President Biden says he’s taking action to cool deadly urban heat islands — which are located disproportionately in communities of color — but advocates say he isn’t doing enough to address one of the phenomenon’s biggest root causes: America’s overbuilt, auto-centric road network.

Following a summer that broke heat records last set during the Dust Bowl, the White House announced on Monday the launch of an interagency effort aimed “to respond to extreme heat that threatens the lives and livelihoods of Americans.”

Those threats aren’t distributed equally. A damning new Environmental Protection Agency report recently found that as climate change gets worse, Black and African-American residents are 43 percent more likely than Whites to live in neighborhoods projected to experience annual increases of up to 187 additional premature deaths per 100,000 residents, mostly due to heat stroke, asthma, and other heat and pollution-related health conditions.

Scientists agree that two of the largest drivers of urban heat island effects are excessive use asphalt — like parking lots and wide, car-focused roads deliberately denuded of cooling infrastructure like trees on behalf of drivers — and excessive waste heat from vehicles themselves.

“The heat emanating from cars every day contributes to a vicious cycle: as the city gets hotter, building air conditioners work harder, pumping even more heat outdoors, and the pavement of parking lots and highways retains all that warmth for hours after the sun goes down,” Streetsblog MASS reported earlier this year about waste heat’s effect on Boston. “Even electric cars end up converting kinetic energy into waste heat as they move about a city, and their drivers will still demand vast, sun-baked plains of asphalt to drive and park on.”

But the White House failed to explicitly name autocentricity as one of the most critical drivers of the national heat island epidemic — and the strategies Biden proposed to beat the heat largely fail to decenter the automobile in any meaningful way.

Among those initiatives were new guidelines for cities seeking to plant urban forests, a new interagency working group that will facilitate new data-sharing efforts around the problem, and even a new federal competition to find new “new ways to protect people at risk of heat-related illness or death during extreme heat.”

But the list conspicuously omitted powerful (and proven) mitigation strategies that inconvenience drivers, like taking steps to reduce vehicle miles traveled — and it didn’t announce any new initiatives to give communities and their residents more money to implement the solutions it was recommending, either. Even the most ambitious city greening initiatives, for instance, are likely to fail without robust investment, as researchers in Pittsburgh found in a recent study. Forestry Department officials revealed that while 74 percent of residents support expanding the tree canopy, only 17 percent of department funds actually went to planting new trees — a rate that was barely sufficient to replace trees that had recently died.

on top of removing space for cars in cities, we also need to invest heavily in blue-green streets. #SpongeCityhttps://t.co/K37IlcldAQ pic.twitter.com/jj37zF3RoU

— wohnBAUMoffensive (@holz_bau) August 25, 2021

Of course, toothless guidelines and federal clearinghouses can only do so much to restructure the way U.S. communities are built — especially considering how legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which would provide a historic $110 billion in federal funds for new roads over five years, might incentivize cities to undercut all these efforts to cool America’s urban cores.

Until the federal government takes radical action to finally stop pouring taxpayer dollars into the creation of new urban heat islands, local efforts to mitigate the ones they’ve already got may be a losing battle — and vulnerable road users will be the ones left out to fry.

The Biden infrastructure package isn’t the only pending federal legislation that could have a big effect on the lives of New Yorkers. Majority Leader Schumer and Congress must enact another important initiative that could make a huge difference in how we commute: the Bicycle Commuter Act.

The act is a pre-tax incentive for people to bike to work that could encourage thousands of New Yorkers to ditch their cars for greener, safer transportation — leading to less traffic congestion on city streets, improved air quality, and more New Yorkers living a healthier lifestyle.

The act would extend to employees who bike to work the commuter benefits that are already offered to bus and subway riders and to drivers and to drivers in the form of prepaid cards, transit passes, commuter-check vouchers, and smart cards. It would provide as much as $81 a month for individuals to cover costs associated with commuting, and could be spent flexibly between modes. The bill would cover bikeshare rides and memberships (including for low-speed e-bikes) and would allow bike commuters to pair those subsidies with their other transit benefits, addressing the first-and-last miles of many commutes. It also would eliminate time-consuming receipt- and record-keeping requirements associated with the previous version of the benefit that required commuters to save receipts and report their expenses in order to get reimbursed.

Many studies have found that bike commuting is associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. In New York City, before the pandemic, 1.6 million residents rode a bike at least occasionally, and 800,000 did so regularly. Those numbers grew by a whopping 26 percent from 2012 through 2017. The number of New Yorkers who develop cardiovascular disease and cancer could decline if the “#BikeBoom” that we have seen during the last year and a half continues — and we expect it will.

One only needs to look at Citi Bike ridership data from this year: 2021 has seen daily ridership shatter records several times, with growth of more than 20 percent above previous years. This month, responding to the rapid growth in cycling, the Department of Transportation unveiled a protected bike lane on the Brooklyn Bridge — the first major reconfiguration of the bridge since trolleys were removed in 1950 — which is designed to handle more than 60,000 daily cyclists. The city also plans to build a protected bike lane on the Queensboro Bridge, which connects Manhattan and Queens. The Bicycle Commuter Act is an unassuming, but powerful tool to raise the tide even higher.

Incorporating the Bicycle Commuter Act into the reconciliation package also would improve community health and environmental equity in our city and others. A 2017 study published in the medical journal BMJ found that places that have invested in bicycling infrastructure have seen dramatic improvements in health indicators and major cost savings in health care.

There are substantial economic benefits for underserved communities, too. In New York city, median incomes of zero-car households are lower than overall median incomes, while median incomes of households with vehicles are higher than overall median incomes in all five boroughs. Bicycle ownership and bikeshare membership are much less costly than owning a car. Both can help low-income families in neighborhoods that lack subway access, by opening up job opportunities and shortening commute times.

Replacing car trips with bicycling trips also could help states like New York meet transportation goals and performance measures, such as reducing congestion and air pollution. In 2017, the U.S. Department of Transportation released performance measures requiring states to set congestion-mitigation and air-quality goals that necessitate shifting trips away from single-occupancy motor vehicles. Offering incentives for employees to bike to work some or all of the time would help states meet both sets of goals. Now is the time to encourage the use of alternative travel options; many people returning to work in downtown offices are looking for opportunities to reshape their commutes in a greener, healthier direction.

Moreover, as the COVID-19 Delta variant has extended the pandemic, bicycling has proved even more important for maintaining social distancing and preventing driving. Indeed, the CDC recently listed biking as a preferred mode of commuting during the COVID-19 crisis.

As we look to enact many other large-scale transportation and infrastructure projects in order to ensure a cleaner, more equitable transportation future, we must not lose sight of the low-hanging fruit. Congress and Schumer must deliver for New Yorkers and city dwellers around the nation by making it easier and more economical to commute on a two hundred-year-old device that is proving more important than ever: the bicycle.

Renae Reynolds (@Renae_Rey) is the executive director of Tri-State Transportation Campaign, a 28-year-old advocacy organization that fights for an equitable, safe, multi-modal transportation network that provides options and supports the economies of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

U.S. motorists may soon be eligible for up to $12,500 in grants to purchase electric cars, thanks to a new fund folded into the Democrats’ reconciliation package — but benefits for e-bike purchasers may be far more modest and aggressively means-tested, unless advocates speak out.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee announced last week that it had passed its portion of the Democrats’ $3.5-trillion budget measure, including $4-billion for incentives for electric cars. If it passes, it would be among the largest federal investments into vehicle electrification ever.

But notably absent from that bill was a fund earmarked specifically for the purchase of the type of electric vehicles that experts agree have the strongest potential to curb the impacts of climate change at the local scale: the revolutionary electric bicycle.

Advocates were careful to note that the omission doesn’t necessarily mean that e-bikes would be left out the final package, because a range of Congressional committees are still hashing out their own portions of the mega-bill. But some fear the scale of the benefit is in danger of being diminished, especially if centrist Democrats insist on downsizing the package — and if the aggressive means-testing being proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee on the so-far theoretical incentive are any indication, it’s not looking good.

Here’s where things stand right now.

What’s in it for drivers

The $4 billion in EV incentives outlined in the committee’s bill wouldn’t be an unrestricted free-for-all — and most advocates think the proposed program would make a meaningful yet reasonable investment into cleaning up the fleet.

“It’s a big step down from [the $100 billion in consumer EV credits proposed under] Biden’s American Jobs Plan, but that’s not all bad,” said Benito Pérez, policy director for Transportation for America. “You have to remember that EV incentives weren’t in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill at all. The committees said, ‘Okay, we at least need to make another, incremental step towards achieving this important priority.'”

In separate legislation released in early September, the House Ways and Means Committee outlined the guardrails that would be placed around the credits, which would range from $4,000 to $12,500 depending on the age and battery capacity of the vehicle, with extra money given for the purchase of cars manufactured in the U.S. or by union crews. Drivers who maximize their credit would get $4,500 more than the $7,500 they get from the feds right now.

