this $100,000 Dodge with a 1,000-horsepower engine. (Car and Driver)
• Vice dubs the recently deceased King of Prussia rail line in Philadelphia the second-worst transit project in the U.S., behind the much-maligned LaGuardia plane train.
• Some good news on the ridership front: The D.C. Metro is ramping up train service as numbers continue to break post-pandemic records. (DCist)
• Arizona legislators are meddling with Phoenix’s transit expansion plans because they know they would lose at the ballot box. (Republic)
• Deploying social workers on the Twin Cities’ transit system would be a challenge because it overlaps with so many jurisdictions. (MinnPost)
• Tennessee’s $3 billion transportation plan mostly consists of new highway lanes. (Tennessean)
• The Hampton Roads region of Virginia is continuing to explore light rail. (WTKR)
• Remember Shit My Dad Says? Here are Things Mountain Bikers Say. (Bike Mag)

Replacing human drivers with self-driving taxis might not actually remove many space-wasting parking lots from dense American cities, according to a new study that throws doubt onto one of the core arguments in favor of the autonomous vehicle revolution.

For decades, AV proponents have envisioned a world where self-driving cars would liberate humanity from the need for personally owned automobiles by shifting trips onto circulating robotaxis, eliminating the need for virtually all garages and surface lots and freeing up precious land for housing, human-centered businesses, and other, better uses in the process.

“On the surface it makes sense; the car comes and picks me up, I get where I’m going, and then it leaves and picks up someone else,” said Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon. “We want it to make sense, because parking is one of the largest limiters of urban form, and the benefits of reducing it are enormous.”

Those who sought to prove the possibility of that vision, though, have mostly relied on abstract models of theoretical cities — and the results were, predictably, all over the place. While some of those models projected a 90-percent decrease in parking demand, others estimated that we would need more parking to accommodate the time AVs waited (likely idling) between rides.

Moreover, many of those researchers made optimistic assumptions about the percentage of people who would be willing to use robotaxis, and to share them with strangers going in the same direction.

To settle the debate, at least one for city, Larco and his colleagues modeled the AV-saturated future of three neighborhoods in ultra-expensive San Francisco, a city with one of the highest incentives to locate more developable land for affordable housing. Rather than assuming that AVs would be a parking-reduction panacea, though, the researchers modeled a range of scenarios wherein the demand for car storage dropped by as little as 20 or as much as 80 percent — and asked tough questions about whether the specific parcels that drop in demand would free up would actually be redeveloped into an apartment building, based on existing market incentives, lot size, and other factors.

In the more car-dependent and less transit-connected Stonestown Mall region, meanwhile, a 40 percent dip in parking demand would generate 3,680 new housing units, with a 60-percent dip yielding 5,600 units or more. Achieving either milestone, though, would depend on a constellation of wildly ambitious scenarios occurring simultaneously, including virtually all AVs being shared rather than personally owned (something 54 percent of Americans say they won’t do) and most of those robotaxi rides being pooled rather than solo (also unlikely, considering only one-third of human taxi trips are shared in the handful of US cities that have embraced pooling the most — and in many cities, it’s as little as one-eighth).

Moreover, because it is geometrically impossible to run a robotaxi fleet without it, San Francisco would need to maintain a world-class transit system that tempts most residents not to take AVs at all — while simultaneously creating a dizzyingly comprehensive AV ecosystem that stretches all the way into the suburbs.

Larco acknowledged that dense, transit-rich megacities like San Francisco aren’t the norm across America, and the Bay Area metropolis has already done the hard work of eliminating virtually all parking requirements. In expensive yet car-dominated communities like Los Angeles and Dallas, he suspects AVs would have a greater impact on reducing parking demand — though whether they will help or harm communities’ other goals is a separate question.

“We need to ask ourselves: is this technology solving a problem, or is it a solution in search of a problem?” he adds. “Will people refuse to use this thing, for any reason — because of ease, because of cost, because of culture? What are the use cases that align with the feasible business models? What are the cascading impacts on equity, the environment, health, the economy?”

And even if shared robotaxis do someday give residents of cities like San Francisco a new way to get to the airport or the office park, Larco wonders whether it will be worth the billions of dollars and decades of brainpower that have been invested into bringing that dream to life — especially when old-school options were there all along.

“That’s the question we don’t ask enough — will this innovative technology be the most efficient way to get to whatever benefit we’re seeking?” he adds. “Would a bike lane, or some other, more mundane mobility [improvement], maybe have made more sense?”

One Washington county’s decision to stop requiring cyclists to wear helmets by law was  associated with an increase in helmet use, a new study finds — and that finding could have a major impact for advocates of equitable cycling legislation nationwide.

Improving safety for cyclists on the road should be a no-brainer. But when helmets are paired with legislation – and police action more specifically – it can get complicated.

Take King County, Washington, a cluster of cities and towns with an estimated 2.1 million residents, and one of the first and only cities to adopt legislation connected with helmet use back in 1993. In February of 2022, though, King County repealed a helmet requirement that many advocates say disproportionately targeted people of color and the unhoused. At the time, some critics opposed repealing the legislation because they were concerned that helmet use would decrease after abolishing the rule, resulting in a surge in cycling-related head injuries.

A recent study from Public Health Seattle and King County, though, may offer some good news — not just for Washington, but for advocates across the country trying to thread the needle between pushing for the benefits of wearing helmets on bikes and scooters, and managing overreaching helmet legislation that negatively impacts vulnerable communities.

So, what’s in the report?

The authors of the Seattle public health study emphasize that rescinding helmet laws was just one part of a long-range, multi-pronged strategy to improve cycling safety awareness and advocacy in the Washington community.

