On Wednesday, Wired published an 1,800-word article devoted to solving the “critical” dilemma of how to keep electric vehicle fleets charged in dense urban areas.

Authors Aarian Marshall and Matt Simon consider a range of strategies to extend the, well, range of the average EV, including classifying EV charging as “a taxpayer-funded public good” that would lead to installing charging stations on public utility poles, convincing apartment developers and managers to install them on existing lots and newly built spaces with publicly subsidized rebates, and converting gas stations to rapid-charging hot spots rather than putting that land to other uses.

Whole paragraphs are devoted to the dangers of “charging deserts,” which the authors fret will leave the poor stranded unless the government subsidizes them on their journey to personally owned electric automobility and all the staggering debt, insurance, and maintenance burdens that come with it. (The average electric vehicle costs $56,437, or more than three times the annual income of a household of two living at the federal poverty line.)

“The goal is clear: Build more chargers,” Marshall and Simon write. “But in dense places, the eternal question is, where?”

For sustainable transportation advocates, the answer may seem pretty obvious: at the bus depot. But the article does not mention electric buses until its very last paragraph, when the authors finally concede that “maybe you don’t have to own an EV to enjoy one.” Walking, biking, and other forms of non-automotive mobility are not mentioned at all, save a one-sentence acknowledgment that putting every American into a car would probably be “dangerous for pedestrians” and “undercut the demand for public transit.” (Spoiler alert: they are already are.)

We don’t just need electric cars, we need fewer cars https://t.co/6WMzBeA28O

To #TransformTransport cities must prioritize sustainable travel by improving infrastructure that supports active mobility solutions, such as cycling and walking. pic.twitter.com/EwNyjmEYEX

— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) January 25, 2022

From the moment pundits first forecast that electric vehicles would replace America’s gas-powered fleets — which, to be clear, they undoubtedly should — an incalculable quantity of ink has been spilled on how to supply U.S. drivers with the electrical power they’ll soon need.

Far less attention beyond these pages has been paid to the question of demand, and why reducing the country’s appetite for automobiles must be a part of the solution to the EV charging problem, particularly in dense, urban areas with the most potential to get people onto greener modes. And even less discourse has been devoted to the ways that the most-popular EV charging solutions would further enshrine the private automobile into city life — at least if cities aren’t careful.

To Solve the Climate Crisis, We Need to Drive A Lot Less — And Drive Electric

Many of the solutions that Marshall and Simon explore could easily fall into that category. When the authors opine, for instance, about the need to “convince apartment developers and managers to buy into the unfamiliar and expensive process of installing” charger-equipped parking spaces, they don’t even mention how those incentives and requirements will affect housing prices — especially for those who don’t drive. Decades of scholarship have shown that when developers are required to build and maintain residential parking spaces (or even just “convinced,” through the publicly subsidized tax credit and rebate programs that Marshall and Simon laud), rents go up by as much as 25 percent for buildings that supply the industry-standard two spots per unit.

And those rent hikes affect the beneficiaries (car owners) and the dupes (non-car owners).

Those costs will only swell when developers begin installing high-voltage plugs in addition to laying asphalt, and they’ll still be passed onto renters, either in the form of rent increases, through their tax bills, or both. Adding charging to existing surface parking, meanwhile, will essentially lock in that land to a single use, unless a developer can overcome the sunk-cost fallacy of ripping out a piece of equipment that cost them thousands to install, possibly including spendy updates to their building’s electrical system.

Don't say "Parking Requirements"
Instead use "Costly Parking Mandates"

The language we use evokes emotion and mental short cuts; we like to create coherent stories. Framing the story of parking reform in a compelling way will help us succeed. pic.twitter.com/B5rUDWqYHO

— Parking Reform Network (@Parking_Reform) May 17, 2021

Some of the most baffling solutions that win Marshall and Simon’s praise are those that would install chargers on public property, rather than in the garages of the 64 percent of U.S. households who have access to at least one covered spot of their own.

For instance, the authors applaud U.S. cities for “[swiping] bright ideas from Europe” like “installing chargers next to curbside spots, sometimes even on street lights,” ignoring the fact that doing so essentially commits a city to maintaining on-street parking in perpetuity — even if that land could someday be transformed into a bike lane, or a sidewalk cafe, more sidewalk space, or anything else a community needs. That argument also ignores that putting chargers on public land essentially “convert[s] automotive refueling from what is now a private transaction on a private space (a gas station) to one that allocates yet more free public space (at the curb and the sidewalk) to the automobile,” as New York pedestrian advocate Christine Berthet recently wrote.

In the Wired authors’ estimation, though, even gas stations don’t really need to go when the EV revolution comes — because they could be converted to rapid-charging stations for the handful of drivers that aren’t gifted easy access to a port at home, or for any motorist who needs to charge on the fly.

And if those stations happen to be located in dense, urban neighborhoods that are desperate for developable land to turn into housing, or grocery stores, or any other essential service? Apparently, that doesn’t outrank the importance of keeping a charger on every corner … and in every garage … and in every on-street parking space, where they are all likely to remain forevermore.

EVs are the future of cars, but cars are not the future

— Alex Lee ??? (@alex_lee) January 16, 2022

Here’s the thing: America’s urban EV charging plans don’t have to replicate the mistakes we made when the last time we retrofit our cities around the gas-powered automobile. And done right, the EV revolution could be a generational opportunity not just to ditch gas, but to put cars at the bottom of the transportation hierarchy where they belong.

Instead of worrying about “charging deserts” in low-income neighborhoods whose residents struggle with the costs of car ownership as it is, we could focus our funding for public transit, walking, biking, and land use reform on those very communities, and give residents the best package of non-automotive mobility options that (public) money can buy.

Instead of ripping out street trees and juicing up light poles to better line our roads with public ports, we could convert those same parking lanes to protected bike lanes or generous sidewalks or BRT lanes that help everyone get where they need to go.

Instead of requiring developers to build “green” parking spots where they might not have otherwise built parking at all, we could compel them to provide bike parking, or subsidized transit passes, or simply to build new housing near existing transit lines.

The internal combustion engine is on its way out, and accommodating that seismic shift will revolutionize the way we live — particularly in dense cities that should have ditched the vast majority of their parking long before electric cars became a commercial reality. And particularly for those communities, to quote Marshall and Simon, “the goal is clear”: to expand access to active and shared mobility options that are green, safe, convenient, affordable, and attractive to the residents they serve.

Or, at least, it should be.

• At The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark published his annual list of transit projects expected to open or break ground in 2022, and it’s a doozy. Twenty-two new rail and bus rapid transit lines are scheduled to open this year in the U.S. alone, including many delayed by the pandemic.
• Did President Biden achieve his fix-it-first and climate-change goals with the infrastructure act? The devil’s in the details. (Roll Call)
• Red and blue states alike are preparing for more than 1 million new electric vehicles to hit the road this year (Pew Stateline). Much like New Deal rural electrification, a big push needs to be made for chargers in the countryside (Bloomberg). Meanwhile, urban residents won’t have the advantage of charging their cars in their garage (Wired).
• A tunnel underneath downtown Seattle that’s the centerpiece of a $53 billion regional rail expansion would delve as far as 140 feet deep to avoid obstacles like existing tunnels and skyscraper foundations, which could lead to higher costs and force passengers to descend and ascend nine stories. (Seattle Times)
• The Federal Transit Administration awarded planning grants for 20 transit-oriented development projects, including Austin’s Orange Line (KXAN) and a streetcar line in Mesa (KTAR).
• Portland is making part of 16th Street one-way for drivers and adding a bike lane. (BikePortland)
• Ann Arbor’s State Street sees more pedestrian crossings than vehicle trips per day, and now it’s getting a more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly makeover. (MLive)
• Richmond is planning to add bike lanes and paths to several streets this year. (Richmond News)
• Small Western ski towns have transit, too, even if taking it is sometimes an adventure. (Salt Lake Tribune)

Automakers aren’t doing enough to ensure that drivers are ready to take over if their vehicles’ self-driving features make mistakes, an auto-industry group argues, re-igniting a debate about who should be held accountable when the drivers of partially automated cars kill people on U.S. roads.