New House-Proposed EV Incentives Benefit Lobbyists, Not The American Taxpayer https://t.co/bzfx1bPiiO

— CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) September 14, 2021

The committee also set a generous cap on the cost of qualified vehicles — the $80,000 Electric Hummer SUV, for instance, is a little beyond the $69,000 max price for that vehicle class, though pick-up trucks priced up to a staggering $74,000 would be fair game — while shrinking the benefit gradually for single-income households with an adjusted gross income of $400,000 or more, with higher caps for married couples.

Estimates aren’t in yet on how many gas-powered cars this program might take off the road, exactly, but it’s safe to say the number could fall anywhere between 320,000 and 1 million — a sliver of the staggering 280 million cars in America’s bloated private vehicle fleet.

The bill also includes at least $11 billion in funds to electrify buses, trucks, and government-owned cars, with billions earmarked specifically for vehicles that will run primarily in low-income and highly polluted communities, and $3 billion for charging infrastructure at publicly accessible locations, at least a quarter of which will be reserved for disadvantaged neighborhoods.

What’s in it for cyclists

E-bikes don’t yet have a dedicated fund in the reconciliation package — but there are already have some pretty strict rules about how those hypothetical funds would be spent.

In the same House Ways and Means committee report, legislators slashed the refundable tax credit proposed in the popular E-Bike Act from 30 percent of the bike’s purchase price to just 15 percent, capped the maximum credit at $1,500, and disqualified those who would buy a vehicle costing more than $8,000 from participating in the program at all.

Worse, the income limits are far stricter on the e-bike program, with credits beginning to phase out at $75,000 of adjusted gross income for singles — an amount that’s less than a quarter of the income limit for a single driver.

Or, to put a finer point on it: a single driver making an adjusted income of $400,000 — nine times the U.S. median AGI — could get a $12,500 discount on a $68,998 SUV. But no one in America, no matter his or her income, will qualify for a credit for an $8,001 e-cargo bike to replace that SUV.

This is why I don't like a limit on the price of qualifying e-bikes for the e-bike tax credit

This bike is >$8k (https://t.co/IAeeubLbw4) and excluded under current language: https://t.co/9Mxbwe0vyS

Credit is capped at $1,500, why does it matter if an e-bike costs more? https://t.co/8DYdAUvdKQ

— Ken McLeod ???? (@Kenmcld) September 17, 2021

In an ironic twist, advocates suspect that committee’s strict new rules may have to do with recent federal estimates that projected that the new e-bike incentive would cost the government $7.4 billion over 10 years, compared to $15.6 billion for the super-charged e-car incentives — meaning the bike program would be too popular to properly fund. (The report does not calculate the myriad costs to the government that would be recouped by replacing replacing car trips with e-bike journeys.)

“Right now, we’re advocating for a return to the 30-percent credit, even if that means reducing the period for which the credit would be available — because if it succeeds, [lawmakers] can always renew it,” said Ken McLeod, policy director for the League of American Bicyclists. “Particularly for people who are earning a lower income, that difference between 15 and 30 percent is really substantial. But if we can get this passed at that higher level, we think [lawmakers] will see the value of this program and build the case for extending it.”

McLeod also praised the Committee’s recommendation to reinstate the bicycle commuter benefit that was suspended during the Trump administration and expand it from $20 per month to $52.50. But he’s frustrated that the proposal didn’t go further — or include purchase incentives for bikes that run on people-power alone.

“I love that we’re getting an electric bike tax credit, but we don’t have the same thing for acoustic bikes,” added McLeod. “Everything we’ve hard from legislators is, basically, that research shows that e-bikes are much more likely to replace car trips. But [increasing the fleet of] normal bikes carries all the same benefits — safer roads, cleaner skies, more people who can stop in at their local shops. We really should do both.”

Overblown reports about crime and COVID-19 spread are scaring Americans away from public transit. (Vice)

The bipartisan infrastructure bill’s funding for climate and transportation equity is the most significant transportation investment since the interstate highway system (NRDC). However, it’s now threatened by West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the moderate Democratic who’s accepted a lot of money from the fossil fuel industry and now wants to hold up the related $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill (The Hill; New York Times).

In writing the reconciliation bill, a House committee cut tax credits for e-bikes in half. (Bicycle Retailer)

To reach low-income communities, conversations around electric vehicles have to include buses and bikes, as well as the used-car market. (Smart Cities Dive)

General Motors warning owners of the explosion-prone Chevrolet Bolt EV to keep them at least 50 feet away from other cars in parking decks. (Detroit News)

A new report found that Boston’s transit agency must find new sources of revenue or accept service cuts that would exacerbate inequality and derail the region’s economy. (WBUR)

The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority may have to scrap plans for a new commuter rail line because a freight hauler won’t let it use its tracks. (AJC)

The Pittsburgh Port Authority is moving ahead with construction of a $230 million bus rapid transit line, as well as a 25-year plan to transform the city’s transit system. (Post-Gazette)

In hopes of drawing more riders, Philadelphia transit agency SEPTA is overhauling its notoriously confusing system with new route names and signage. (Bloomberg)

Tampa-area leaders say a Clearwater transit hub is Pinellas County, Florida’s most important transportation project, and all they need is a $25 million federal grant. (Tampa Bay Times)

Portland is preparing new design guidelines for pedestrian infrastructure. (Bike Portland)

KXAN interviewed Austin’s transportation director about what the city is doing to stop speeding drivers.

This is the fourth bout in our competition to find America’s Most Toxic Car Ad. Don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of this post to vote by the end of the day Wednesday. Also, check out the results in our previous contest (two deeply sexist ads for  the same Chevy truck), our Dodge Demon vs. Dodge Hellcat/Viper contest and the inevitable Hummer showdown.

We can’t talk about toxic car ads without talking about all the ways that cars literally toxify our communities — and yes, that includes some of the relatively “greener” models, too.

That’s why today, we’re digging into two commercials that make their drivers feel good about polluting just a tiny bit less than their neighbor, while conveniently forgetting to mention all the other ways that their vehicles are still poisoning their environment, even if they don’t have a tailpipe. (Though in this case, both of them do.)

The Mazda CX-5

We had to watch a whole lot of SUVs speeding through inexplicably vacant downtown areas as we combed through the submissions for this context…but there’s something about seeing the same car zip through a road paved straight through a Truffula tree forest that just hits a little different.

This 2013 Mazda ad was one of the most-submitted entries to this contest, and back when it was first released in tandem with the animated movie edition of The Lorax, (whose sunny CGI is featured throughout this commercial), it was definitely one of the most blogged-about commercials around.

Then-Streetsblog NYC editor (now Transit Center Comms Director) Ben Fried wrote this memorable summary, for those who can’t stomach watching Dr. Seuss’s environmental classic being hacked up into an ad for a megacar, like so many Truffulas put through the woodchipper to satisfy the consumer public’s bottomless appetite for Thneeds:

“A cobalt blue Mazda CX-5 crossover SUV (26 mpg city/35 highway) coasts along a remarkably roadkill-free asphalt strip through a bucolic landscape of fluffy Truffula trees. Against an audio backdrop of chirping birds, lightly strummed strings, wistful whistling, and angelic harmonies, a narrator asks: ‘Who delivers outstanding fuel efficiency without compromising the joy of driving?’

Not pictured in the ad: The Truffula tree forest that was clear-cut to make way for the four-lane highway the Once-ler built to sell more Thneeds. (Today Mazda CX-5 owners use that highway to get to their outrageously wasteful, greenhouse gas-spewing subdivisions.)

[Also] absent from Universal’s cross-promotions: The hard-to-commodify solutions like walkable neighborhoods, bicycle-safe streets, and transit-oriented development that we’re going to need in order to avert catastrophic climate change.”

But is this bastardization of one of our most beloved childhood fables worse than…whatever in the fresh hell this is?

The ‘Clean Diesel’ Audi A3

While Mazda hoped to make drivers feel a bit less guilty about driving a car whose highway MPG is roughly a tenth of the miles-per-gall0n equivalent of a walker’s measurable energy efficiency, Audi’s approach to greenwashing was a little different. Instead, the German automaker sold its marginally-less-dirty car as an easy way to get the pesky, scolding “green police” off your back, without having to do something hard to help the environment like ride a bike or take a bus (as another infamous Audi ad openly mocked.)

Worse, the German automaker chose to make point with a super-triggering super-cut of literal police conducting brutal raids, arrests, paramilitary surveillance, and other human rights abuses that echo the countless incidents of police murder, brutality and harassment that BIPOC have been subjected to in U.S. communities literally since the dawn of the institution. (Audi probably had an inkling of what collective traumas this imagery might evoke, because all the actors cast as the victims of this abuse are white-presenting … but it still ran the ad during the Super Bowl.)

And all of that is before we even talk about the fact that the police force that patrolled Germany’s streets during the Nazi regime were actually nicknamed the “Green Police,” because of the color of their uniforms.