Back in 2004, the same agency conducted observations of 1,473 cyclists and recorded an 80 percent overall helmet use rate, which provided researchers a strong baseline for comparison in the 2022 report. Meanwhile, between April and September 2022, county officials gave out 1,875 free helmets across the county.

Many Washingtonians, apparently, were still wearing those helmets when the researchers counted again. Based on observations of over 2,000 bicycle and scooter riders at over 50 sites across the county, researchers observed a helmet use rate of 85 percent, up five percent from the 2004 report. For three key groups — children between five and 14, toddlers and infants under five years old, and cyclists who used their own personal bikes — that average was a staggering 91 percent.

In all cases, helmet usage had gone up since 2004 across all age categories, regardless of gender.

“It was really gratifying and pleasing for us to see that helmet use rate was was so high,” said Tony Gomez, who heads up the manager of Violence and Injury Prevention, for Public Health Seattle and Dr. Martin Luther King County.

Gomez stresses, though, that those results were likely due to decades of efforts to encourage cycling and helmet use, rather than the repeal alone. In another study released in 2019, years before the helmet law was taken off the books, researchers found that helmet use for riders of personally-owned bikes across parts of Seattle also hovered around 91 percent, though similar analyses were not conducted in other parts of King County.

He also notes that there’s still more work to be done: the number of rideshare cyclists and scooter riders wearing helmets was significantly lower than riders of personally-owned bikes, at 45 percent and nine percent, respectively.

Why does it matter?

Though the King County data is observational, it could go a long way towards assuaging residents’ fears that nixing helmet requirements might prove to be a deadly mistake — and it could also help open the door for more dialogue about eliminating pretextual stops that pose their own dangers to vulnerable communities.

The helmet law repeal, after all, was made after two critical reports that revealed a disproportionate number of police stops among unhoused residents and people of color — a pattern of law enforcement overreach that’s all too common across the country.

Ethan C. Campbell, a University of Washington doctoral student who conducted the latter study, was not surprised to hear that helmet use had stayed high in King County, even after police stopped getting involved.

“It’s tremendously vindicating to see the results from the study,” Campbell said in a recent phone interview. “We have a culture of helmets here, and that is more powerful than anything else.”

And while helmet use is proven to reduce some injuries, Campbell said the focus for advocates has to address the systemic issues that make streets more dangerous for cyclists overall — including the dangers of police stops and car crashes, for which helmets provide little protection.

“There’s not a safe place for people to bike here,” Campbell said. “[It all comes down to] creating smarter, 21st century streets that are designed with safety in mind, instead of designed with the goal of just putting as many vehicles through as you can.”

George Kevin Jordan is a freelance writer based out of Washington, D.C.

• With income inequality growing and the cost of owning a car rising, people without cars who must walk or use shoddy transit are increasing cut off from jobs, schooling and services. (Salon)
• Charging drivers to use increasingly precious curb space for parking and deliveries could be transit agencies’ ticket to a post-pandemic fiscal recovery. (Governing)
• A coalition of 22 transportation, equity and environmental groups are criticizing the Biden administration for backing down from its fix-it-first approach to road construction. (NRDC)
• “The Free Streets Manifesto” shows how to transform streets into places where people gather and enjoy themselves. (Pop Up City)
• Philadelphia transit agency SEPTA is mothballing the King of Prussia rail line after getting a negative reaction from the Federal Transit Administration. (Billy Penn)
• Seattle’s light rail expansion is underfunding, and what’s getting built is going to be different from what voters approved. (The Urbanist)
• The Washington State Supreme Court ruled that a man was “unlawfully seized” during a fare check, but upheld that fare checks are legal. (KUOW)
• Victims of traffic violence in Washington, D.C. don’t need an audit to tell them the city’s Vision Zero program is failing. (Washington Post)
• Two years into Vision Zero, Chapel Hill isn’t showing much improvement from education and enforcement. (WRAL)
• Following the success of a nine-euro monthly transit pass last summer, Germany has approved a 49-euro version covering all regional rail, metros, trams and buses nationwide. (The Guardian)
• This week Berlin voters will decide whether to push up their city’s carbon-neutral target date from 2045 to 2030. (The Mayor)

As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, the transit industry is at a crossroads. On one path, this could be our shining moment: society needs transit to solve its concurrent challenges of climate, equity, safety and growth. On the other, this could be our dying gasp: as currently deployed, transit may not survive the looming fiscal cliff and vicious funding death spiral.

Which path we follow depends on how we answer the fundamental question at the heart of our industry today: Why do riders choose transit — why, even before the pandemic, was ridership was trending down?

The answers to those questions lie, in part, in a status quo our industry has tried for too long to maintain, despite its structural flaws. And we owe it ourselves to question that status quo.

Why do we decide what’s best for the transit rider by centering the powerful, rather than by centering the rider?

Why are our outreach processes designed to help the rider use the system, rather than helping the system understand and accommodate the rider?

Why do we continue to measure success by the amount of transit we build and operate, rather than by its utility?

Thanks to the pandemic — and the funding consequences we face from reduced ridership — now we must recognize the flaws in our current approach. Now we must see that ridership isn’t just desired, but essential. We must build and operate the system that riders want, because the existence of our industry depends on choices they make, of their own free will, to use our transit product. Before financial and political realities remove our authority to choose, we must collectively embrace this opportunity to center riders in our decision-making.