Last week, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety announced the criteria for a new set of rankings that will evaluate how well automakers are combatting “automation complacency” among their drivers, as well as the intentional misuse of advanced driver assistance systems that are becoming increasingly common on new cars.

First used to describe the phenomenon of pilots mentally checking out in the cockpit when their planes are on “autopilot” mode, “automation complacency” has since been flagged by watchdogs like the National Transportation Safety Board as a major contributing factor in several crashes involving a partially automated vehicle — and for the foreseeable future, every AV on the road will only be partially automated.

In 2020, the Board advised federal regulators to develop “performance standards for driver monitoring systems that will minimize driver disengagement, prevent automation complacency, and account for foreseeable misuse of the automation.” Experts point out that many of those systems could be implemented with inexpensive, software updates such as programming driver assistance systems features not to activate if a drivers’ seatbelt isn’t buckled, or by installing simple in-cabin cameras to monitor drivers’ behavior.

But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has yet to mandate either.

“There’s a regulatory void,” said David Harkey, president of the Insurance Institute, explaining his group’s new rankings. “Automakers need to ensure that this tech is implemented [so] it does not lead to either intentional or unintentional misuse on the part of the driver. And consumers need to have a better understanding that these remain driver assistance systems, and not driver replacement systems. No one should purchase a vehicle thinking it’s capable of more than it is, and then learn later, sometimes through tragic consequences, that they were wrong.”

Please don't do this if you drive a Tesla and use Autopilot. (@stkbullgod you're freakin me out.) https://t.co/P6M43ppJK2

— Lora Kolodny (@lorakolodny) January 24, 2022

In the absence of strong federal safety standards that would require companies to put better safeguards on advanced driver assistance systems, some automakers have sold customers their own narratives about what partial automation is really capable of.

In 2020, Tesla began selling an untested “Full Self Driving” mode that was not, as the name suggested, actually self-driving, paired with an owner’s manual whose fine print warned customers not to trust the tech too much. GMC, meanwhile, is currently marketing a “Super Cruise” feature with commercials that encourage drivers to operate their cars “hands free,” even as a microscopic disclaimer encourages those drivers to stay attentive.

Some pundits have partly blamed that dangerously optimistic advertising for encouraging bad driving behaviors that lead to real-world crashes — and the criminal charges that sometimes follow.

Just before the Institute announced its new rankings criteria, a California driver was charged with vehicular manslaughter after he failed to take control when his Tesla, which was using the company’s other misleadingly named driving mode known as “Autopilot,” ran a red light at high speed and killed two occupants of a Honda Civic. The driver may be the first in U.S. history to be charged with a felony for failing to take control of his car when the popular advanced driver assistance system failed. (A test driver for Uber was charged with negligent homicide following a similar 2018 collision in Arizona, but many of the safety features on her car weren’t yet being sold to consumers; Tesla, by contrast, has sold Autopilot and the beta version of Full Self Driving software to tens of thousands of untrained motorists).

This story has been extremely under-reported. There really should be increased scrutiny not in just drivers but also on Teslas marketing of autopilot and automated driving features. https://t.co/J4jMJ8uT6b

— Shabazz Stuart (@ShabazzStuart) January 22, 2022

The Insurance Institute hopes its rankings will help encourage customers to look beyond the automaker hype, if only for their own legal protection — and someday, inspire NHTSA to enforce stronger requirements on semi-automated vehicles overall. To earn a top ranking from the organization, an advanced driver assistance-equipped car will “need to ensure that the driver’s eyes are directed at the road and their hands are either on the wheel or ready to grab it at all times,” and issue “escalating alerts and appropriate emergency procedures when the driver does not meet those conditions,” including automatically bringing the car to a safe stop.

Those alerts, of course, would help ensure that any driver behave more safely behind the wheel — and even manual drivers are prone to “complacency” and distraction, if only because the tacit design cues of the autocentric roads they drive on often signal that it’s okay to tune out. But those safety features become even more critical when it comes to semi-automated cars, which have been linked to particularly egregious roadway crimes like sleeping, gaming, or even having sex instead of watching the road.

“We’re helping consumers understand what this tech can and cannot do,” said Harkey. “Automakers are advertising these technology in a way that makes it seems like it can do more than it actually can.”

At least so far, no automaker can accurately say that their advanced driver safety systems are foolproof — which is why it’s so critical that every automaker take steps to make sure that drivers don’t misuse them. (Disturbingly, the Insurance Institute notes that “while most partial automation systems have some safeguards in place to help ensure drivers are focused and ready, none of them [currently] meets all the pending IIHS criteria.”)

Doing that, though, would require the seemingly paradoxical acknowledgment that partially automated cars might require even more safety backstops than cars designed to be driven by human beings alone — at least as long as the public agrees that the point of advanced driver assistance systems is to protect all road users, rather than to make it easier for drivers to take a nap.

“At some point, we have to ask ourselves: are these, indeed, driver safety systems?” said Harkey. “Or are they driver convenience systems?”

• After years of losing riders to Uber and Lyft, taxis are making a comeback by embracing apps and mobile payment. But drivers still face challenges from COVID and medallion costs. (Next City)
• Quick-build projects can big a big difference, and gentrification fears shouldn’t be an excuse not to invest in communities. Those were two takeaways from a Smart Growth America equity summit.
• Artificial intelligence could help create more equitable congestion pricing systems. (Route 50)
• CityLab profiles the young climate activists fighting the I-5 expansion in Portland’s Rose Quarter, who won a couple of recent victory when the feds rescinded environmental approval (BikePortland) and Oregon DOT officials said the project is facing a $500 million shortfall (Oregonian).
• Remote work is devastating New York commuter rail, with ticket sales down 75 percent. (NY Times)
• A Massachusetts bill would force 175 suburban Boston cities to build hundreds of thousands of new apartments near transit stops. (Slate)
• It’s time for Austin to end minimum parking requirements citywide. (Towers)
• Drivers have already killed five cyclists and pedestrians in Montgomery County, Maryland, this year, denoting a lack of progress on Vision Zero. (Bethesda Magazine)
• Residents are also demanding safer streets in Nashville, where drivers killed 39 pedestrians in 2020, 37 last year and three already in 2022. (WSMV)
• In Omaha, drivers have sent 13 pedestrians to the hospital in January. (KETV)
• Cincinnati officials are considering turning a proposed multi-use path into a protected bike lane to free up money for other bike projects. (WCPO)
• Asheville is spending $2.8 million to build nearly a mile of new sidewalk. (WLOS)

Two and half years ago, we launched the Future of Transportation Caucus (FOTC) because we were at a crossroads with respect to our transportation systems. Our crumbling roads, our failing public transit systems, and rising carbon emissions from the transportation sector were exacerbating the climate crisis and further entrenching inequities and disparities in our communities.

Despite the progress we’ve made since the launch of our Caucus, including the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), these challenges remain, and in some respects are even worse. For example, greenhouse gas emissions in the United States from the transportation sector reached record levels in 2021.

The IIJA provides record levels of investment in surface transportation, including public transit, roads,  passenger rail, and cycling and walking. But more money poured into the same broken system does not guarantee it will yield better results. Unfortunately, the IIJA does not include the transformative investments and policy changes in public safety, transit expansion, and alternatives to highways that the House passed in the INVEST in America Act or Build Back Better Act last year.

That’s why we are relaunching the Future of Transportation Caucus: because our work to build more equitable, accessible, and sustainable transportation systems is far from finished and we cannot miss this opportunity to deliver for our communities.

Our country still needs a new vision for transportation in which everyone can affordably, reliably, and safely reach their destinations — a progressive, forward-thinking vision that centers the needs of working people, makes our communities more connected, and leaves no one behind.

With the IIJA set to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in physical infrastructure projects across the country, our Caucus will work with the Biden Administration, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT), and stakeholders to ensure the projects and policies we implement meet our communities’ needs. That means making our existing roads and bridges safer, emphasizing equity, access and sustainability, and targeting federal dollars to communities that need them most.

The IIJA provides a path forward, but only if we seize the moment and recognize the role that transportation can play in rooting out some of the starkest inequities and disparities facing the nation. Our Caucus will do that, and we will build on the progress made through the IIJA by continuing to fight to deliver the Build Back Better Act so we can make the remaining investments our workers and families need in this moment.