Here’s how Streetsblog LA editor Damien Newton saw it way back when:

Picture a future where a smiling multi-racial police force, who apparently answers to nobody, moves unchecked through society arresting and detaining people for offenses to the environment. Use plastic bags at the grocers? You’re arrested, frisked, and handcuffed before being frog marched from the store. Set your hot tub at too high a temperature? You’re chased, mostly naked, through your backyard by a hoard of police officers. Sound like a nightmare scenario dreamed up by a conservative talk radio host? Nope, it’s just another greenwashing attempt from the same car company that mocks cyclists, bus riders, pedestrians and people who drive cars run on vegetable oil.

The Audi A3 was one of the many, many so-called Clean Diesel cars that were cited by the Environmental Protection Agency for overstating their emissions-cutting potential, to the point where the company was forced to offer to buy back its cars, and this ad did face its share of backlash. But at least a few journalists at the time still praised it.

It’s time to vote: which bad ad deserves a spot in the quarterfinals?

Polls will remain open until 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Sept. 22.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

No wonder they call it the Great White North.

Last month, I journeyed to Montréal, a city I have visited many times in the last three decades, to see how much progress it has made in reining in the car culture, creating more livable communities, encouraging cycling, making roadways safer and, most important, bringing back freedom to inhabitants long oppressed by car drivers.

The changes are amazing — and they are the subject of two new Streetfilms, my 1,000th and 1,001st of my career. The first one is about open streets. The other is about cycling. Both will make New Yorkers drool … or book tickets.

Of course, Montréal has fewer open streets than New York City does, but the open streets in the Paris of North America are much better. Montréal’s 13 open streets are much longer and operate almost entirely car-free — car-free, meaning no parking, either! — 24 hours a day, all summer long.

“It’s about making the city accessible for everyone,” Montréal’s mayor Valérie Plante told me. “There has to be more room for cyclists and pedestrians, and arts and parklets.”

On Montréal’s open streets, you don’t just see people walking or biking as you see in New York, but also art installations, benches, bioswales, swings (with cupholders!), play areas for kids and bollards to keep out the cars.

Bollards to keep out the cars.

“It just brings so much joy and fun and, of course, safe spaces for our kids,” Plante added.

And local business owners confirm that pedestrianized zones bring in more money for struggling merchants.

A 1.5-mile stretch of Mont Royal Avenue is fully pedestrianized, including some side streets. That’s about the same length as New York’s best open street — 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights — but in New York, the open street is still filled with parked cars and only open between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., limiting what residents can do, how many can do it and how long they can do it for. There’s a movement to make the open street permanent and 24 hours — a position supported by incoming mayor Eric Adams — but opponents in the neighborhood want the open street reduced or even eliminated.

Montréal proves that the real solution should be to double-down on open streets. Barricades keep the cars out — and don’t require a massive volunteer effort. And instead of dismissing older adults’ worries about getting around, the city provides transportation (via pedicabs) for them.

The other film looks at Montreal’s latest bike infrastructure — whose success can be summed up in two comments from residents:

“It fun to feel you’re in a culture that encourages cycling,” one woman told me.

“To walk out onto my street and be safe is just incredible,” said another woman, who added that she had not felt the same feeling in other cities in which she had lived.

The city’s bike network is called REV, which is apparently a play on words because “rêve” means “dream” in French, but for us English speakers, you don’t need a pun to enjoy the “Express Bike Network”: the bike lanes are wider, safer and more connected in Montreal than they are in New York.

And here’s why that matters: “I would never send my kid biking through the city if the REV didn’t exist,” said bike advocate Severine Le Page.

See it all below:

One final note for all us nerds: Make sure you check out the appearance of former Streetsblog contributor Steven Miller in the Montreal open streets video.

Editor’s note: These two films represent the 1,000th and 1,001st mini-documentaries by Streetfilms Director Clarence Eckerson Jr., who has been making these movies since the mid-2000s. It is time for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider Eckerson for a lifetime Oscar. And if they won’t, we will. For the highlights of Eckerson’s long career in fighting to end discrimination against cyclists and pedestrians, and to break the car culture, click here.

• Rep. Peter DeFazio, the chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has a clever plan to boost transit funding in the reconciliation infrastructure bill without violating President Biden’s promise not to revisit line items from the bipartisan bill. (Streetsblog USA)
• New York has joined California in outlawing the sale of gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035. (CBS News)
• About three-quarters of Seattle residents support more funding for transit, according to a new poll. (The Urbanist)
• Transit, environmental and faith groups are joining forces to oppose widening I-94 in Milwaukee. (Wisconsin Public Radio)
• Thanks to low pay, Denver’s Regional Transportation District continues to struggle with hiring enough bus and train drivers to meet the demand for more service as ridership rises. (Colorado Public Radio)
• The Pittsburgh city council gave preliminary approval to new regulations on e-scooters. (WESA)
• St. Paul and Minneapolis are thinking about pairing up on bike-sharing. (Pioneer Press)
• The Atlanta school system is getting electric buses. (Voice)
• Shed a tear for these University of Utah students who can’t find a parking space. (Daily Utah Chronicle)
• In another college town, Gainesville, Florida residents mean business about Vision Zero. (Sun)
• Mayor Anne Hidalgo has liberated Paris from the tyranny of cars (Slate), and now she might do the same for the whole country (Quartz). Viva la France!

This week, we’re joined by Dr. Megan Ryerson, UPS Chair of Transportation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. In this special episode, Ryerson talks about her research on cognitive workload, measuring the stress of cyclists at intersections, transportation during the pandemic, the uneven power dynamics (cars vs. everyone else) in traffic safety, and how the inability to navigate our streets are a form of discrimination.

For those of you who get your news through your eyes and not your ears, there’s an edited transcript below the audio player. If you want a full unedited transcript (with some typos!), click here. If you want to listen, here you go:

Here’s the partial transcript:

Jeff Wood: Let’s talk about drivers — and how a driver’s response sitting inside of a two- or four-ton vehicle differs from, say, the cyclist and pedestrian response. I know that you haven’t done this research yet, but do you think it would be a different response and are we over-designing roads for that car response versus the more vulnerable users’ response.

Dr. Megan Ryerson: Our roadway system and all of the guidelines for how we design roads, are based on driver workload and driver line of sight, right? And so driving simulators and eye-tracking glasses etc are a very common way that we approach road design and road safety. And I think even the Federal Highway Administration and universities have driving simulators and study these in-vehicle experience.

Like you said, when you’re driving a two-ton vehicle, your mistakes have significant implications. And you know, when you’re driving a simulator, they don’t, and you can try out other things. All of our roadway design guidance is based on driver line of sight and what a driver can see. And really all about the driver experience. And so if we’re focused on the driver experience, then absolutely we’re over-designing roads to make sure drivers are comfortable and their workload isn’t too high, right?

What makes your workload high? Narrow lanes, right? A lots of different pedestrian, cyclists, and so on. And it makes you go a lot slower. Right? And, you know, when we focus on things like minimizing driver workload, we have wider lanes, right, or no cyclists, or cyclists allowed only on the side or very controlled access for pedestrians and so on. And it’s led to this roadway system that focuses on increasing the driver’s ability to see the cyclist and that’s it — the design of this bike lane helps the drivers see the cyclist like this, right?

So no, it’s not about the cyclist’s experience. It’s about the driver not hitting into the cyclist because they can see them. And that’s certainly an important aspect of safety. I certainly want that to be considered, but it shouldn’t be the only thing that is considered, right? Because then automatically the cyclists are the vulnerable ones that need to be responsible for their own safety. And we just need to make sure the driver can see the cyclist rather than saying, “Well, if the roads are more narrow and the drivers will go slower, it will naturally reduce our likelihood of an accident” and so on.

Wood: It’s so interesting because you kind of have to put yourself in the shoes of the vehicle or mode of travel. So if you’re in a car, you want to increase the amount of workload because you want people to slow down. I mean, we know this from narrow streets, the way, you know, in the older parts of Philadelphia, I’m sure there’s many cobblestones and other places and you know, that people go slow. Whereas cyclists, you’re trying to kind of reduce the workload because you are trying to be protective, but also have safety involved. And that changes the paradigm of how we design streets and roads as you mentioned, how would you kind of redesign a safety agenda around those specific ideas, such that we’re actually focused on the results of better safety looking at all those variables, rather than just, like you said, the line of sight for automobile users. What would be the first thing that you did or what would be a safety agenda that you would design using this information that you have?

Ryerson: The first order of business would be including workload and stress maps for pedestrians and cyclists, in addition to crash maps and really thinking about what are the segments of roadways where non-motorized modes (cyclists, pedestrians) are having their most stressful moments, and layer that on top. I really like what you said about how we want to decrease workload for cyclists and pedestrians, and increasing the workload for drivers because then they pay more attention.

So if we have maps of high workload for non-motorized users, for pedestrians and cyclists, can we then look at those segments of roads and see how we can increase the workload for drivers? Can we make the lanes narrower here? Can we add protection to this bike lane and, you know, physically restricted area that sends that signal to drivers to be more careful. Can we, you know, bump out the curves, all of the things that are in the NACTO guide that slow down traffic because they cause the driver to have to be more aware, right?