How can we do this? Together, the key players in transit — riders, elected officials and decision-makers, staff and consultants, and advocates and media — have the power to rebuild a stronger transit system, one that is financially sustainable and positioned to carry the masses into the future. But only if we each do our part and we trust each other to do the same.

To that end, we call upon our partners to commit to this Transit Ridership Pact.

Transit Riders

We, transit riders, driven by the need to save transit, hereby commit to:

• Use our political power. Transit riders, due to our sheer number, should be an influential voting bloc, but we aren’t. In partnership with advocates and media, we must support elected officials and decision-makers who are trying to help and apply pressure to those who aren’t.
• Reject learned helplessness. We must believe that change is possible. We must believe that by working with advocates and media, staff and consultants, and elected officials and decision-makers, the transit system we need will be the one we get.
• Learn. We can’t demand what we don’t know. Supported by staff and consultants and advocates and media, we must understand that our demands can include, but aren’t limited to, a full menu of transit improvement options:
  • Service (frequency, span)
  • Routing (directness, proximity to destinations)
  • Fares (cost, enforcement)
  • Priority (transit speed and reliability)
  • Information (wayfinding, real-time schedule)
  • Capacity (more/larger transit vehicles)
  • Access (first/last mile connections, sidewalks/elevators/escalators)
  • Coordination (bus/rail connections, compatibility between systems)
• Ride. When agencies provide what we need, we must use it.

Elected officials and decision-makers

We, transit elected officials and decision-makers, driven by the need to save transit, hereby commit to:

• Center decision-making on those most impacted by our projects — and in particular, focus on the rider.Communities affected by construction are not the only ones who are impacted by our decisions. We must direct staff and consultants to seek and develop rider-optimized projects and policies. This direction must not be constrained by real or perceived funding, technical, and political challenges. These challenges may indeed be insurmountable, but we still must start the conversation with unconstrained options optimized for the transit rider.
• Define success. With the help of the American Public Transportation Association, the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy, the Eno Center and others, we must call for a common definition of “rider-optimized” transit. Like Vision Zero has done for traffic safety, we must ask them to develop a common toolkit for rider optimization.
• Ask for tradeoffs, not opinions. When presented with options, we must not ask staff and consultants to opine about feasibility. Instead, we must ask staff and consultants “what would be needed to advance this option?” It is then our responsibility (in a public forum) to weigh tradeoffs and determine feasibility.
• Encourage innovation. We must not be afraid of the unfamiliar. Our staff and consultants can perform magic, but only if we let them expand our comfort zone.
• Devote resources to help riders co-create their desired transit system. We must not interpret quiet rider voices as unimportant. Rather, we must make sure quieter voices are heard.
• Leverage rider political power. Our decisions should benefit millions of daily riders. We should be empowering this constituency to drive change.

Staff and consultants

We, transit staff and consultants, driven by the need to save transit, hereby commit to:

• Engage with riders. Public meetings inevitably draw input from a localized community, one that may not include riders. Instead of asking riders to come to us, we must meet riders where they are — maybe on the bus? — so we can listen to their concerns, offer solutions, collect feedback on these solutions, and change accordingly.
• Build capacity. We must help riders co-create their desired transit system. Just as we provide staff and resources to help community-based organizations co-create their desired future, so too must we invest in the transit riding community.
• Innovate. With direction from elected officials and decision-makers, we must generate rider-optimized projects and policies. This will undoubtedly require development of new policies and approaches.
• Educate. We are experts. We’ve spent years developing deeply specialized knowledge of transit. We’re privy to best practices from elsewhere and other possibilities beyond what’s being discussed publicly. We must share this knowledge with riders, advocates and media, and elected officials and decision-makers.

Advocates and media

We, transit advocates and media, driven by the need to save transit, hereby commit to:

• Represent riders. We are riders ourselves and therefore should also advance the rider-optimized transit discussion based on our own first-hand experience, but our influence upon elected officials and decision-makers grows exponentially when it is supported by our fellow riders and vetted by staff and consultants.
• Organize campaigns. Elected officials and decision-makers operate most effectively when supplied with funding and political support. Riders need our help to convert their tremendous political potential into reality.
• Recognize successes. When elected officials and decision-makers guide their agencies toward a rider-optimized future, we must reward them with good publicity.
• Encourage copycatting. When we see effective rider-optimization happening elsewhere, we must encourage our elected officials and decision-makers to take notice.

In a more climate-friendly, equitable, safe, sustainable future, we will know exactly how to answer the question “why do riders choose transit?” Riders choose transit because we committed to center the rider in our process, each did our part, trusted others to do theirs, and built the system riders wanted.

Colin Drake is a transit planner with 20 years of experience in the field. Known for rider-optimized projects in Seattle, Colin believes in transit that puts riders first.

Sustainable transportation advocates are calling for common-sense trade regulations, consumer education, and other reforms to keep prevent fires involving defective lithium-ion batteries — while simultaneously fighting misinformation that threatens to explode into a culture war against electric microbility.

A spate of articles have seemingly warned the American public that their neighbors’ pedal-assist bicycles are about to spontaneously combust, engulfing homes and everyone within them in a fiery inferno. A March 4 Fox News article, for instance, warns that about “e-bike batteries are exploding and killing people” and asked readers whether the vehicles should be “banned altogether”; NPR warned that “as the popularity of so-called micromobility devices has soared across the U.S., so too have risen the number of fires associated with the lithium-ion batteries that power them.”

Vehicle batteries have certainly been linked to hundreds of deadly blazes — and once they start, the chemical reactions that happen within battery cells make them significantly more difficult to douse than traditional fires. Micromobility fires have been implicated in 11 documented deaths and 251 injuries in New York City, tragedies that Consumer Product Safety Commissioner Rich Trumka was right to call “heartbreaking and preventable” in a recent memo.