It’s time we challenge the status quo, revisit the core assumptions and policies underlying our transportation system, and fundamentally reimagine transportation solutions that will help us achieve socio-political and environmental justice in America.

Drivers killed almost 7,000 pedestrians in 2020, but that doesn’t tell the whole story, because no one is counting close calls, which can cause trauma and keep people from walking. (Next City)

Route Fifty has more on Republican governors’ efforts to undo federal restrictions on infrastructure funding so they can use it to build more roads. The 16 GOP governors oppose the Biden administration’s emphasis on equity and addressing climate change.

Infrastructure dollars should go towards hyper-dense cities that can bring an end to the dominance of cars. (Governing)

Some older people probably don’t belong behind the wheel, but they have to keep driving because, in the suburbs, they have no choice. (Treehugger)

The Federal Transit Administration bumped up a new rail tunnel underneath the Hudson River separating New York and New Jersey on its priority list. The project would help unsnarl Amtrak traffic up and down the East Coast. (Railway Age)

Demolishing urban freeways like I-345 in Dallas is just the first step—vibrant neighborhoods won’t sprout up on their own. (D Magazine)

A bill in the Utah legislature would ban transit agencies from charging fares. (KSL)

St. Louis is once again embarking on a study of a north-south rapid transit line. (Next STL)

Houston is filling in a major bike-lane gap in the Third Ward. (Chronicle)

A road diet project in Austin has been delayed again. (Monitor)

Gainesville, Florida allocated $3 million to Vision Zero over the next two years. (WCJB)

Toronto NIMBYs are fighting a new subway line. (Toronto Life)

TVO documents the Ottawa light rail system’s descent into chaos.

Demand for electric cargo bike delivery has been booming over the course of the pandemic. (The Guardian)

A group of Republican governors banded together this week to thwart the federal government’s push to use the new $1.2-trillion infrastructure package to promote progress on climate change, jobs and racial justice.

The 16 state chief executives wrote to President Biden on Wednesday demanding that the administration “not burden states or private sector partners with needless and unnecessary red tape,” in the distribution of funds for projects under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

But it wasn’t really red tape that the governors took aim at — it was tape that was green or rainbow-hued. The letter specifically cites objections to the federal effort to only fund projects that seek to mitigate global warming or rectify racist land-use policies.

“Excessive consideration of equity, union memberships or climate as lenses to view suitable projects would be counterproductive,” the governors wrote. “Your administration should not attempt to push a social agenda through hard infrastructure investments and instead should consider economically sound principles that align with state priorities.”

Exhibit A for what the governors called “a clear example of federal overreach” would be “an attempt by the Federal Highway Administration to limit state widening projects,” which, the governors wrote, “would be biased against rural states and states with growing populations.” The governors argued that highway expansions “drive economic growth” — but many studies indicate that wider highways lead only to sprawl, pollution and, through the phenomenon of “induced demand,” more time- and productivity-killing congestion.

The infrastructure bill, which passed last November with bi-partisan support, was supposed to usher in a new era of cooperation in Washington around the shared national goals of fixing roads, bridges and transit. It only has led to more division, however, as Biden’s Build Back Better Act, which envisions even more sweeping climate-change and jobs measures, remains stalled.

The governors were reacting to a Jan. 4 letter that Biden’s infrastructure implementation coordinator, Mitch Landrieu, sent to governors urging them to be “good stewards” of the federal money by “working to achieve goals around creating good middle-class jobs, supporting disadvantaged and underserved communities, advancing climate resilience and sustainability, and investing in American manufacturers.” Landrieu said that regulations governing the expenditures would enshrine those priorities.

Removing highways that had the racist intent of dividing and impoverishing Black communities has been a focus of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who recently decried how “Black and brown neighborhoods … were divided by highway projects plowing through them because they didn’t have the political capital to resist.”

Such stands have brought him opprobrium from the right, with Fox News pillorying him for those views. Meanwhile, Republican infrastructure proposals arguably would make climate change worse: They go all-in on cars, raising the funding for roads and bridges, cutting funding for public transportation and intercity rail, and opposing zoning reform, all of which are essential for decarbonizing the transportation sector.

Advocates, for their part, are mobilizing to make sure that the federal dollars go to the right projects, with Transportation for America, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, America Walks, and the League of American Bicyclists joining for an online forum on Jan. 26. “America’s cities share the administration’s goals for investments that make the country’s streets and bridges safer, more accessible, sustainable, and equitable,” said Corinne Kisner, executive director of NACTO, recently in support of the infrastructure bill’s progressive priorities.

The infrastructure bill passed. Now what? Join @BethOsborneT4A, @Kenmcld, and Sindhu Bharadwaj of @NACTO in a panel discussion moderated by @mayormcginn on Jan. 26. https://t.co/fIKoleqZYp pic.twitter.com/mdf1J0umJU

— Transportation for America (@T4America) January 21, 2022

The Republican governors who signed the letter were Bill Lee of Tennessee, Kay Ivey of Alabama, Mike Dunleavy of Alaska, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, Brian Kemp of Georgia, Eric Holcomb of Indiana, Mike Parson of Missouri, Greg Gianforte of Montana, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Doug Burgum of North Dakota, Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, Henry McMaster of South Carolina, Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Spencer Cox of Utah, and Mark Gordon of Wyoming.

• Democrats are starting to work on whittling down the Build Back Better bill into something Sen. Joe Manchin will support (New York Times). Whatever form the bill takes, President Biden said he wants climate change to remain a focus (Washington Post).
• More than 40 states have failed to adopt common-sense laws against drunk and distracted driving that could easily prevent crashes. (Streetsblog USA)
• In addition to the health benefits, trails and greenways more than pay for themselves through growth in tax revenue. (American City and County)
• Sixteen Republican governors want the Biden administration to let them spend all their infrastructure money on widening roads. (Arkansas Times)
• Going fare-free helped the L.A. Metro keep ridership up during the pandemic and reduce boarding times, but the agency started collecting fares again nonetheless. (Curbed)
• Federal officials told the Oregon DOT to do a new environmental assessment for their plan to widen and cap I-5 in Portland’s Rose Quarter, pushing the project back about six months. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• Dallas’ new bus routes providing more frequent service to high-ridership areas kick in next week. (Human Transit)
• Miami transportation planners have proposed a new $81 million express light-rail line. (Miami Today)
• Lyft is spending $14 million, the single largest political donation in Massachusetts history, to push a Prop 22-style referendum classifying drivers as contractors with no labor rights. (Jalopnik)
• Boston officials are worried about a spike in fare evasion when a new collection system is in place in 2024 (Globe). But with Mayor Michelle Wu’s fare-free pilot program underway, will riders even be paying fares by then?
• A Memphis program is turning dumped tires into bike-lane barriers. (WREG)
• The Philippines built 500 kilometers of bike lanes in a year during the pandemic. (World Bank)

A horrifying car crash that aired during a live TV news broadcast in West Virginia is sparking a conversation about roadway and workplace safety — and the many ways that U.S. media normalizes traffic violence, even when they watch it happening in gruesome real time.

Tori Yorgey, a reporter for the NBC affiliate WSAZ, went viral on Thursday after her camera captured her being struck from behind by the driver of a pick-up truck as she reported from the side of a road in rural Dunbar. In the footage, Yorgey — who had been sent to the site alone, without the support of even a camera operator, to report on the dangerous road conditions — is seen being knocked down violently before righting herself and telling her in-studio co-anchor that she had “just got hit by a car, but I’m okay.”

Moments later, Yorgey adds, “I actually got hit by a car in college, too, just like that.”

Later in the broadcast, she says that the driver who struck her “was so nice, though. She didn’t mean to. It was an accident. I know it was.”

Yorgey was reportedly later transported to an area hospital as a precaution. She could not be reached for comment, and WSAZ has not responded to a request for information regarding her condition.

Warning: the video below is disturbing.