So it’s really a linking of where are the locations that are inciting stress and workload for our most vulnerable users. And how can we design interventions that reduce their workload. And part of reducing that workload is significantly slowing drivers speed and increasing driver awareness. When I see a driver on their cell phone, which I live in Philadelphia is nine out of 10 drivers. I think about workload a lot, because I think this driving task is so easy for you, that you can look at your phone and it shouldn’t be, it should be more aware for sure.

But if they’re only concerned about their own personal safety, well, they feel like they can, this is an extra thing they can add into their workload mix. That’s a real problem, right? That they have that much mental capacity while they’re driving to look at a phone. And so we need to think about how are we designing our roads, such that they command the attention of the drivers, because they’re not going to see that cyclist, even if the site distance is good, if they’re on their phone, because it’s so easy to drive down this road.

• The U.S. must start prioritizing safety in designing and building roads and shift away from the emphasize on moving goods and people efficiently, says the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, advocating a system that minimizes crashes instead of relying on drivers not to make mistakes. (Smart Cities Dive)
• The American Public Transit Association supports a House version of the infrastructure bill adding $10 billion in funding to transit and $10 billion for high-speed rail (Transportation Today). Progressive Democrats want the transit funding, plus $20 billion for shared modes, all taken from $60 billion earmarked for electric vehicles, which they argue aren’t up to the task of meeting climate goals (Streetsblog USA).
• Since 2000, more than 1,500 U.S. communities have adopted Complete Streets. (Smart Growth America)
• The pandemic has made it even more important for transit agencies to listen to passengers. (The City Fix)
• The University of New Mexico is researching sidewalk materials that are more sustainable and retain less heat than concrete.
• A passenger who was in the car when a Kalamazoo Uber driver was about to start a mass shooting spree in 2016 has filed a lawsuit alleging that the company could have stopped the killer. The passenger says he tried to tell Uber about Jason Dalton’s reckless driving but it never deactivated him from the app per policy. (WOOD)
• With new pro-transit members, the Phoenix City Council could revive plans for a light rail line it scuttled in 2018 in the face of opposition from businesses. (New Times)
• A hundred years ago, Spokane merchants were angry about a utility company’s plans to abandon streetcar lines. (Spokesman-Review)
• Portland is lowering the speed limit on North Halsey, but that doesn’t change the fact that the street it built like a drag strip (Willamette Week). Meanwhile, Portland transit agency TriMet’s Red Line will be extended (Hillsboro News Times)
• Barcelona is giving free transit passes to residents who give up their cars. (Eltis)

David Shorr serves as an alderperson on the city council in Stevens Point, Wisconsin and was at the center of a rancorous battle over a road diet on Stanley Street for his first two years in office. He and his co-author, Kathleen Sullivan, offered this list of lessons learned for communities across the country engaged in similar conflicts. 

There are countless articles about why road diets are so controversial US communities, but fewer resources on how to actually puncture the political and cultural arguments that often shape the debate.

In our latest paper, we argue that in most cases, we must treat such conflicts as a political obstacle to be overcome, rather than substantive concerns that can be addressed via public engagement and bridge-building. 

Here are the seven key takeaways from our case study of the Stanley Street road diet in Stevens Point. 

1. A Complete Streets plan ? community support for complete streets 

Despite the contentious battle over slimming down Stanley Street, some might be surprised to learn that Stevens Point already had many of the key markers of a bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly community: a detailed county bike-ped plan; League of American Bicyclists bronze status; a declared commitment to Vision Zero; and an approved $400,000 TAP grant for 13 miles of new bicycle infrastructure street markings. But as David quickly learned, these indicators were deceptive — not signs the whole community was actually ready to divvy up the right of way for the benefit of all users. The real test came when we actually challenged car-dominance by redesigning a main arterial like Stanley Street, whose re-striping debated in the community for two full years even after the Transportation Alternatives grant with much more extensive changes had been approved unanimously by the council. 

2. Recognize when you need a ‘policy change through perseverance’ strategy

Road diet debates often run so hot because they’ve become proxies for local community attitudes about broader forces of societal change. For the most rabid opponents of road diets lane conversion proposals serve as convenient symbols of change rather than genuine threats or disruptions to their lives. As a result, they’re highly unlikely to be persuaded or mollified.

In this situation, the only course left to advocates is what we call a “policy change through perseverance” strategy: assembling a persuasive case, creating policy momentum, and pushing through the resistance all the way to the finish line.

Here are four signs that your battle could benefit from a perseverance strategy:

• Opponents who inflate their political strength through hyperbolic critiques, bold claims about general public sentiment, and having a high profile in the debate.
• A base of support visible and active enough to undercut their claims about the unpopularity of the proposed change, ready to mobilize for key deliberations and votes.
• A solid core of advocates as well as elected decision-maker champions to press the case all the way to the finish line.
• A strong substantive case to refute the counter-advocacy’s caricature of what advocates are proposing.

3. Always name your opponents’ game

Our interest in this advocacy approach led us to explore a range of literature on counter-advocacy and strong practices for how to deal with opponents. One resource, from the University of Kansas Center for Community Health and Development, recommended that advocates not only consistently push back against their opponents’ messages, but also highlight whichever underlying gambit they’re using to seek advantage.

In the Stanley Street case, for instance, the mayor of Stevens Point tried to short-circuit the previous 18 months’ deliberation with an alternative proposal just weeks before the council was to make its decision. David only learned of the University of Kansas framework much later, but his response was right out of its playbook: He insisted that despite the mayor’s attempt to shift the agenda, the road diet was still the question on the table.

4. Expect opponents to be loud and inconsistent — but their bark is worse than their bite

The Stanley Street road diet scrambled typical the political/partisan divides — as local issues often do. David and his city council colleagues heard skeptical views from left, right, and center. But it was the most strident opponents whose voices drowned out the others, and they often echoed the populism of recent times.

Most telling was their claim that the importance of maintaining road space for drivers was so widely supported that it didn’t even need to be debated. As the battle dragged on, the opposition made countless statements at public meetings, collected loads of petition signatures, and rallied endless Facebook commenters to speak out — and then pointed to these ‘wins’ as they criticized road diet supporters for continuing to push the proposal rather than giving up the fight.

But ultimately, the loudest opponents’ posturing as self-appointed spokespeople for majority was revealed as hollow. Despite the opposition’s boisterous displays of emphemeral “support,” not one of the anti-road diet candidates in Stevens Point who later ran against incumbent councilmembers actually won at the ballot box. With a bark much worse than their bite, they were only able to inflict temporary political pain. 

5. Think before you mobilize

Road diet opponents indeed collected more petitions and put up more yard signs than road diet supporters in Stevens Point — partly because proponents chose not to compete on that turf. A policy through perseverance strategy calls for a more subdued approach, focusing on media work and one-to-one conversations to build a solid base of road diet proponents who will show up when they’re needed most. As one of the advocates we interviewed put it:

When that final Stanley Street meeting was held for the council vote, tons of people came out of the woodwork in support of the road diet [including] people I didn’t know. People I hadn’t even heard of. Some people I did know, but didn’t know they were very adamant about getting a road diet.

6. Be the ones to set the terms of the debate

Whenever proponents of change can manage to set the terms of debate with their preferred framing, the policy battle is partly won. In Stevens Point, advocates posed a simple question to the community— whether Stanley was a highway or a neighborhood street — and made a strong case that the experience of living, walking, and shopping in the neighborhood was more important than the ability to drive through as fast as possible.

When the final public meeting was held and the Council voted, their success in framing the issue was evident in the remarks of community residents and council members alike. Without any coordinated effort, numerous speakers at that meeting highlighted the street-versus-highway theme.

7. Keep your eyes on the other side of the finish line.

If advocates push all the way through to a vote by decisionmakers, they have a good chance of not only achieving the desired outcome but also demonstrating the benefits of road diets.

Despite some opponents’ claims that the complete streets ideas adopted by countless other communities won’t work in their town, most often they do. In Stevens Point, the Stanley Street battle paved the way politically for the TAP grant’s full 13 miles of bicycle infrastructure, and all of that re-striping made good on the community’s commitment to streets that pedestrians, bike users, and drivers can truly share. It also earned the town silver status from the League of American Bicyclists.  As for road diet opponents and their dire predictions, our study found that some of the more honest ones ultimately copped to their error.

Whenever an advocate picks a policy change they want to pursue, it’s always wise to start with an honest assessment of their chances of success and what they’d be up against. The strategy of policy through perseverance offers a way to overcome high-decibel opposition, by not taking their ‘voice of the people’ pose at face value and staying the course. 

David Shorr and Kathleen Sullivan are evaluation consultants who specialize in assessing non-profits’ advocacy and policy change work.

State transportation officials from throughout the Western United States are meeting this week in Utah’s capital for golf outings, work sessions, a pub crawl, dinners and sponsored breaks, and nowhere on the agenda is there a spot for the most pressing issue.