Some e-bike advocates, though, say the scale of the epidemic is far more modest than the headlines suggest — and that misleading headlines are distracting both from the societal benefits e-bikes and from finding real safety solutions to prevent future disasters.

“It almost seems like fear-mongering,” said John Seedborg, product safety manager for the e-bike manufacturer Hovsco. “Electric cars catch fire and the media goes crazy, but people don’t stop buying electric cars — but they do start thinking e-bikes aren’t safe. Everyone wants to jump on the hype train.”

Here are three things Seedborg and other proponents of e-cycling want the world to know about all those e-bike battery fire trend pieces — and why, with a little common-sense regulation, this mode can safely become the front-line mobility option it deserves to be.

‘E-bike fires’ don’t always involve e-bikes…

For most people, the word “e-bike” rightly evokes the image of a two-wheeled vehicle with pedals, handlebars, and a small electric motor to assist riders to more easily reach a top speed of 20 miles per hour.

Among law enforcement and the media, though, the word “e-bike” is sometimes incorrectly used as a shorthand for a much wider range of micromobility vehicles, including electric mopeds and scooters capable of reaching far-faster speeds — and which use far larger and more combustible batteries than you’ll ever find on a pedal-assist bike.

Per FDNY Fire Marshals the cause of this morning’s 3-alarm fire which occurred 5401 7th Avenue in Brooklyn was lithium ion batteries from E-Bikes/Scooters. Read more: https://t.co/JrdMmQkNMH pic.twitter.com/SJtWnveRn5

— FDNY (@FDNY) May 2, 2022

“This is exactly the challenge we have as an industry,” said Larry Pizzi, head of the e-bike committee at People for Bikes in an interview with Bicycle Retailer last year. “We are working hard to be responsible, … then we have rogue companies that bring in electric scooters from China without any kind of regulations, and it creates a bad image.”

… and the ones that do don’t meet US standards

When an exploding battery is attached to a bike, it’s often attached to cheap, imported one from Chinese sites like Alibaba, which are allowed to enter the country under the infamous “de minimis” rule. A carveout theoretically aimed at saving people who buy products like alcohol and tobacco for personal use from the red tape placed on large-scale importers, that loophole in federal law is having a dangerous impact on the e-bike industry, allowing overseas manufacturers to sell direct-to-consumer e-bikes that cost less than $800 without going through the normal customs process, paying the steep duties and taxes associated with bigger shipments, or complying with certain Consumer Product Safety Commission regulations and guidelines.

Groups like People for Bikes are fighting to exclude e-bikes and their batteries from the de minimis rule, but experts say the battle will be difficult to win. In the meantime, the CPSC is essentially begging overseas manufacturers to rigorously test their vehicles before they enter the U.S. to make sure they adhere to a fire safety standard known as UL-2849, and lawmakers are introducing legislation to give those standards the force of law.

Seedborg warns, though, that even if all those measures are put in place, e-bikes might still occasionally ignite if customers don’t treat their bikes with care over the long haul. A former bikeshop owner himself, he says he’s seen customers buy uncertified overseas chargers for their batteries, too, as well as mismatch weaker batteries with too-powerful chargers that can easily overload their cells, send broken batteries to shady refurbishment outfits to save money, and do other dangerous things in an attempt to modify bikes to go faster, last longer, or simply keep working on the cheap.

“A lot of the social media hype comes from older posts and videos where people would ask their device to do more than it was designed to, and cause that battery to purge,” he explains.

Seedborg emphasizes that to keep defective parts away from bikes, consumer education on bike maintenance, charing practices and safe repair options are key. New York City, where the nexus of exploited delivery workers and food delivery companies has created a market for cheap batteries, is considering a buy-back program to get defective batteries off of bikes entirely.

They’re rare — and the root cause is socioeconomic

It bears repeating that just like car crash deaths, all e-bike battery fires are 100 percent preventable, and even a single person being harmed by one is unacceptable. It’s also important to note, though, that outside of New York City, micromobility fires aren’t an epidemic, despite what alarmist headlines might suggest — and with proper regulation, they likely won’t  be.

Most experts believe that battery fires are so heavily concentrated in the Big Apple for the simple reason that there are way more e-bikes within its borders than any other major city in America, thanks in large part to New York’s roughly 65,000 deliveristas, an exploited group of workers that relies on pedal-assist technology to make their living.

Those workers are typically underpaid and forced to depend on cheap and potentially dangerous models that traditional bike shops refuse to repair when they break. To make it through a typical 10- to 15-hour shift delivering food to wealthy customers far from the homes they can afford, they also often charge their bikes at hubs run out of private businesses  — even if that means piling their batteries alongside dozens or hundreds of others in storerooms strung with dangerous extension cords that can easily ignite, as Vice’s Aaron Gordon described in a recent long read.

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In cities like Denver, though, e-bike fires have grabbed virtually no headlines, despite the fact that the city gave 4,734 residents vouchers of up to $1,700 to buy them last year. That’s in part because of a smaller bike fleet overall, but also because the program required participants to buy from certified bike shops that are highly unlikely to sell a defective bike, and because the socioeconomic factors affecting Denver’s deliveristas differ significantly from the challenges facing New York riders.