Unironically, this is actually how we treat pedestrian crashes in America. Don’t talk about it, don’t address it, yet we see it with our own eyes every day. https://t.co/IGpwRVliCg

— Ryan Deto (@RyanDeto) January 20, 2022

The video was polarizing on social media, with some praising Yorgey’s professionalism for finishing her broadcast after such a traumatic event, and others outraged that the reporter had ever been asked to work in such dangerous conditions at all.

The growing prevalence of “multimedia journalists” — essentially, the practice of requiring solo reporters to produce and film their own segments without any on-site support — has drawn criticism as a cost-cutting measure that can jeopardize the safety of on-screen talent, particularly in conditions that stations know to be dangerous.

That’s certainly true when journalists are tasked with reporting on America’s increasingly deadly roadsides, where deaths from crashes recently reached a 15-year high. (Kanawha County, W.Va., home to Dunbar, has a car crash rate of almost 14 deaths per year per 100,000 residents, which is 26 percent higher than the national rate.)

Please do not call me tough or dedicated to my job if I get hit by a car while working and have to keep working omg wowow

— Alexis Johnson (@alexisjreports) January 20, 2022

Yorgey, moreover, was recording live from the site of a recent water main break that had made already frozen roads even more treacherous — conditions to which the reporter was required to turn her back in order to record her own package.

It’s not clear, yet, whether the driver who struck her lost control of the vehicle or was simply confused by the emergency blockades as Yorgey’s co-anchor suggested during the broadcast. But some news pros say that either way, a producer should have been on hand to at least warn her that a driver was headed her way, or ideally, back her up if she refused to film in such unsafe conditions entirely.

“A reporter I worked with [once] was nearly hit by a jackknifing tractor trailer because his back was to the highway while he was doing a stand-up for a package; he didn’t see it coming and only heard it,” said Tory Wegerski, a Pittsburgh-based TV news producer. “These are situations that need another set of eyes on them. … People should boycott stations that use multi-media journalists. Reporters should refuse to work for them, and producers should refuse to take live shots with them.”

Stop watching #TVNews stations that send reporters out alone at night, without a reflective vest, to stand on a side of a road, w/ no photographer or live truck operator watching their back, & to risk their lives for inconsequential “news,” just so the producer has a “live” shot. https://t.co/XF2mUCzRkx

— Anita Kissée (@anitakissee) January 20, 2022

Of course, TV reporters aren’t the only workers who risk their lives in dangerous conditions on U.S. roads — and workers certainly aren’t the only ones who are endangered by the systemic failures of America’s auto-centric transportation network, either.

The Vision Zero movement itself was famously born after Swedish transport leader Claes Tingvall pointed out that the country’s government had committed to ending worker deaths by changing the dangerous conditions of Sweden’s workplaces, but had not yet vowed to do the same on the country’s roadways, where many Swedes labored every day. Sweden’s efforts to reconcile that incongruity has since inspired advocates around the world to rethink the conditions on their own roadways, so that every traveler can be as safe as a construction worker jack-hammering the pavement behind a concrete jersey barrier.

The powers that be in America, though, have generally taken a different tack in their approach to both roadway and worker safety — by treating deaths and injuries that occur in those environments as individual “accidents,” rather than the predictable outcomes of dangerous systems that can, and must, be changed. And when Yorgey declared, on air, that the crash she’d just endured was an “accident,” she entered a long tradition of journalists who unthinkingly reinforce that individualized view of roadway safety, before anyone has a chance to examine the universe of systemic factors that precipitate a crash.

Please do not call me tough or dedicated to my job if I get hit by a car while working and have to keep working omg wowow

— Alexis Johnson (@alexisjreports) January 20, 2022

To be clear, this is in no way a criticism of Yorgey herself. She was delivering a live television interview in the adrenalized moments just after a traumatic event while her producers failed to cut away or even offer to get her help. And it wasn’t even her first car crash. But in that way, her experience was so typical.

When humans experience trauma, it can condition the nervous system to react to even the perception of recurring trauma in ways that a non-traumatized person might not understand: fight or flight, freeze or fawn, whatever survival strategy the body believes will keep us alive. Especially in the immediate aftermath of harm, human beings often have a powerful psychological, social, and ontological incentives to treat bad things that happen to them as outliers, rather than to scrutinize the systems that put them in harm’s way.

We do not have to die for work. It is OK to cut to commercial AFTER BEING HIT BY A MOVING VEHICLE. https://t.co/Bpqrry1Bmf

— Shireen Ahmed (@_shireenahmed_) January 20, 2022

When journalists seated safely at a desk refer to a car crash as an “accident,” though, they don’t have those same excuses — and that’s exactly what many of the journalists who covered Yorgey’s crash did, despite long-standing guidance from the Associated Press to avoid using the term.

When a news station sends a reporter out onto a dangerous roadside at night without so much as a reflective vest or a single coworker to advocate for her safety, it does so both with full knowledge of the dangers of that choice, and with full knowledge that the public is unlikely to decry their negligence. That’s because, in the American consciousness, accidents happen — particularly when a car is involved. (And anyway, as every exhausted pedestrian advocate knows, even the best reflective vest in the world won’t stop the force of a pick-up.)

Tori Yorgey is not a war zone reporter who signed up to put her life on the line every time she covered her beat. (Though, to be clear, those journalists deserve robust protections, too.) She just happened to be covering one of the most dangerous spaces in the public realm: an American highway. And until every road in the country is redesigned to be safer, her crash won’t be the last.

This week we’re joined by Anna Zivarts from Disability Rights Washington and Paulo Nunes-Ueno from Front and Centered. They join us to talk about the Disability Mobility Initiative and the Mobility Bill of Rights.  We also chat about why mobility experiments might make travel harder for disabled travelers and why road safety is a core part of civil rights.

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:

Jeff Wood: That story was so powerful because of the small amount of distance that you had to go, you get most of the way. And then you couldn’t get the rest of the way because of the mud and getting stuck. And it just doesn’t seem fair.

 This collection of expertise that you all put together, and I’ve seen a number of the articles that you all were quoted in for after you released the project, talking about that, that these are folks who we should be valuing their expertise because they live it, they’re in it all the time. They’re trying to get to places and they’re learning what they can and can’t do. We often take, experts as people who have studied something for a long period of time, and they’ve just done their 10,000 hours.

It’s just, they’re doing it as they live day by day. So what’s the power of this expertise that you’ve collected? The stories of folks and, and the coordination that, putting them together in categories that that can actually inform change.

Anna Zivarts: You know, it is this expertise, right? That that 10,000 hours thing is a really good way to talk about it. You know, people who can’t drive, we are out there using the system day in and day out, and it’s taking a loooong time to get where we need to go. So we are thinking about it, like the amount of time I think about our transportation system, any time I need to go anywhere, especially out here in the west, but you know, is in this auto designed utopia for cars, you know it’s immense. The other thing I think about this lived experience expertise that we’ve really been able to tap into and people seem kind of surprised by is the passion that people have to change the system, because it is something that, as non-drivers, we are other thinking about, oh my gosh, if the only there was a light here to cross the street to my bus stop.

So, I didn’t have to try to dash across six lanes of highway. If only it wasn’t a giant puddle at the base of this ramp that I have to roll through or step through every time like there is. So when people have the opportunity to engage, they are more than willing and more than excited to show up, and hope to be listened to. We really have to start to change the way our transportation departments and transit agencies think about hiring people and paying people with this experience to bring them in and get that knowledge. One thing we’ve tapped into a little bit is just that so many of these job postings require driver’s licenses, when they don’t need to. Right? It’s not like we’re saying that you know, if you’re a bus driver, yes, you need a CDL, but there’s a lot of planning jobs, data jobs, other types of jobs out there, there’s no good reason people should be requiring driver’s licenses and yet they are. And then you’re just automatically excluding a whole bunch of us who could offer a lot of knowledge and expertise to improve the system.

Wood: What kind of jobs are they requiring licenses for? Why would they do that? If it’s not necessary? If you’re not delivering or driving?