Fittingly, the headquarters of the four days of elbow rubbing and bureaucratic camaraderie is the most dangerous surface street in Salt Lake City, a street owned and operated by the conference host.

State Street, known to transportation officials as US-89, is owned, designed and operated by the Utah Department of Transportation. Even more than other state-owned surface roads in town, State Street is where people walking and biking are most commonly hit by people driving cars.

But that’s not on the agenda for the WASHTO 2021 Conference at the Grand America Hotel, a grandiose building surrounded on three sides by state-owned surface roads where people are frequently hit by people driving cars.

The data is well-known by UDOT, an agency profoundly competent at designing and building car-centric spaces while at the same time ignoring the will of residents asking for safer roads. At the time the conference takes place, the agency will be working on or preparing billions of taxpayer dollars for highway widening across the region.

Notably absent from the agenda is the fact that the state — like others around the country — saw traffic deaths rise during a year that people drove less. (Let that sink in.)

Vehicle crashes are already the leading cause of death among people between the ages of 1-54. Yet when fewer people were on the road, more of them crashed and died on state-owned roads.

That news is often overlooked by residents and unwitting news reporters who focus only on data from interstate highways and spin from public relations people in transportation departments that are remarkably good at deflecting responsibility.

Just this spring, the Salt Lake Tribune happily reported that, while driving fatalities were up in 2020, fewer of them were on highways. The story notably failed to define the word “highway.”

If only they’d asked for the data not included on the news release, they’d have seen that fatal crashes were up on state roads and the state-managed roads that are supported by federal dollars. Just because a road isn’t part of the interstate system doesn’t make it, in the eyes of a state department of transportation, not a highway.

You see, State Street is a state highway. 700 East is a highway. 400 South is a highway. Redwood Road is a highway. These are surface roads, and they’re state highways.

All across town, all across the nation, surface roads that are inherently dangerous and operated for the convenience of suburban car commuters above the safety and wellness of city residents are considered state highways. And they are routinely the most dangerous place

In 2016 and 2017, 38 people walking and 27 people riding bikes were hit by people driving cars on State Street. The next year, two-thirds of Salt Lake City residents asked for safety improvements on State Street, a road with nine lanes of pavement all dedicated to the car.

What changes did UDOT allow? Next to nothing. Two blocks of mainly beautification near Downtown while the rest remains a hostile carscape cutting through the heart of the capital city. Use another street to get around, they said. We need these nine lanes.

Even if the cities these roads divide want to make changes to improve safety, sustainability, beauty and economic activity, they can’t. It is up to the state department of transportation to decide how the road will actually function. And too often, state roads are managed exclusively for the car, all other metrics and users be damned.

Farmland is gobbled up to shave 30 seconds off the commute of a suburban driver. Space that could fit valuable housing is set aside for state routes and land adjacent to it. Roads that are known to be hazardous to life and limb are ignored. Trees are cut down to minimize the objects that motorists might crash into. Sidewalks are kept narrow. Bike lanes and mixed-use trails and paths are not built. The system repeats. The conferences come and go.

Meanwhile, state roads are psychological barriers that create boundaries for daily walking routes, they divide desirable neighborhoods from undesirable ones. They are intentionally designed to repel anyone not in a private vehicle. Level of service for whom?

UDOT and state departments of transportation across the nation would be well suited to listen to residents who are asking for safer streets, but who don’t know where or how to direct their energy to make change.

For a few days next week, the people will be having a ball at the Grand America in Downtown Salt Lake City. Let’s hope they take care when crossing the road before check-in.

Taylor Anderson (@TaylorWAnderson), of Salt Lake City, is co-founder of the streets advocacy group Sweet Streets, a volunteer group working to make Utah’s capital a safer, stronger and more sustainable place.

Streetsblog Chicago co-editor John Greenfield spotted a tweet from Sushil Reddy, whose handle is @SunPedal_Ride, stating that he’s traveling across the country and would be in Chicago soon. As his username suggests, Reddy is riding a bike with a solar powered electric assist. He started the Sun Pedal Ride project to raise awareness of solar energy and sustainable mobility options like e-bikes.

Reddy is no stranger to lengthy solar-powered rides. In 2016 he made the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest journey on an electric bicycle. The 2016 ride with three other individuals was  a little over 4,600 miles through India. Reddy has since done a few other sun-powered rides. There’s been the 2017 SunPedal Ride California, the 2017 SunPedal Ride France, the 2018 SunPedal Ride Iceland, the 2018 SunPedal Ride Bengaluru, and the 2019 SunPedal Ride India in a solar-electric tuk tuk. I met up with Reddy and his riding partner Luis Fourzan to learn about their journey.

Courtney Cobbs: What inspired you to take this ride?

Sushil Reddy: I have an engineering background in solar energy. I wanted to raise awareness on the need for collective efforts to combat climate change. The SunPedal Ride project is an attempt to inspire people to change their individual lifestyle to adopt a more sustainable one.

CC: Very cool. Can you tell me about the set-up of your bike?

SR: I have a long-tail Yuba cargo bike with two 50-watt solar panels. The solar panels add about seventeen pounds. The solar panels provided about thirty miles worth of assistance to the batteries that power the all-Axle Front Hub Motor. The bike has a pedal-assist and throttle function. If the weather is really cloudy, I can always use a wall-charger for the batteries.

CC: How many miles have you ridden so far?

SR: We’d have to calculate all our Strava miles, but I think we’re somewhere around 1,400 miles.

CC: What’s the plan for the ride?

SR: We’ve planned 115 days. Right now we’re close to a month; it will be a month on the 15th. We average around sixty five miles a day. We’re resting for a night here in Chicago and then we’re headed to Minneapolis. Our final destination is Dallas, Texas.

Asked what their experiences have been like on the road, both Reddy and  stated that there have been lots of helpful people. Luis shared a moment when there was a gearing issue with one of the bikes. There was a gearing issue with one of the bikes and a driver shared that they have a rack and could drive them to their destination which was about twenty miles away. In another instance of kindness, a driver pulled over to help them fix a flat. Hotels have been accommodating when it comes to the storage of their bikes and the panels. It doesn’t hurt that Sushil was able to obtain hotel sponsorship for some of their accommodations.

It’s not everyday you come across a set-up like Reddy’s. Hopefully the Sun Pedal ride will inspire some folks to swap some of their car journeys for two wheels. 

If you’d like to keep up with Reddy and Fourzan’s ride, check out the SunPedal Ride website or follow Reddy on Twitter,

For far too long, the rhetoric around mobility in the active transportation field has been deeply rooted in White supremacy, classism, and other intersecting oppressions that violate our fundamental and collective human rights. And yet we still try to build equitable approaches upon this toxic foundation.

This will not work.

We need space to question our language, to disrupt these systems, and most importantly, to uproot what makes us unable to work toward justice.

This was the motivation behind my recent research into how top transportation organizations tend to frame conversations about safety, equity, and policing — and how that language is evolving.  In my paper — which is built upon the concept of coined by Charles T. Brown — I closely analyzed 44 articles and communications published by ten active transportation thought-leaders, before and after George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020.

Ten thought leaders with power and privilege were chosen because of their large outreach and influential advocacy. Most importantly, each organization responded to Floyd’s murder in some capacity. The results of my work were broken down into the three main categories: safety, equity, and police.

Safety

When transportation leaders spoke about safety prior to the murder of George Floyd, they tended to focus on safety performance measures: crashes, injuries or fatalities, trips, and number of people who are physically active on U.S. roads. These are essential, but they do not capture a complete definition of safety, which includes safety from all racist and discriminatory barriers to transportation.

Most organizations also tended to talk about safety for “all” users. Some took care to acknowledge that certain identities are more vulnerable than others because of racism and other targeted oppressions — but some organizations did not.

In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, this rhetoric subtly shifted. Nine out of ten organizations spoke explicitly to safety from police brutality and violence, and they openly condemned acts of racism by police following the events of May 25, 2020.

Many spoke specifically to how the concept of ‘safe streets’ means more than bike lanes and sidewalks, and how no one should fear traffic violence or police harassment and brutality on our streets — a more of expansive definition of safety than had never been so collectively visible in transportation discourse before May 25, 2020.

Mode Equity

Before George Floyd’s murder, most of the organizations in this study alluded to the concept of “mode equity,” which concerns the mobility and modality choices available to different people, distinct from each person’s fundamental right to mobility.

When the language of “mode equity” excludes the intersectional identity of the person who’s moving, though, this rhetoric is dehumanizing, because it works to separate a person’s specific lived experience from the way they choose to move around — even as the realities of systemic racism, police brutality, and other intersecting oppressions have a profound impact on those very mode choices.

After Floyd’s murder, organizations spoke more specifically about the human right to walk or bike without becoming the target of violence from police or other community members — a right which is often denied to our BIPOC communities since the origins of colonialism and slavery in the U.S.