Cursory Google searches of e-bike fires in other large major cities in America, meanwhile, yield almost no results. There were reports in 2019 of two bike-share vehicles catching fire in San Francisco that resulted in a micromobility operator pulling its entire fleet; a 2022 bike shop fire in Miami after a battery refurbished at by a 3rd party outfit was left charging overnight; and a recent Phoenix garage fire which fire officials attributed to the fact that the family left three batteries charging simultaneously against manufacturer advice — a blaze which resulted in no injuries, by the way, because the homeowners had access to a secure bike storage option outside of their primary living area, something which non-homeowners deserve, too.

There’s also a statement from the Los Angeles Fire Department saying that it “does not have any data about fires attributable to e-bikes.” (And, it’s worth noting that New York City’s fleet of 4,000 electric Citi Bikes has not experienced any fires.)

None of this, of course, is to minimize the pain and suffering endured by families who have already been harmed or lost loved ones to battery fires. It is to say, though, that with a thoughtful and holistic approach to battery safety, the e-bike has the potential not just to be a fire-safe mobility option, but to save countless lives on American roads, too — by getting more of us out of our cars and into the saddle.

On Monday, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell issued an advisory to warn cities and towns across eastern Massachusetts that they “must comply” with the state’s new MBTA Communities Law by legalizing multifamily housing near MBTA bus routes and rail stations.

Where many of Boston’s suburbs currently only allow single-family homes with large lawns, the new law will require new zoning districts “of reasonable size,” and generally within a half-mile of transit stops, where builders would be allowed to construct at least 15 homes per acre.

New State Rule Would Force Suburbs to Legalize Thousands of New Apartments Near T Stops

However, some officials from some of the region’s most exclusionary communities have talked about defying the law in public meetings.

Towns that do not comply would no longer be eligible for certain state funding programs, like MassWorks infrastructure grants.

However, many of the state’s wealthiest communities don’t receive that funding anyhow.

At a Housing Production Plan Implementation Committee meeting in January, Harvey Boshart, a Weston Select Board member, argued that “as it currently stands, we’re not giving up anything” if the town chose not to comply.

Weston has three MBTA regional rail stations within its boundaries. Its median home price is currently over $2.5 million and its well-heeled residents are notorious for exploiting zoning and environmental laws to keep poorer renter households out of their community.

In the nearby City of Newton, which has even more transit service, City Councilor Marc Laredo mused in a January 2022 public meeting that the law “creates significant issues for us in limiting our ability to manage and control what gets built here… And I think we need to weigh that against what in my mind is a very small amount of (state) funding at stake.”

Attorney General Campbell’s legal advisory quashes those arguments.

“MBTA Communities cannot avoid their obligations under the Law by foregoing this funding,” states the Attorney General’s advisory. “The Law requires that MBTA Communities ‘shall have’ a compliant zoning district and does not provide any mechanism by which a town or city may opt out of this requirement.”

Attorney General Campbell – whose 2022 election campaign focused on racial disparities in wealth, policing, and education – also warned suburbs against preserving zoning laws that perpetuate racial segregation across the region:

MBTA Communities that fail to comply with the Law’s requirements also risk liability under federal and state fair housing laws. The Massachusetts Antidiscrimination Law and federal Fair Housing Act prohibit towns and cities from using their zoning power for a discriminatory purpose or with discriminatory effect. An MBTA Community may violate these laws if, for example, its zoning restrictions have the effect of unfairly limiting housing opportunities for families with children, individuals who receive housing subsidies, people of color, people with disabilities, or other protected groups.

Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, the executive director for Lawyers for Civil Rights in Boston, issued a press statement on Wednesday to commend Attorney General Campbell “for her decisive leadership on this important issue.”

“Municipal compliance with the MBTA Communities Law is critical to combating Massachusetts’ affordable housing crisis… If towns don’t comply, they will face litigation brought by (Lawyers for Civil Rights). With the advisory now in effect, recalcitrant towns now also face civil enforcement action from the Attorney General’s office,” wrote Espinoza-Madrigal.

Under the the state’s rules, inner-core cities and towns on and immediately adjacent to the MBTA’s rapid transit network – places like Newton, Cambridge, Brookline, Everett, and Braintree – have until the end of 2023 to implement new zoning rules and verify compliance with the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development.

Other municipalities on the commuter rail network, including towns like Weston, will have until the end of 2024.

Communities that were red-lined in the 1930s are still experiencing more than twice the rate of pedestrian deaths today than more privileged neighborhoods — and we can’t achieve Vision Zero until we reckon with racist and classist policies that contribute to the disparity, a groundbreaking new study argues.

In the first study ever to definitively “connect redlining to a transportation-related health outcome,” researchers found that census tracts once marked as “hazardous” or “grade D” by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation experienced a pedestrian death rate of 2.6 per 100,000 people between 2010 and 2019, compared to a rate of just 1.1 during the same period for tracts marked grade “A” or “best.”

Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, the infamous Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps were used to determine eligibility for low, federally backed interest rates based on a color-coded grading system that systematically marked Black and low-income communities with red lines to connote “D” grade neighborhoods that were supposedly too risky for banks to invest in — essentially “tying the presence of Black people to low property values,” the researchers wrote.

Predominantly White and wealthy communities, meanwhile, generally received “A” grades that guaranteed them the lowest rates around, and were handed a profound incentive to make sure their neighborhoods stayed segregated by any means necessary lest they slip into a lower category.

The researchers stress that this simple and deeply racist policy helped “cement the racial wealth gap” that endures to this day, and remains associated with a cascade of unjust and deadly intergenerational impacts that have endured as well. In many communities, both the present-day residents of red-lined neighborhoods and the descendants of people who lived in them but were later displaced are still experiencing higher rates of infant and maternal mortality, gun violence, and poverty, to name just a few of a mountain of adverse health and economic outcomes.