Zivarts: It tends to be an automatic thing on a lot of these HR checklists. So when the job gets entered into the HR system it’s just automatically checked. So that’s the most innocuous. There’s other times where people will make really good arguments or whatever they think they’re really good arguments to me about why a planning job, or a fundraising job, or a QuickBooks job, the person needs to have a driver’s license. Well, what if they needed to somehow get across the state to this other thing, and we know there’s no good transit, and it’s true. There is no good transit, but there are ways around that — especially if you’re a transit agency or an advocacy group that works to improve transit, there’s an imperative to try harder and recognize that, sure, it might take that person a little longer to get somewhere, but that’s okay. And in getting there, they are going to be gaining a lot of knowledge and experience just using the system.

So I think one other thing that Paulo hit on a little bit earlier, and I think is really important is that we aren’t just talking about improving transit and walkability and roll-ability in urban areas or in population centers. We a very consciously focused on doing advocacy throughout the state and through our more rural, to our farming areas. Part of that is really critical because of the gentrification, the increased pricing of housing in our more urban areas. But also there’s no reason our more rural areas shouldn’t have at least hourly, or a couple of times a day, transit service.

Right now they just don’t. And there are so many folks, including so many seniors and folks in our tribal areas, farm workers, who don’t have access to cars and live in these more rural areas and could benefit immensely from having better transportation access. So I just think that is something really relevant to the national conversation that we can’t just be talking about cities. We need to be dreaming bigger than that.

Paulo Nunes Ueno: Yeah, absolutely. And what an engine of inequality we’ve set up for ourselves where, to fund transit, you need these basic requirements. You need to have a progressive general voting population that will vote to tax themselves, to pay for transit operations. And you need to have progressive politicians who are willing to put those measures on the ballot. Those things tend to coincide really heavily with pretty well-to-do areas right now in America. So the people that are just incredibly left out in this equation are poor people in communities of color who have the misfortune of living in areas that are conservative and led by Republican politicians, because they will never be able to get the transit that they need because they can’t get it on the ballot. And even if they did, they probably can’t get those things approved.

So it’s creating this engine of inequality, where the urban wealthy areas have the ability to tax themselves to create better transit. And the ex-urban and rural areas are getting left behind. And you have this sort of really sick situation where walking, biking, and transit are becoming elite activities where re-urbanization is bringing wealthier people back to the traditional city cores that have a connected grid that spent the money to build the sidewalks back in the day.

The suburbs have this disconnected network, with no sidewalks that are harder to serve with transit, frankly, and don’t have the tax base to provide this basic service. You know, going back to the indoor toilet example, absolutely there are economies of scale, right? We have water-treatment plants in places that are very urban and that where you have a mass of folks that can fund that. And we figured out how to do septic tanks in places that are less dense, but everybody has a toilet inside now, right? So we need to sort of figure out how we provide this basic element of living in society so that people can get to the things that they need, regardless of whether you’re in the big metropolitan area or you’re in a smaller city or a less dense place.

Passengers should take action when a driver is drunk, drugged or distracted behind the wheel, a new public awareness campaign will argue — but it’s raising provocative questions about the role of education in the fight to stop the most egregious driving crimes on U.S. roads.

On Wednesday, advocacy groups We Save Lives and the National Road Safety Foundation announced National Passenger Safety Week (Jan. 23-30), which seeks to “empower passengers to speak up and have the courage to intervene when their lives are threatened by an unsafe driver” through a series of educational initiatives, public service awareness campaigns, and individualized outreach efforts.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 25 percent of the people who died in car crashes in 2019 were passengers, pedestrians, or other road users, a number that rises to 53 percent for children under 18. For children under 13, 73 percent of the dead are vehicle passengers, while the remainder are pedestrians and cyclists.

The effort will builds on decades of anti-drunk driving campaigns targeting the sober people around a dangerous motorist — campaigns which both the US Department of Transportation and advocacy groups alike have transformed into viral catch phrases for decades.

Some even credit the famous “friends don’t let friends drive drunk” ads of the 1990s with a 30-percent decrease in drunk driving fatalities in the first four years of the initiative, though the architects of such campaigns acknowledge that it’s hard to quantify the exact impact of education efforts when they’re launched in concert with other interventions. The percentage of fatal crashes that involves alcohol has largely plateaued since 2014, despite the continued prevalence of PSAs, and the sheer number of DUI deaths rose an estimated nine percent between 2019 and 2020.

“Highway safety education efforts don’t always yield immediate results, and the long-term impacts are inherently difficult to measure,” said Candace Lightner, founder of both We Save Lives and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who lost her 13-year-old daughter, Cari, to an impaired motorist in 1980. “But we have found that effective public awareness campaigns are proven to have enormous impacts on behavior, and to make things like drunk driving socially unacceptable.”

Lightner and her colleagues hope that National Passenger Safety Week will go even farther than the PSAs of the past.

In addition to ads, interviews, and social media graphics aimed at making it more socially acceptable for passengers to take action when they observe the person behind the wheel behaving dangerously, the campaign also offer a series of scripts and videos that model exactly how to do it in the moment.

That might involve, for instance, a passenger offering to serve as the “designated texter” so the driver isn’t tempted to pick up her phone, or a parent asking a checklist of questions before allowing his child to catch a ride with another teen. Sometimes, Lightner says, it might even look like a child telling a parent to stop playing with the onboard “infotainment” system, or a teen calling the police on an impaired friend who refuses to hand over the keys.

“Passengers need to speak up, first, for their own safety, because they have a role in saving their own lives,” she adds. “And ideally, you need to do it before everyone gets in the car. [If the dangerous driver insists on getting behind the wheel anyway,] tell that driver you’re going to call the police, give the police the make and model and the license plate number, and let them know which way you’re going…At the very least, tell the driver ‘I love you, and I want you to live — and I love me, and I want me to live.”

Coming from a highway safety agency, of course, stressing the power of passengers to stop car crashes might seem like a kind of victim-blaming — particularly when those same agencies have failed to stop dangerous driving through broader systemic approaches.

Advocates have long criticized state DOTs for spending millions on distracted driving (and, even worse, “distracted pedestrian“) campaigns while continually failing to build the kind of traffic-calming infrastructure that would all but force motorists to drive attentively. Congress, similarly, has drawn ire for failing to mandate Ignition Interlock Devices on all cars until the most recent infrastructure bill, even as drunk driving deaths surged and politicians publicly urged their constituents not to drink before getting behind the wheel.

But like Lightner herself, many of the most vocal supporters of the Passenger Safety week campaign don’t have the power to issue vehicle safety reforms or end mandatory minimums that mandate ample parking lots in front of bars. They’re the victims of traffic violence themselves, and their surviving loved ones — many of whom say intervention from passengers and bystanders could have made a difference that saved lives.

“Evan Bard was a beautiful, vibrant young woman who was killed in May of 2013 in an impaired driving crash,” said Todd Bard, Evan’s father and a supporter of the campaign. “She and her fiancé were attending the wedding of her best friend when they decided to leave. They were both obviously impaired and despite the bride’s concerns, she said nothing while Evan and her fiancé piled into their car, both too drunk to drive. On the way home Evan’s fiancé crashed into a pole killing her and injuring him. If only someone had the ‘courage to intervene,’ Evan would be alive today.”

Seen through that lens — and particularly in light of transportation leaders’ slow progress towards implementing broader changes to policy and infrastructure — Lightner hopes the campaign will help inspire a culture where speaking up about dangerous driving whenever possible is seen as an ethical responsibility and a social norm. And someday, perhaps dangerous driving itself will no longer be so broadly normalized, legalized, and even outright celebrated in American communities.

“Obviously, the fault lies with the driver,” Lightner adds. “But at the same time, you have to think of everyone else who’s around — even the passengers, who are often killed themselves. Why did you get in the car? What could you have done to stop this?”