Police

In the first phase of this study, seven of the ten organizations spoke to disparities in traffic enforcement —  and those were the same seven that talked about working with police to end those disparities.

All of these organizations acknowledged there are disparate and harmful impacts on Black communities and other marginalized groups, but none of them expressed an active commitment to working to end police partnerships or to remove police from traffic safety efforts altogether.

Instead, many advocated for “data-driven enforcement” as a politically viable work-around to help diminish these disparities.

Less clear, though, was what specific sorts of enforcement changes this data would actually ‘drive’ — and who gets to make those decisions about the enforcement and policing of our communities.

After Floyd’s murder, only two organizations in my sample — the Safe Routes to School National Partnership and the League of American Bicyclists — wrote explicitly about ending partnerships with police.

Both of these organizations dropped the “E” of enforcement from the “five E’s of Vision Zero” framework that often guides traffic safety advocates, and explicitly stated that enforcement does not equal safety because policing actively puts Black lives at risk and perpetuates white supremacy.

Takeaways and what you can do

As advocates seek to uproot toxic frameworks from their language, here are three takeaways to bear in mind.

1. Be specific about safety from police brutality — and remember that safety is about far more than Complete Streets and sidewalks.

Be intentional and impeccable in how you talk about safety, and fully embrace that safety from police brutality is an essential part of our active transportation work.  Safety, equity, and re-examining the role of police in transportation are intimately intertwined; pretending they are distinct concepts is unacceptable.

Today, almost every active transportation thought leader in this study has explicitly said that safety from police brutality would become a focus of their work. Now, we must hold this industry accountable to keeping that promise.

2. Shift from ‘mode equity’ to ‘transportation rights’

Safe and dignified mobility is a human right, and anything that impedes that right for BIPOC communities and other marginalized groups is a blow to our collective humanity. Police brutality on our streets and sidewalks too often violates or removes the right to walk, bike, drive, and take transit — as well as the right to simply be connected to the world.

To paraphrase Dr. Destiny Thomas, mobility justice is less about mode choice and is more about freedom of movement — and the freedom to navigate space in the absence of racism.

We must utilize the rhetoric of mobility rights because it is far more powerful than any language around ‘modes’ or ‘choices.’

3. Question data-driven enforcement without data justice

Data can be used to oppress, police, and surveil. But it can also be used to heal and bring justice.

Data justice is essential to transportation because we can use it to deeply examine and challenge power and privilege.

As Charles T. Brown emphasizes, to begin to fill that void, we must start disaggregating everything we collect by race and ethnicity. We need new data sets and performance measures that shape our evolving definitions of safety and success.

Until we do this, questioning data-driven enforcement is key. Because of course, pretextual and discretionary stops by police that target Black and low-income communities are examples of “data-driven enforcement strategies,” too.

—

This is not an exhaustive list of every instance of inequitable framing in transportation advocacy circles. But as we work towards true mobility justice, we must make an ongoing commitment to being intentional in how we write and how we speak, and we must recognize how our language choices fundamentally affect how we approach our work.

To be silent about racism in the transportation realm is not just a failure. It is actively violent. We are here to serve our communities and do good, equitable work, and anything less than that in transportation is inexcusable.

Sarah Brown is a researcher at the intersections of mobility and data justice. She previously completed this work as a part of her Master of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently a Transportation Analyst at Kittelson & Associates, Inc. Find her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter at @sarahbrow_nn. 

• California wildfires are a sign that Congress needs to approve a green infrastructure package to combat climate change, President Biden said in Sacramento. (Bloomberg)
• The U.S. doesn’t really need half a million public electric vehicle chargers. (Vice)
• Nobody has figured out a way to get drivers to stop idling their engines. (Jalopnik)
• Exposure to traffic noise raises the risk of dementia, according to a new study. (Medical News Today)
• Georgia Democrats are pushing a bill that would tie transit funding to affordable housing and let transit agencies use federal grants for operating expenses. (Moultrie Observer)
• Elevated cycleways preceded freeways by more than 50 years, but then cars killed them off. (The Drive)
• A Colorado study found that shifting transportation funding from highways to transit, sidewalks and bike projects would bring $40 billion in economic benefits. (Colorado Public Radio)
• Charlotte is looking for a site for a new light rail station. (Observer)
• A week into going fare-free, Alexandria’s transit system is already looking for funding to extend the program. (WUSA)
• Lincoln is projected to get more congested in the next 30 years, and the city doesn’t have enough transportation funding to deal with the issue. (Journal-Star)
• Ordinarily, a bike lane down the middle of the street might seem like a bad idea. But Portland is utilizing them to help cyclists navigate offset intersections where the cross-streets don’t quite match up. (Bike Portland)

Skillful new House legislation that will be folded into the Democrat’s reconciliation package could help restore some of what sustainable transportation advocates lost during the negotiations over the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — without technically breaking President Biden’s promises to the GOP that many thought would shut the door on further money for transit and equity.

Advocates are celebrating new legislation released by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee over the weekend that offers new details about how lawmakers would actually spend some of the transportation dollars included in the Democrats’ $3.5-trillion budget measure — including billions aimed at expanding the mobility of low-income communities without access to cars.

That was a pleasant surprise to transit proponents, who were disappointed by Biden’s promise to the GOP last month that no element of the budget measure, which is expected to pass without Republican support, would restore funding that was cut during Senate negotiations over the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — funds which included unrestricted billions for transit, equity, and more.

And indeed, the T&I committee’s bill technically honors that commitment — by establishing new, highly targeted programs for green mobility, rather than simply increasing allocations to the Federal Transit Administration and other agencies.

That clever workaround was praised by advocates who are eager to see the Democrats make progress on climate change policy before they potentially lose their majority in the midterms.

“The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill only took limited steps to decarbonize transport,” said Ben Crowther, program manager for Congress for the New Urbanism. “This fills some of the most glaring holes in that bill, while also supporting our efforts to build back better for the environment and maintaining our commitment to equity in new ways.”

DeFazio acknowledges that the new program in reconciliation draft linking transit to housing was created specifically to get around Biden's promise not to revisit line items from Senate's infrastructure bill https://t.co/qE9f6M92sB

— Sam Mintz (@samjmintz) September 14, 2021

The bill was undergoing a rigorous committee markup at the time of this writing, but is not expected to change substantially. Here are a few of the highlights from the first draft:

Almost $10 billion for low-income mobility — emphasis on transit

No sector lost more during the negotiations over the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill than transit, which was slashed by $10 billion while leaving road spending intact. The T&I committee’s chunk of the reconciliation package could restore almost all of it, but with a twist: all of the money would be specifically targeted towards improving the mobility of disadvantaged residents who rely on transit most.

The new, $9.9 billion “Affordable Housing Access program” would establish a new grant program aimed at increasing disadvantaged communities’ access to affordable residences, jobs, grocery, medical care, and more, while making funds available for city agencies to increase their operations capacity, rather than simply building new things. The money could also be used to build sidewalks, electrify buses, and more.

“It’s taking that next step, from ‘more transit is good,’ to ‘let’s align our transportation and land use policies to really help people,'” said Crowther. “Basically, it’s become something even more worthy of support,”

Nearly $4B to heal communities destroyed by highways

Advocates slammed the Senate for allowing the popular Reconnecting Communities program to be slashed from $20 billion to Biden’s original American Jobs Plan to just $1 billion in the final reauthorization bill, dashing the hopes of communities across America eager to remove or cap highways that were strategically routed straight into the heart of BIPOC communities. The new bill would restore $3.95 billion to that effort, but it would do so in a novel way: by establishing a new program that expands the eligible uses of the fund to also include things like traffic noise mitigation, heat island effect mitigation, and pollution mitigation, even when it’s not logistically possible to rip a freeway out wholesale.

And it would also set stronger guardrails to ensure these projects don’t displace the very people they’re supposed to protect — or, paradoxically, become yet another vessel for highway expansion.

“This bill has really strong provisions that make sure that communities seeking this funding have anti-displacement measures already in place before they apply, ” said Crowther. “And it also excludes any project that would increase single occupancy vehicle capacity. We’ve already seen several DOTs saying, ‘Hey, maybe if we expand our highway and build a cap at the same time, we can apply for this funding!’ — which is a pretty grim green-washing and equity-washing approach. We don’t want to see that happen.”

$4B to set states straight on curbing emissions

The House T&I committee didn’t just plug the the holes the Senate gouged in its visionary reauthorization bill. It also added a handful of new programs, like the $4-billion “Community Climate Incentives” initiative, which would require states to set performance targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, provide incentives for meeting them, and impose penalties on those who fail to comply — three things it’s hard to believe the U.S. doesn’t already do.

Best of all, it would require $3 billion of that money to be made available as grants directly to “non-state entities” — subverting the highway-focused state departments of transportation that too often stymie progressive local climate efforts.

“This program goes towards several things that we’ve been encouraging the administration to pursue for a long time,” said Benito Pérez, policy director for Transportation for America. “A lot of the worst climate impacts are felt locally, but state DOTs have these entrenched policies and politics — and often, a lot of bureaucracy — that can really dilute the ability of this funding to reach the communities that feel the worst impacts. This gets around that.”