Pedestrian deaths can now be added to the list.

“In public health, there has been a shift towards thinking more about societal processes that impact the inequities we see in the U.S.,” said Nandi Taylor, a PhD candidate in public health at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the lead author of the study. “When we think about pedestrian fatalities, the current transportation field is largely focusing on the identification of individual risk factors rather than these policies that created and facilitated unsafe environments. … We think that needs to change.”

Those “individual risk factors,” of course, will be all too familiar to sustainable transportation advocates, even if they don’t know the historical reasons why just so many of them are present in Black and brown communities.

In addition to plunging existing Black homeowners into poverty, red-lining transformed neighborhoods of color into targets for “slum clearance” programs to make way for the interstate highway system, leaving the residents who remained to contend with both the freeways themselves and a deadly maze of supporting arterials that are today the site of the majority of pedestrian and cyclist deaths.

Meanwhile, the absence of affordable mortgage products caused vacancies to skyrocket, leaving sidewalks, which cities usually rely on homeowners to maintain, to crumble in front of empty buildings. Financially struggling households became more dependent on less-expensive modes like walking, biking and transit, even when a simple walk to the bus stop meant endangering their lives.

And disempowered residents had little political power to resist these policies or call for public investment in infrastructure like good crosswalks and street lighting, and were systematically shut out of government leadership positions that had the most direct impact on the roads they walked on.

To be clear, this is just a partial list of the many transportation impacts of red-lining — which Taylor emphasized itself “isn’t a sole or perfect measure of structural racism” that can perfectly explain why Black people are so much more likely to die on foot or bike in the U.S., despite the fact that they actually walk and cycle fewer miles than their White counterparts.

To truly accomplish the goal of Vision Zero, Taylor and her co-authors argue that transportation leaders need to move beyond “color-blind” approaches — such as allocating funding for pedestrian safety equally across a community — and start reckoning with the upstream reasons why U.S. roads are so dangerous for people of color in the first place. And that will mean not just learning their history, but stepping outside of siloed agencies to develop multidisciplinary approaches that go beyond painting crosswalks.

“We’re imagining some kind of initiative that takes into account the history and a wider diversity data sources, to really get at why we see the inequities we see in transportation that we see today,”  Taylor adds. “We need to be more direct in addressing these underlying drivers, and not just advocate for equal investment everywhere.”

• Cities all over the country closed streets to cars and opened them up to pedestrians during the COVID-19 pandemic, and now they’re fighting over whether to make those changes permanent. (Washington Post)
• From a too-small New York City tunnel to safety issues in Boston and Charlotte to traffic-choked Southern cities that rejected transit — and outrageous costs to fix it all — the U.S. transportation system is a dystopian hellscape. (Vice)
• Good transit service is wasted without high-density zoning to match. (Commercial Observer)
• More proof that induced demand is a real thing. (Planetizen)
• A new mapping tool can help urban planners identify sidewalk gaps. (MIT News)
• Used EV batteries can find new life hooked up to a solar power grid. (Reasons to Be Cheerful)
• Chicago transit agencies are asking Illinois legislators for help with a looming $730 million budget deficit. (Daily Herald)
• Boston’s fare-free transit pilot program is saving low-income riders significant money and making commutes easier. (WGBH)
• Philadelphia is raising parking fines to $300 because drivers keep parking anywhere they like — even on sidewalks (Inquirer). And Market Street is getting a red bus-only lane (ABC 10).
• Chicago aldermen passed a Complete Streets ordinance, instituted automated traffic enforcement and introduced a bill for the city to take over sidewalk snow shoveling. (Streetsblog Chicago)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit needs more decisiveness and less micromanaging, according to an advisory group. (The Urbanist)
• An auditor’s report found problems with the management of the Southwest light rail line in Minneapolis. (Minnesota Public Radio)
• All 42 Charlotte train cars need repairs after a derailment revealed problems with their axle bearings. (Axios)
• Lyft is dropping Motivate as the maintenance contractor for Portland’s Biketown bike-share system. (Bike Portland)
• Tampa is increasing streetcar frequency to once every 12 minutes. (Creative Loafing)
• Salem, Oregon is looking to restore streetcar service that ended in the 1920s. (Reporter)
• Marketers say it grabs attention, but research shows consumers find it cringey when companies like Lyft intentionally misspell their names. (ZME Science)

This week we’re joined by Oregon Metro Council President Lynn Peterson to talk about her book Roadways for People: Rethinking Transportation Planning and Engineering. We chat about better project scoping, capacity building, engineers going to actually walk and bike their project areas, and highway expansion in cities.

If you prefer to read instead of listen, check out an excerpt of the conversation below the audio player. If you want a full unedited transcript, click here.

Jeff Wood: There’s a number of discussions in the book about centering people, especially in places like in Baltimore and in New Orleans, where, you know, the projects that you’re doing outreach and community input for aren’t moving along, but something happened in between that made the community trust that the process would be okay. With a place like 82nd Avenue in Portland, where the road was given back to the region by the state, there is a whole community of folks — the APANO folks, the Asian community there, the Jade District — that creates a discussion about how that road should be designed, how that road is used. I think that’s really fascinating, to think about those processes and how that focuses on people and not just a transportation project.

Lynn Peterson: Exactly. The planning process that was started on 82nd started with community members feeling safe enough, and we’ll get into what that means, to articulate what their needs were within that corridor, whether they were small business owners or whether they were kiddos getting to school. But 82nd Avenue in Portland is the highest transit ridership line in the entire region. There’s all these transfers that are going on east-to-west, north-to-south.