• The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, accused the Biden administration of using misleading statistics attributing almost all crashes to driver error when road design also plays a role. (Associated Press)
• Amtrak is temporarily cutting service due to employees coming down with Omicron. (New York Times)
• Police have an incentive to hand out speeding tickets because most states use the revenue to fund criminal justice, creating a hardship for drivers who can’t afford to pay. (Route Fifty)
• Equity conversations around transportation often leave out people who can’t drive or can’t afford a car. (City Observatory)
• Two self-driving shuttle companies went bankrupt last week, but the technology still holds long-term promise even if it’s not profitable yet. (Forbes)
• The Philadelphia Inquirer calls on Pennsylvania lawmakers to upgrade public transit.
• The growing popularity of drive-throughs during the pandemic is crimping Charlotte’s plans to become more walkable. (Axios)
• Pinellas County, Florida officials want to cut pedestrian and cyclist deaths, which nearly doubled from 2020 to 2021. (St. Pete Catalyst)
• Drivers have already killed two Hartford pedestrians this year, which matches the total for all of 2017. (Courant)
• Cincinnati is updating its bike plan for the first time in 12 years. (WVXU)
• Uncleared sidewalks are forcing Cleveland pedestrians to walk in the street. (News 5)
• The Georgia DOT was going to install bike lanes on a busy Athens street, then removed them from its plans. (Flagpole)
• D.C. Metro General Manager and CEO Paul Wiedefeld is retiring. (DCist)
• London Mayor Sadiq Khan is floating a plan to charge motorists across the entire city based on time of journey, distance traveled and destination. He said the city needs to cut car trips by a quarter to meet 2030 emissions targets. (The Guardian)
• Prague is offering free shared bike rides to residents who have a transit pass. (Expat)

Gary Public Transportation Corporation, which operates bus service in Gary, Indiana and a few other nearby Northwest Indiana municipalities, is launching a pilot of sorts on its busiest corridor to see how well the buses perform during winter. If the test is successful, the city where steel mill smoke still dominates the skyline (even if the city’s steel industry is a fraction of what it used to be) and the Jackson 5 got their start may have fully-electric transit within the next decade.

GPTC bought four electric buses that are expected to be delivered by late spring/early summer. They will primarily be used on the Broadway, one of Gary’s main commercial thoroughfares, and the busiest transit corridor. David Wright, planning and marketing manager for the transit agency, said that they want to see how well the buses stand up to the weather and their regular passenger loads. “If the experiment works, we’ll make the entire fleet electric,” he said. “But this is us sticking the toe in the water.”

The agency unveiled its plans during the November 15 Fall Summit, which was held at Gary’s main public library in the afternoon. Agency officials used the occasion to announce several programs and initiatives, and take questions from riders. The summit emphasized just how how underfunded the transit agency is. The electric buses only came about because of a state grant, and any further service expansion hinges on additional outside funding.

GPTC has five routes within Gary proper, two regional routes that connect Gary to nearby suburbs, three regional routes that are completely outside Gary (but connect to routes that do go into the city) and the Broadway Metro Express (R-BMX), which serves the Broadway corridor in Gary, Merrillville and Crown Point. Regional Route R1 connects to Pace routes 350 and 364 in downtown Hammond, but there are no transfer fares between the two systems.

Wright said that, while the Gary transit system wasn’t spared from the affect of the pandemic. During the height of the pandemic, ridership dropped to 40 percent of the regular level, which, he noted, was still higher than national average and highlighted how important their buses are to the region. By December 2021, ridership rebounded to about 55 percent of regular levels.

While both the CTA and Pace are moving toward adding electric buses, they have larger fleets to work with than Gary does. CTA has 1,835 buses and Pace has 740 buses, while GPTC has only 20 fixed-route buses and seven paratransit buses.

For now, GPTC has ordered four 35-seat electric buses and four diesel buses to replace seven buses it bought in 2007. Wright said that the vehicles have a service life of 11 years. According to the 2020 Indiana Department of Transportation Public Transit Report, the most recent report currently available, Gary has nine buses purchased in 2010, three bought in 2014, and one that was purchased in 2018. That means GPTC will need to replace at least nine buses over the next few years.

The funding for the rolling stock purchase came from a $3.2 million grant from Indiana Volkswagen Environmental Mitigation Trust Fund. In 2015, Volkswagen was found to have violated the federal Clean Air Act after selling 500,000 cars that came with devices that fooled emissions tests. Under the 2017 settlement, the car marker agreed to pay out $4.3 billion, with Indiana getting $41 million.

GPTC bought the buses from Livemore, California based-Gillig, the second-largest bus manufacturer in United States which, has made all the fixed-route buses GPTC currently has in service. Wright said that the transit agency was impressed with the electric buses Gillig helped built for Indianapolis’ public transit system.

“If you go down to Indianapolis and ride the Red Line, it’s excellent,” he said. “It’s so quiet it’s almost a safety hazard. Most, if not all drivers who drive electrics down there prefer to drive electric [buses]. The technology is cleaner and the response is quicker.” GPTC also liked that 80 percent of the bus parts were the same as the ones in Gillig’s diesel buses.

Still, Wright noted that the buses were going to be “low-emission, not zero-emission,” because they will be using gas-powered heaters. “That’s something that most cold-weather eclectic bus recipients are going to do.”

Wright added that the bus drivers would need to be trained to handle the new electric buses, since they respond quicker. Gillig will send a consultant “to help us perfect the rollout.”

There will be at least three buses running on the BMX route at any given time. The buses will be charged overnight at GPTC’s existing garage and maintenance facility. The transit agency also plans to build a new driver relief facility on the land it owns at the intersection of 20th Avenue and Broadway, which would include additional charging stations the buses would be able to use during the day.

Wright said that GPTC will decide how many additional electric buses they will buy, and when, based on how well the first four buses do. “Once we know, after a couple of years, what the average mileage is gong to be, it’s going to inform how many [electric buses] are going to purchased.”

Asked whether the electric buses will have any special features other than the power source, Wright said that GPTC is looking into adding transit signal priority technology for Broadway, which would shorten red lights or lengthen green lights to facilitate bus service. The traffic lights on the portion of the corridor south of 53rd Street, which accounts for about a half of the route, are already equipped to accommodate the technology

“We don’t know whether or not we’re going to have Wii-F,” Wright added. “We’ll see if we can afford it.”

Most Pace buses have Wi-Fi, but only because the suburban bus transit agency was able to tie the service into its bus surveillance cameras. CTA buses don’t have it, and neither do any buses elsewhere in Northwest Indiana.

The summit also touched on the potential service expansion to serve the stations of the South Shore Line’s newly built West Lake branch, which will serve south Hammond, Munster, and Dyer. GTPC’s Route R1 currently serves downtown Hammond, the city of East Chicago, and western Gary, while Route R4 services south Hammond, Munster and nearby Highland.

Wright said GTPC is looking into rerouting R1 and R4 to better serve the new branch, but anything beyond that would require funding they don’t currently have. He noted that the most recent service expansions outside Gary, including Route R4, got funding support from the municipalities they served.

“We made it known, since the West Lake corridor was envisioned, there needs to be attention paid to feeder bus service,” Wright said. “We’d like to see feeder service, but we can’t do that without some kind of a funding arrangement.”

More than 40 states have failed to adopt a series of common-sense laws that advocates say would prevent many of the most easily avoidable crash deaths — and that reluctance to do the bare minimum doesn’t bode well for those states’ potential to more comprehensively reimagine their approaches to traffic safety.

As part of its annual Roadmap of State Highway Safety Law report, nonprofit Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety graded all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on whether (or not) they’d adopted 16 foundational traffic safety policies related to drunk and distracted driving, as well as stronger licensing requirements for child drivers, and vehicle occupant protections.

The states of Missouri and Wyoming tied for the worst on the list, having each passed just three of the recommended 16 laws, with Montana not far behind at just four. In the first two states, it is legal for drivers to have open containers of alcohol in their cars, provided they’re found on the passenger’s side when the driver is pulled over, and Missouri and Montana both allow drivers to send and read text messages behind the wheel, which the report authors say research has shown to be “equivalent to the behavior of drivers at the threshold of the legal limit for alcohol.”

New York and Rhode Island tied for the best, though both were still missing three of the 16 recommended laws, including critical policies related to teaching safe-driving techniques to notoriously dangerous teen motorists. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the crash rate for child drivers is three times that of adults, in part because many states do not use graduated licensing programs that restrict their driving privileges until they’re older and have logged significant supervised practice hours on the road.

Notably, none of the policies on the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety’s wishlist is particularly earth-shattering — and many have been considered best practices in other countries (and a handful of forward-thinking states) for decades.