A bunch of new clearinghouses, earmarks, and more

Not everything in the House T&I bill garnered uniform praise from advocates, but that’s mostly because the committee kept a few measures vague. Those mysteries include:

• A $100-million fund to establish a “national clearinghouse for fair and equitable traffic safety enforcement programs” — which could be a game-changer or a step back for the movement to de-emphasize “enforcement” from the five E’s of Vision Zero, depending on what solutions the program platforms.
• An $8-million fund to operate a “national highly automated vehicle and mobility innovation clearinghouse” — again, a controversial allocation, depending on how you feel about AVs.
• A whopping $6 billion for “local transportation priorities,” which could mean literally anything (but probably refers to the earmarks that were axed from the House’s original infrastructure bill, many of which were pretty good for active transportation)
• $10 billion for high speed rail — which sounds whopping, but may not be enough to build much more than California’s long-sought bullet train (but many advocates say could help get the project across the finish line in time for the next reauthorization, when its success can help persuade future lawmakers to fund future projects.

Of course, the biggest mystery of all may be whether centrist Senate Democrats wary of increasing the national debt will allow the massive reconciliation package to pass at all — and how the other transportation dollars in the package will be spent, once the other Congressional committees with a hand in the process finish hammering out their own bills.

But advocates are hopeful that with enough advocate outcry, at least the House T&I bill could have a bright future.

“People should be prepared to fight for this bill, because it’s really a great package of investments,” said Crowther. “This is an opportunity we can’t afford to pass up. Maybe it goes without saying, but contacting your reps right now will go a long way.

Editor’s Note: This is the third match-up in our competition to find America’s Most Toxic Car Ad. In the first round, the Hummer EV narrowly beat out the Hummer H3 to advance to the quarterfinals. Scroll to the bottom to vote for this match-up, and take a moment to vote in our second bout, Dodge Demon vs. Dodge Hellcat/Viper, before polls close at 11:59pm ET on Tuesday. 

Contrary to what the all-powerful truck nut lobby would have you believe, the kind of car you drive (or don’t drive!) connotes literally nothing about your gonads, genitals, or secondary sex characteristics, much less the infinite range of gender expressions and sexual orientations that have existed since the dawn of the species.

Unfortunately, the average American auto ad exec never made it to gender studies 101.

Today, we’re looking at two commercials that harness some of the blandest flavors of heteropatriarchy to shame insecure people into buying death machines — and while these two happen to be from Chevy, most automakers featured in the contest are guilty of it, too.

The Chevrolet Colorado, 2005

We couldn’t possibly sum up what’s wrong with this 2005 Chevy ad better than our submitter, Andrew B., so we’re just going to quote him in full:

Does a man being comfortable with himself and rocking out to a total BOP of a Shania Twain song inflame your lovely mix of misogyny, toxic masculinity, homophobia, and transphobia? The newest innovation from Chevy: a truck cabin big enough for you AND your gay panic.

On a personal note, this is SUCH an early-2000s ad and the kind of thing I just unknowingly internalized as a young queer person. Shit like this made my life so much more difficult, because it told me that my expectation should be that everyone would be uncomfortable with me and that it would be my fault. So much so that it can be leveraged for all-American comedy and selling cars. I NEVER forgot this ad and had a knee-jerk averse reaction to that song for YEARS until the first time I heard it at a gay club and saw the joy that it could bring. Fuck you, Chevrolet.

Andrew isn’t the only one who resents Chevy for normalizing this kind of everyday abuse in a prime-time ad — not to mention forever tainting our associations with what is objectively one of the best karaoke songs of all time for people of all genders. After the spot was nominated for Images in Advertising’s “Clean Up Your Act” award, Chevy pulled it off the air and offered a not-especially-apologetic apology that promised the company would “explore opportunities to market directly to GLBT customers,” and that it was “working to develop better insights into this buyer group.”

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation offered one “better insight” when it pointed out that the company’s recent sponsorship of a nationwide evangelical Christian music and worship tour featuring Pastor Max “Gay-Marriage-is-a-Slippery-Slope-to-Human/Giraffe-Marriage” Lucado as headliner was … not a great start.

But hey, 2005 was more than a decade ago! Surely Chevy has learned the error of its ways!

Yeah, about that…

The Chevrolet Colorado, 2015

This 2015 campaign for the new-and-improved (and-20-percent-heavier) edition of the Chevy Colorado doesn’t scream offensive “no homo” stereotypes quite as explicitly as its 2005 counterpart.

But it’s not that far off.

In the spot, which aired during 50th Superbowl and remained in circulation for at least two years, a focus group of selectively edited everyday Americans are shown photos of the same actor standing in front of two cars: the extremely awesome and tough Chevy Colorado, and a puny sedan for weak emasculated babies.

Then they are asked a series of leading questions about these two drivers — who, once again, are literally the same person.

Who they find more sexually alluring? (All choose the truck driver, including, alarmingly, the focus group composed entirely of children).

Which car would fare better in a zombie apocalypse? (Clearly the truck, which is designed to decimate human bodies, both dead and undead.)

What kind of pet would each driver have? (A truck driver apparently is running an illegal animal trading ring out of his rig, because the focus group says he looks like he’d own a “tarantula,” “rattlesnake,” or at the minimum, a sweet “Timberwolf/Husky” crossbreed. The Sedan driver, meanwhile, looks like the only animals he husbands are …”maybe, like, some birds.”)

Which driver is living and which is “merely existing”? (We blacked out from crushing nihilist depression by this point in the commercial, but we’re guessing the truck wins again.)

Of course, the opinions of the focus group provably say a little more about how toxic car ads like the 2005 Colorado spot have conditioned Americans to think about truck and sedan drivers from the youngest possible age, rather than anything about the drivers themselves. But as critic Derrick Clifton points out in the Mic, the commercial itself also perpetuates that conditioning, among men and people of other genders:

“But attaching value to objects that are marketed as ‘tough’ may influence men to repress their true selves, preventing a healthy range of emotional expressions in favor of consistent roughness and virility,” Clifton writes. This ideal has negative effects on how we view women too. Hegemonic masculinity encourages a static view of men as dominant and women as docile — and heterosexual, of course.”

But whether hegemonic masculinity trumps Shania-fied homophobia is up to you.

It’s time to vote: Which ad deserves to advance to the quarterfinals? Polls are open until Friday, Sept. 15 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

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• House Democrats hope to use the party-line reconciliation bill to add back some of what the Senate cut from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, including $10 billion for transit, $10 billion for high-speed rail, $4 billion to cut climate emissions and $4 billion to remove urban freeways. (Washington Post)
• Safer streets for walking and biking, denser neighborhoods and charging drivers the true cost of parking are three relatively easy ways to reduce our over-reliance on cars. (Vox)
• The oil and gas industry is fighting to preserve tax loopholes for drilling that Democrats want to close to help pay for the reconciliation bill. (E&E News)
• While Oregon transportation officials recently approved an unpopular plan to widen and cap I-5 in Portland’s Rose Quarter, they might have laid the seeds for its demise by raising the estimated cost half a billion dollars. (Willamette Week)
• Detroit announced plans to build 700 speed humps this fall to slow down drivers, in addition to 4,500 already planned. But that still doesn’t meet demand — the city has had 17,000 requests. (News)
• Bay Area Rapid Transit hired a “homeless czar” to assist people who seek shelter on trains. (SFist)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit is now using “fare ambassadors” to conduct fare checks, rather than fare enforcement officers, with a greater emphasis on education and customer service. (Metro Magazine)
• Bird is bringing e-bikes and e-scooters to South Bend. (Tribune)
• In the latest blow to Uber and Lyft’s anti-labor business model, Dutch court ruled that ride-hailing app drivers are employees, not contractors. (Reuters)
• A continent-wide effort is underway in Europe to lower speed limits, saving lives and reducing emissions (Quartz). One such city is Glasgow, which set a Vision Zero goal for 2030 (Cities Today).
• A Swedish company called Polestar is developing an electric scooter/sled thingy for deliveries that can carry up to 400 pounds and fits in a bike lane. (Fast Company)
• Get ready to share the sidewalk with delivery robots. (Next City)

Mass transit must be at the center of America’s strategy to end climate change — and the next spending package needs to devote at least half our transportation dollars to getting people out of cars and onto shared modes, a coalition of lawmakers says.

In an open letter to top officials in Washington, a coalition of 64 House and Senate Democrats urged their colleagues to devote at least $30 billion of the impending $3.5-trillion budget resolution to public transportation agencies. That amount would restore the $10 billion for transit negotiated out of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill — which blue lawmakers hope to pass with GOP support, after which the larger budget measure would be passed by Democrats alone through reconciliation — while also tacking on a whopping additional $20 billion for shared modes.

The authors of the letter said that massive shift has become nothing short of a mandate following a wave of recent climate disasters, citing the destruction of Hurricane Ida, California’s unprecedented wildfires, and historic heatwaves in the Pacific Northwest.