So just crossing the street as a transit user, or just needing trees to provide shade, were huge issues within the community. But if we started with the traffic engineer scoping out a project, they would say, well, all 10 of these intersections need new signalization. They need new hardware. There would be very little attention paid to the pedestrian crossing the street or the number of crossings per mile, right? So we started with the people to identify what they needed and then built out, with the traffic engineers and with the planners, like, how do we scope this project?

That’s where we usually get sideways. Somebody saw congestion at an intersection, they scoped the project, then it took 10 years to get to the planning process. By that time, somebody’s already estimated a cost for that project, and then they come and they say, “Hey, here’s the project we’re gonna do,” and the community’s like, “That’s not the project we need. What are you talking about? We need X, Y, and Z.”

The response is that giving the community what it needs would drive up the cost, so we’re not gonna be able to do that. Right? But  it started 10 or 20 years ago, and that’s where I wanna focus. We need better scopes and better estimate ranges because we don’t know, right? We should never be held to something that was created 10, 20 years ago, but that’s what a transportation project takes to get through — between funding and the planning and the engineering, it takes 10 to 20 years.

We should never be set into a scope that was created 10, 20 years ago, so 82nd is a really good example. We started with the assumption that there was a lack of trust and that we had to build up trust.

We spent two years prior to being able to have that conversation on 82nd, actually building up capacity within community-based organizations to just be able to talk about transportation. We granted a lot of organizations — a lot of grants to be able to build up that capacity to hire staff and get get them up to speed with these projects.

In terms of APANO [the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon] and the Asian community, having folks that were trusted members of the community be able to go out and have those conversations in places that were safe and be able to speak in the languages that they felt they could actually communicate, and in not English — we got a lot more information from that kind of conversation, rather than just having a town hall meeting where an engineer gets up and says, “There’s congestion, here’s my solution, let me know what you think on this card,” and then walks away.

• Four of the 15 most congested stretches of highway in the U.S. are in Atlanta, with three in Los Angeles, three in Chicago and two in Houston. (Jalopnik)
• People want car-free living even in car-centric cities like Charlotte and Phoenix. (City Lab)
• In rural areas where transit isn’t an option, it’s important to convince drivers who are largely unfamiliar with the technology to buy electric vehicles. (Union of Concerned Scientists)
• Traffic engineers should be looking at entire transportation networks holistically, instead of piece by piece. (Cities Today)
• The Los Angeles Times has a very sad story about rampant drug use on the L.A. Metro. While transit agencies shouldn’t be responsible for social services, and more policing isn’t the answer to homelessness or substance abuse, commuters, women and families also aren’t going to ride if that’s what they encounter.
• Wall Street is cheering a recent California court ruling denying ride-hailing drivers labor rights. (Reuters)
• Atlanta voters approved a plan to raise taxes to drastically expand transit in 2016. But now that many of those projects are being delayed or scaled back, it could discourage voters from ever doing that again. (Governing)
• The Charlotte Area Transit System has to repair all 42 of its light rail cars due to an axle bearing problem it kept under wraps. (Axios)
• Drivers killed 31 Portland pedestrians in 2022, compared to five in 2008. (Bike Portland)
• Milwaukee is focusing Vision Zero efforts on a stretch of Burleigh that’s particularly known for reckless driving. (Fox 6)
• Madison’s BCycle bikeshare is adding 110 new e-bikes at 20 new stations, thanks to a Wisconsin DOT grant. (WKOW)
• Milwaukee Avenue is Chicago’s most dangerous road for cyclists. (Chicago Magazine)
• St. Paul poets have a chance for their words to be immortalized in concrete as the city prepares to fix 10 miles of sidewalks this summer. (Pioneer Press)

One of America’s most infamous highway expansion projects is steamrolling ahead after a civil rights lawsuit brought it to a two-year pause — and experts say it’s unlikely to be stopped again unless fundamental changes happen in Congress and the Texas DOT.

Last week, the Texas Department of Transportation announced that it had reached an agreement with the Federal Highway Administration to resume work on the $9-billion North Houston Highway Improvement Project, which will rebuild and expand the aging Interstate 45 and other highways throughout the Bayou City’s downtown core — and displace over a thousand residents and more than 300 businesses in predominantly BIPOC communities.

As a concession, the agency promised to evaluate the possibility of reducing the highway’s footprint where “reasonable” — which some advocates say means it’s unlikely to be reduced at all — and committed to twice-annual public engagement meetings, a modest 11-percent increase in funding for affordable housing, and unspecified “parks, open space, trails, pedestrian and bicycle facilities.” It also includes funding for four highway “caps,” but notably, no money to build anything on top of them.

Advocates slammed the decision, pointing out that none of those commitments will fundamentally change the damaging impact that the expansion will have on Houston, nor will it deliver on the congestion and climate promises that the agency has claimed.

“It just means they’re going to follow the widely accepted best practices, which are terrible,” said Steve Davis, associated vice president for transportation strategy at Transportation for America. “For instance, TxDOT will provide the community with an open forum to provide feedback — feedback which they may do nothing with. There are some important concessions in here, and the deal is better than it was, but these are very small wins.”

6/ Short answer: Nothing.

TxDOT has only committed to…"evaluating reasonable opportunities to reduce the project footprint…" but ONLY if they would "not compromise the integrity and functionality of the purpose and need…" Welp. pic.twitter.com/ea6fmx4YYl

— Kevin DeGood (@kevin_degood) March 10, 2023

Despite widespread celebration when the I-45 initiative was brought to a standstill in early 2021, many advocates privately believed it was only a matter of time before it rose from the dead.