They include:

• Requiring motorists convicted of drunk-driving offenses in the past to have devices installed on their cars that prevent them from starting the vehicles when they’re over the legal blood alcohol limit, based on an on-board breath test.
• Outlawing texting behind the wheel, which “causes the driver’s eyes to be off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds,” or “the equivalent of driving blind the entire length of a football field” when a car is traveling 55 miles per hour.
• Applying strict licensing requirements on children under 18 years old, who are easily the most dangerous drivers on the road by many metrics, including having the highest rate of killing pedestrians and cyclists of any age group.
• Obligating all occupants of vehicles to use basic safety equipment, including seatbelts for car passengers, rear-facing car seats for babies under two years old, and helmets for high-speed motorcycle riders.

The group emphasized that those recommended policies aren’t a silver bullet to stem the rising tide of crash deaths on American roads, which federal safety agencies project will reach a 15-year high once the numbers from 2021 are finalized. But in concert with building safe roadway infrastructure, people-centered land use reforms, strong automotive safety standards, and strong reforms to protect motorists of color from police violence, some advocates say these laws could prevent some of the most truly egregious roadway crimes — or to put it another way, the floor, rather than the ceiling, of a safe national transportation system.

“These 16 laws do not comprise the entire list of effective public policy interventions states should take to reduce motor vehicle deaths and injuries,” the report authors wrote. “Rather, they are minimum critical traffic safety laws.”

Many advocates say that even these aggressive safety reforms would still set the bar pretty low — particularly when it comes to drunk driving.

According to research cited in the report, experts estimate that the first time a driver is cited for driving under the influence, he will have already driven drunk a stunning 87 times on average before he was caught — and that all of those instances could be prevented if Interlock Ignition Device technology came standard on all cars. The recently passed Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will require automakers to install anti-drunk-driving tech on all new cars by 2026, but it won’t need to be installed on the millions of cars already on the road, and in the meantime, 16 states still don’t even require people who have a proven history of drunk driving to adopt the technology.

That won’t address the underlying problem of how to provide transportation options besides driving for travelers who have had a few, at least in the most deeply auto-centric communities — but it would at least force recidivist DUI offenders who do have access to other modes like taxis, buses and rides from friends to actually use them. 

Perhaps the best argument for adopting strong roadway safety laws, though, is that even the most car-crazy Americans want them — and states can answer their call right now.

In a companion study commissioned at the time of the report, more than two thirds of respondents said that “not enough is being done to reduce dangerous driving behavior on our roadways,” and the majority added that they were either “very” or “extremely” concerned about the roadway behaviors the Advocates’ recommended policies would help address, regardless of where they lived or their political affiliation.

The report authors say that’s evidence enough that state leaders should act now.

“Not only are these actions supported by data, research, and experience, the poll also demonstrates the public’s concern and desire for change,” said Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety President Cathy Chase. “Allowing this carnage to occur year after year, when solutions are readily available, is simply unacceptable.

• That old muffler ad is obsolete — you are gonna pay a lot for it. While everyone complains about inflation, a closer look reveals that much of the overall increase in prices is attributable to cars. The cost of owning an automobile rose 23 percent last year. (Eno Center for Transportation)
• Once again, consumers’ insatiable demand for the higher hoods and heavier weight of ever-bigger trucks and SUVs is deadly for anyone who happens to be standing in their way. These vehicles rarely come with live-saving technology that could mitigate their enormous blind spots. (Consumer Reports)
• Even the traditionally Republican-leaning U.S. Chamber of Commerce is now in favor of transportation equity.
• The U.S. DOT announced a $27 billion bridge repair and replacement program, funded by the infrastructure act (Traffic Technology). Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg launched the program in Pennsylvania (Fox 43).
• Seattle police will no longer stop drivers and cyclists for minor infractions like cracked windshields and not wearing a helmet, recognizing that the fines fall disproportionately on people without the ability to pay them. (Public Cola)
• A new Massachusetts law will force reluctant suburbs to change their zoning policies to subsidize affordable housing near transit stops. (Streetsblog MASS)
• A transgender man in Denver says he was beaten up at a light-rail stop and kicked out of an Uber on the same night. (Metro Weekly)
• Nashville residents are calling for justice on Dickerson Pike after a driver killed a third person in the past year. (News Channel 5)
• Berkeley is shifting road-paving funding from major arterials to neighborhood streets in “equity zones” encompassing less wealthy neighborhoods. (Berkeleyside)
• Some Portlanders spent the MLK Day of Service sweeping up debris from bike lanes. (Bike Portland)
• Buttigieg told CBS News that fatherhood — he and his husband, Chasten, recent adopted infant twins — has given him a new sense of urgency. Any parent can relate.

When are automated speed cameras an equitable tool for roadway safety — and when are they merely creating speed traps that disincentivize cities from making roadways safe because of the money that’s coming in?

That thorny question is at the heart of the discourse over a recent ProPublica investigation into Chicago’s automated enforcement program that found that the 38 percent of speed camera tickets were sent to residents of majority-Black ZIP codes, despite the fact that those ZIP codes account for just 27 percent of the Windy City’s population — and the fact that the cameras themselves were not disproportionately concentrated in Black neighborhoods.

Journalists Emily Hopkins and Melissa Sanchez said the discrepancy stemmed in large part from road design in Chicago’s BIPOC neighborhoods, where there are a preponderance of wide, highway-style that signal to drivers that it’s okay to travel quickly. Thanks to decades of racist policy, communities of color are significantly more likely to live in close proximity to highways, industrial areas, and high-speed arterials that prioritize the speed of drivers over the safety of residents.

I'll admit, I was skeptical about this story when I saw the headline. But I didn't realize how the hollowing out of minority neighborhoods — the destruction of buildings, pedestrian-hostile roadway design — can induce drivers to speed. https://t.co/Pbc2CLOC8f

— Jack Newsham (@TheNewsHam) January 12, 2022

That theory got additional attention after the release of a separate University of Illinois Chicago study the same day, which found that cameras located in Black neighborhoods actually issued a disproportionate share of the city’s speeding tickets, regardless of whether the ticketed drivers themselves were residents of those neighborhoods. As a result, the ProPublica article argued, Black motorists were “hit with more than half a billion dollars in penalties over the last 15 years, contributing to thousands of vehicle impoundments, driver’s license suspensions and bankruptcies.”

The findings prompted a fierce debate among street safety advocates on Twitter. Some argued that Hopkins and Sanchez’s investigation didn’t definitively prove that BIPOC motorists were receiving the brunt of the ticketing burden, since the researchers only had access to the racial demographics of the ZIP codes where tickets were sent, not the race of the drivers themselves; others questioned their decision to de-emphasize the safety benefits of automated enforcement, which the UIC study found had decreased the expected number of fatal and serious injury crashes by 15 percent citywide between 2015 and 2017, albeit not at every camera site.

Others advocates, though, praised the piece for exploring the interlocking structural reasons why cameras aren’t a cure-all for racism in traffic enforcement — and noted that those structures extend far beyond Chicago.

A red light camera can not give you a ticket if you don't run a red light. It does not care if you are black or white when running that red light

Absolutely incredible that the face of this article is a guy with 11 traffic violations, including running 3 red lights, in a year

— The Notorious S.E.B. (@bigseb31213) January 11, 2022

The case for speed cameras

Of course, the debate over the role of automated enforcement in America isn’t exactly new — even if the stakes have never felt higher.

The United States is still very much in the throes of a national reckoning over police killings of Black and brown Americans — many of which occur in the context of pretextual traffic stops — which has spurred calls for law enforcement officers to be removed from roads and replaced with automated technology. That movement has dovetailed with a historic surge in traffic violence, driven in large part by purchases of bigger cars, increases in speeding and other reckless driving behaviors during the pandemic, as well as a contentious battle over federal infrastructure funding that fails to slow down drivers through safe infrastructure.

In the midst of that morass, many advocates have looked to automated enforcement as one of the best solutions available to cities with urgent safety problems but few options — particularly antiracist ones.