And they also specifically noted that electric car adoption alone would not be up to the task of preventing future tragedies.

“We cannot address the climate crisis in reconciliation without strengthening our public transit networks and bringing them into the 21st century,” the authors wrote. “While we support additional funding for electric vehicles, studies are clear that electric vehicles alone will not allow the United States to meet its climate goals in transportation. We must expand the use of other modes of transportation, especially public transit.”

The signatories also added a specific request that all of the money be sourced from the $60 billion allotment that has been assigned to the House Transportation and Infrastructure under budget measure’s framework, as well from unannounced allocations to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committees — two funds in the still-being-written bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) hinted would heavily favor consumer incentives for electric cars.

Here's the chart Schumer's office sent out on how they'd get to this 45% emissions reduction number. The vast, vast majority comes from reconciliation and a Clean Electricity Payment Program (a CES) + clean energy tax incentives for wind, solar & other renewables. pic.twitter.com/efUNSIHDST

— Ella Nilsen (@ella_nilsen) August 25, 2021

If the progressives’ plea is heard, they’re hopeful that the $30 billion boost could help correct for the shortcomings of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, which would pump billions in unrestricted funds into road expansion across the country — while also expanding access to opportunity for BIPOC communities destroyed during America’s last highway-building sprees.

“We must bring America’s infrastructure into the 21st century and begin to undo decades of disinvestment in communities of color,” said Rep. Chuy García (D-Ill.), the lead signatory on the letter along with Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) and Henry “Hank” Johnson (D-Ga.). “We can’t afford to wait: the transportation sector remains the largest contributor to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and Congress must not lose this unique opportunity to make transformative investments in clean, reliable, and convenient public transportation alternatives.”

Kids today are lazy.

They tap and swipe at their smartphones all day. They hole up in their rooms, playing Fortnite and Minecraft. They don’t go outside. They don’t build things or play sports at the park, or ride their bikes. It’s not like it used to be.

How many times have you heard something like this?

It’s true that kids today do spend an awful lot of time playing video games and looking at screens — as much as eight hours a day for teens, and only slightly less for younger kids. That’s still far less time than adults spend on their devices, by the way.

Let’s put aside whether or not all this screen time is bad for them for now. Let’s imagine what they could be doing instead. We’re going to start with a visualization.

Take a second and think about where you live right now. Think about your street, your yard, your neighborhood, your city. Now, imagine you were a child.

Where would you play? Is there a park or are there woods within walking distance, or would you have to ask your busy parents to drive you there?

Think some more.

Would any of your friends be around to meet you, or would they also be far away, in their own houses, having to ask all their own parents to drive them too?

Let’s say you want to go get ice cream. You’ve got a little pocket change, an allowance. Can you walk, or ride your bike, to a store to pick up some sweets? Or is your home separated from the corner store by miles of serpentine suburban streets and high-speed roads?

Now you’re back as a parent. Would you feel comfortable letting your kid walk or bike to the store alone? Do you think it would be safe?

Many parents don’t, and wouldn’t.

Kids today aren’t lazy. They aren’t addicted to screens, at least not any more than adults. But the way we’ve built our modern environment restricts, with almost authoritarian precision, the ability of kids to do anything independently — including play outside.

Child development experts have known for decades that kids want to be seen as independent. They want to be little adults. Every parent has stories of how their kid tries to emulate what they’re doing, whether it’s talking on the phone, getting dressed, putting on makeup or typing on the computer.

About 52% of families say they live in suburbs, though this definition is a little hazy. Let’s think of the suburb as a car-focused area, usually on the outskirts of a larger city, with houses separated from offices separated from stores by miles and miles of roads. There are few sidewalks, and few bike trails or lanes. There is no real bus or transit system.

All this adds up to a suburban environment that is agonizingly boring to kids — and an area in which it is impossible for them to act on their need to “try out” independence as they get older.

With wide lanes and miles of tract housing between one’s doorstop and a park or shop or school, it’s an environment designed to be driven and only to be driven.

Kids can’t drive. If they want to go anywhere, it means they’ve got to come to mom and dad and ask them for a ride. Over and over and over again.

Parents move to the suburbs because it’s a “safer” area for their kids — but it’s only safer if the kids stay inside all the time, away from the speeding traffic and dangerous roads that characterize almost all suburban neighborhoods. Traffic deaths — and child fatalities — are far more common in suburbs than in cities.

Looking out their window on this hostile landscape, it’s no wonder many kids choose to be independent on their own terms, in virtual worlds, where they can chat and hang out with their friends with no fuss.

To fix this, we need to change the way we think about kids and about our cities. We need to think of kids as full members of society and we need to design our neighborhoods for kids to have full, rich childhoods that let them grow into well-rounded members of our communities.

So what do we do?

We follow three simple steps: Connect the streets, mix the uses, and shrink the schools.

Connect the Streets

Suburban streets follow a hierarchy that makes travel without a car impossible, and dramatically increases congestion. In cities, grid patterns ensure that traffic is distributed evenly. There are many ways to get everywhere, so there is never all that much traffic on any one road. An obstacle like a disabled car on one street simply causes cars to shift to another street.

In suburban areas, streets run wild in every direction. Many of them dead-end. Instead of a distributed grid, streets all empty out onto “collector” streets that must carry all the traffic from everywhere. It’s a system that is impossible to navigate safely without a car — and is woefully inefficient even with a car.

We have to connect our streets so that kids can travel where they want without having to be driven everywhere. Cul-de-sacs and curving dead-end suburban streets must be woven into a network that allows everyone to walk, bike or drive multiple routes to go multiple places.

Mix the Uses

If we treat kids as members of society, we need to give them access to a part of society beyond endless single-family homes. Most suburban areas use a form of zoning known as Euclidean zoning, which strictly separates offices from housing from retail from restaurants from schools and so on. Modern planning has long accepted this idea as misguided (and racist). We must allow uses to nestle against each other again and create fine-grained cities where kids can participate in society.

This doesn’t mean plopping a Circle K next door. But it does mean bringing things closer together where possible, and encouraging businesses like restaurants, grocers, some service and some retail stores to locate close to where people — and kids — actually live, rather than banishing them a ten minute drive down the road.

Shrink the Schools

In the 1930s, there were more than 127,000 separate school districts in the United States, representative of uncountable small neighborhood schools. By the early 2000s, nearly 90% of them had been consolidated.

The push toward consolidation closed thousands of neighborhood schools. The moves aimed to save school districts money by combining resources, but resulted in a perverse outcome: large, crammed school buildings on the outskirts of the city, far beyond walking distance for any child and reachable only through private car. They are usually surrounded by far more parking space than educational space.

Schools must rely on costly busing services that force kids to wake up before sunrise and take a 30 minute ride (at least) from their house to the new school. When they get older, they’ll start driving, because they have no other option, adding to congestion and pollution. Schools need to be smaller and distributed among neighborhoods, where they can serve their historic functions as centers of neighborhood community.

These three steps are simple to remember, but agonizingly difficult to implement. It will take creative thinkers and public leaders across the nation to begin to see the harm the environment we’ve built is doing to kids, and it will take bravery to implement even small changes.

Change can happen though. It does every day. We can join the effort, and we need to.

Scott Berson (@_ScoBerson_) is a community and regional planner in North Carolina with a master’s in community planning and a former reporter for McClatchy newspapers.

This article originally appeared on Medium and is republished with permission from the author.

• There may not be enough skilled workers to build all of the transit projects and other infrastructure in the Biden administration’s plans. (New York Times)
• The Federal Transit Administration is releasing $2.2 billion in competitive grants for transit agencies that need more help with pandemic-related expenses. (Transportation Today)
• The FTA is also asking for input on what criteria the agency should use to decide how to distribute grants. (Human Transit)
• Mobility as a service — the idea of a streamlined system with all modes of transportation available through one app — remains a tantalizing dream. (Cities Today)
• Micromobility companies are emphasizing equity. (TechCrunch)
• Fifty years after the construction of North Charleston freeways displaced Black homes and businesses, residents are still fighting South Carolina DOT highway projects (Washington Post). Sadly, that’s not the only story about the disastrous effects of highway construction on Black communities in the paper recently — The Post also reported on similar projects in Northern Virginia.
• And, The Post interviewed a top federal passenger rail official about plans to improve Amtrak service in the Northeast Corridor.
• With a mayoral election looming, a Cleveland group is pushing candidates to boost funding for transit by taxing parking lots. (Scene)
• Fatalities are up on San Francisco streets, and officials are considering lowering speed limits. (Chronicle)
• Chicago cyclists used their own bodies to form a protected bike lane to illustrate the need for safer bike infrastructure. (5 Chicago)
• Charlotte’s first-ever regional transit plan is scheduled to be released today. (UNC Charlotte Urban Institute)
• Volvo’s Swedish hometown is considering making the city center car-free. (Politico)
• Can you outrun a D.C. Metro train? (DCist)