“This is a project that has always felt sort of inevitable,” said Joe Cutrufo, executive director of Bike Houston. “It was disappointing, though, to see U.S. DOT let this move forward, especially given everything we’ve heard from Secretary [Pete] Buttigieg since he’s entered office about how the days of dividing neighborhoods with wider and wider roads are over, and we’re bringing this era of ever-expanding highways to a close. … That isn’t happening in Houston.”

Davis added that at the end of the day, Buttigieg and his colleagues don’t really have much of a say in whether bad highway projects go forward — because under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Congress guaranteed states the right to build pretty much whatever they want with the bill’s $110 billion in funding. That money will distributed over five years according to a formula, rather than based on the U.S. DOT’s discretion, and can be used on new lanes even when states have existing roads that are badly in need of repair or life-saving redesigns.

“When states follow the widely-accepted standard measures and models, FHWA really has no substantial power to stand in their way,” he said. “[That’s true] even when we know that their project is destructive, that it will increase emissions, that it will disconnect communities and primarily serve the needs of people who move through a place over the needs of the people who live there.”

Houston Advocates Slam TxDOT For ‘Deliberately’ Ignoring Highway’s Racist Impacts

There is often a fierce backlash when the federal Department of Transportation merely suggests that states hold themselves to a higher standard, Davis added.

Just days before the Houston agreement was announced, the agency conceded that it had no choice but to revise a non-binding guidance memo that asked, but did not require, states to prioritize roadway repair over construction, prompting fury from Republican lawmakers and an investigation from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office.

That investigation delivered what Davis called a “surprising and unorthodox” conclusion that the FHWA’s mild memo could be interpreted as carrying the force of a rule, and had to be thrown out — reifying a federal transportation culture that Davis characterizes as “essentially a block grant program” to states that may not share the administration’s priorities. In a state like Texas, whose oversight board has deep ties to the auto and fossil fuel industries and whose legislature is currently exploring a bill to make road diets illegal, that means projects like I-45 are hard to beat.

“Until something fundamentally changes with the program, highway expansions are going to continue to happen,” Davis adds. “States are going to be free to ignore repair needs, ignore induced demand, ignore emissions, and displace people. That’s just the hard truth of things right now.”

It didn’t age wellhttps://t.co/QKlRRGx9aj

— Allyn West (@allynwest) March 9, 2023

Despite their big setback, Houstonians aren’t giving up hope — and freeway fighters in other communities shouldn’t, either.

Locally, Cutrufo pointed to a new effort to secure Houston a proportional voting share at the local metropolitan planning organization that helped ram the I-45 through despite residents’ objections. The megacity and its surrounding county are home to 60 percent of the population governed by the Houston-Galveston Area Council of Governments, but have just 17.9 percent of the voting power on the board.

“At the city and county level, we hear a lot about transit, walking and biking; we see a lot of people investing a lot into projects that are making our streets safer and making it easier and more attractive for people to get around without a car,” Cutrufo added. “But there’s a clear disconnect with what’s happening at TxDOT that needs to change.”

Davis says advocates in other communities should be pressuring for similar structural changes from their own state and regional policymakers, including pressuring them to adopt progressive standards that would force the DOT to cancel bad highway projects before they begin. Colorado did just that twice over following the adoption of a 2021 emissions rule, prompting calls from advocates across the country for their own states to follow suit.

Mile-High City Halts Two Highway Expansions — And Gives the Money to Transit Instead

Even if states don’t heed those calls, though, Davis says U.S. DOT does have some power to nudge transportation leaders in a more sustainable direction. That might include requiring states to incorporate induced demand into their planning, or to dump the use of “value of time” metrics that experts say misleadingly inflate the economic value of highway expansions.

Until those things happen, though, sustainable transportation advocates would be wise to take note of what happened in Houston, and start exploring new strategies to defeat bad highways — no matter what Washington is saying.

“The lesson here is, Secretary Pete is not going to come in and save the day,” added Cutrufo. “And he probably isn’t capable of saving the day.”

• People are more likely to exercise if they have access to safe bike and pedestrian infrastructure. (Journal of Transport and Health)
• If you want people to walk and bike more, get rid of street parking (Momentum Mag) and, in general, don’t let cars dominate curb space (Smart Cities Dive).
• Robust transit is vital to Cleveland’s growth. (Crain’s)
• Bay Area Rapid Transit is suffering from lost ridership more than most transit agencies because it’s always been so dependent on farebox revenue. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Some Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority officials are resigning themselves to the possibility that transit ridership will never fully recover. (Commonwealth)
• Amtrak is studying passenger rail service along I-20 between Dallas and Meridian, Mississippi. (Associated Press)
• A new bridge over the Columbia River connecting Washington and Oregon will cost just $500 million, but the whole project is 15 times that amount because it’s really a freeway widening project in disguise. (City Observatory)
• An Oregon bill would let schools use their transportation budgets for things other than buses, like organizing mass bike rides and paying crossing guards. (KGW)
• The L.A. Metro gave 10 million free rides to K-12 and community college students over the past eight months through its GoPass program. (The Source)
• Could New Orleans-style vintage streetcars help the Atlanta streetcar line boost its ridership? (Urbanize Atlanta) After all, in Baltimore you can just find them in the woods (Banner).
• Here’s a nice daylong bike ride to take if you live in Charlotte. (Axios)
• Jakarta has gotten so polluted and congested that Indonesia is building a brand-new capital. (PBS)
• The name of Switzerland’s new high-speed train don’t impress me much. (Jalopnik)