Data shows that speed makes a difference in the severity of a crash, with even incremental reductions in speed greatly increasing the likelihood of an individual avoiding death or serious injury in the event of a crash. pic.twitter.com/XyCSgtYVtA

— CDOT (@ChicagoDOT) October 28, 2020

To many advocates, automated enforcement seemed an ideal solution to some of the most pressing traffic safety issues of our day. A speed camera, after all, is a machine: it can’t wield gun or a baton or a fist, can’t exercise “officer discretion” suffused with implicit or explicit racial bias. It’s also cheaper, quicker, and easier to implement than a road diet, and deploying one doesn’t usually require the months of community engagement, endless traffic studies and onerous environmental reviews that a simple lane-narrowing might require.

Most important, automated enforcement often works. An international 2010 study found that speed cameras can reduce fatal and serious injury crashes by 11 to 44 percent, depending on the context in which they’re utilized; in a matter of months, New York City’s camera program slashed speeding violations by as much as 89 percent in select school zones. Put simply, traffic cameras provide a direct financial incentive for drivers to stop speeding — at least in areas where they know a camera is likely to be watching.

Troubling incentives

Market-minded urbanists, though, point out that drivers aren’t the only ones who are subject to financial incentives when a speed camera goes up in their neighborhood — particularly when their city leaders face few restrictions on how they can spend the money they get from that camera.

“I have real qualms when cities are funded through police enforcement and fines,” said Scott Beyer author of Market Urbanism: A Vision for Free Market Cities. “So, no, I don’t really look at speed cameras as ideal. The ideal market urbanist method for getting cars to go slower is simply to redesign the roads to essentially force drivers to slow down. If cameras are going to exist, let’s at least spend the revenue on that, so you eventually, you won’t even need the camera at all.”

Speed cameras are great but the only way they work out is if every dollar of revenue goes toward making driving "harder". As retaliation for their misdeeds.

— Sean Wants (more) Snow (@MoldyBasil) January 14, 2022

Unfortunately, that practice isn’t the norm in most American cities. A recent study from the Tax Policy Center found that in at least 43 states, including Illinois, “some portion of speeding ticket revenue is distributed to … law enforcement,” rather than being directed back towards street safety infrastructure — an incentive structure that the report authors warn may cause those institutions to “become reliant on revenue from more speeding tickets being handed out to fund their day-to-day operations, sometimes called the ‘broken budget model.’” Others plow ticket revenues back into the general fund.

Speed cameras are great but the only way they work out is if every dollar of revenue goes toward making driving "harder". As retaliation for their misdeeds.

— Sean Wants (more) Snow (@MoldyBasil) January 14, 2022

The National Association of City Transportation Officials makes it clear in its Urban Street Design Guide that communities “should never use [automated speed enforcement] to generate revenue,” and that cameras should only be deployed as “a tool for reducing speeds and/or achieving compliance with the posted speed limit.” But without strong regulations in place to require leaders to spend on safety first, not all of them do.

“Any money that is generated should go back into street safety programs. That’s widely considered best practice,” said Jenny O’Connell, senior program manager at NACTO. “It’s also pretty widely accepted that any automated enforcement program should be managed administratively, rather than by the police department. If that involves a contractor, that relationship should be set up so that they’re not generating more money if the ticket revenues rise, so that everybody’s incentive is to reduce speeding, and the fatal and injury crashes that come with it — not to increase ticketing.”

Road design first, enforcement second

The question of how to create a speed camera program that actually stops speeding, though, isn’t as simple as regulating how cities can spend the revenues they get from fines.

Both Beyer and O’Connell point out that cities often can’t easily redesign their most dangerous roads because many roadways are owned by state transportation authorities that prioritize vehicle throughput for regional motorists over the needs of neighborhood residents, who weren’t given a meaningful opportunity to object when a high-speed thoroughfare was created in the first place. Road-safety projects that are under city purview, meanwhile, often face tough competition for tiny pots of federal and state money aimed at improving safety for vulnerable road users; otherwise, their engineers are often legally obligated to follow auto-centric road design guides that all but guarantee speeding.

“A lot of the reason why these streets are designed this way to begin with is that we have these top-down planning interests that are requiring the streets to be over-engineered,” added Beyer. “We should restore local power over those streets and allow choices about road design to be made at the local level. I mean, people always want the traffic in their neighborhoods to be slow.”

It is important to point out that these states require their engineers to build roadways in a way that makes it counterintuitive to go the speed limit. And then they blame you (and fine you) for going the actual design speed of the road. https://t.co/pOJD4cykN6

— Beth Osborne (@BethOsborneT4A) January 13, 2022

Of course, some U.S. neighborhoods do have slow roads — if their residents have enough privilege, money and time to advocate for them.

A 2021 study found that three-quarters of the most-dangerous roads for pedestrians in the United States run through low-income neighborhoods, which are themselves disproportionately likely to be communities of color. And as in the Chicago study, in which all the problem cameras were located on four-lane roads, nearly all those corridors were designed explicitly for speed. A whopping 97 percent of the deadly streets identified in the study had at least three lanes; 70 percent had at least five.

U.S. communities, though, don’t always bother to track where their most deadly roads even are, much less which segments of the transportation network induce the most deadly behaviors before drivers kill. That makes automated cameras a critical data source — particularly when they’re spitting out tons of infractions.

“If a camera is generating a lot of tickets, the idea should never be to keep the camera there, change nothing, and continue to give those tickets out,” said O’Connell. “To the extent that there is a non-police-based incentive program [like automated enforcement], the goal always needs to be safety; a really well-designed program would make less money over time, because people are slowing down.”

Here are my and other’s recs on making automated enforcement equitable, shared w/ Mayor’s Office in Fall 2017. Over four years of punitive financial harms on Black/Brown ppl to make incremental progress. City expanded program after UIC study confirmed inequities. Infrastructure? https://t.co/Ywu1dILJB5 pic.twitter.com/eR4fzIpP91

— Olatunji Oboi Reed (@theycallmeOboi) January 13, 2022

O’Connell added that until cities are able to make meaningful road design changes, it’s critical that they at least reform the fine and fee structures that can plunge low-income motorists into a cycle of poverty, by scaling fines and fees to the offenders’ ability to pay while also making sure they’re commensurate with the potential harm of aggressive driving. Some cities, she pointed out, are also exploring fine-fee restorative justice approaches that show promise.

But at the end of the day, she says, reforming road design should still be a city’s first line of defense – because in many cases, it could also be the last.

“The thing I have to keep hammering home is this: the best and most important tool that cities have at their disposal to make streets safe and comfortable for everyone on the road is design,” she added.

• Fare-capping gives transit riders who can’t afford to buy long-term passes access to the same low fares for unlimited rides without having to pay upfront. It could be a tool to make transit more equitable and lure back riders lost during the pandemic. (Next City)
• Railway Age breaks down how Amtrak could spend $58 billion earmarked for intercity rail in the infrastructure act.
• Micromobility companies like Bird and Lyft — private companies that are worth billions — want subsidies from taxpayers so they can expand. (Smart Cities Dive)
• City officials and cyclists all over the country are divided on whether e-scooters belong on bike paths. (Wired)
• Denver is now over halfway done with a five-year project to build 125 miles of protected bike lanes. (Denver Post)
• One Florida school system is so hard up for bus drivers that it’s considering hiring Uber or paying parents to drive their kids to school. (WFLA)
• After near-record number of traffic deaths in 2021, San Jose drivers have already killed four people this year. (Spotlight)
• Residents are growing more accepting of Detroit bike lanes and starting to use them more, although concerns about gentrification remain. (WDET)
• A private group has raised $10 million in donations for a 34-mile urban trail around Cincinnati. (Spectrum News)
• After a failed attempt with Zagster, Wilmington, North Carolina, is restarting talks to bring in a bike-share company. (Port City Daily)
• Quebec decided that pranking a bunch of people into watching themselves get run over to deter jaywalking is a better use of government funding than, you know, trying to get drivers to stop running people over. (YouTube)

• The U.S. needs a new place-based transportation policy focusing on sustainability and climate change. (Urban Institute)
• Melting permafrost will damage thousands of miles of roads. (Jalopnik)
• Shaming drivers is pointless as long as streets are dangerous for biking and carmakers keep selling ever-larger SUVs. (Treehugger)
• Bike mechanics are petitioning Walmart to stop selling crappy bikes that break quickly and can’t be repaired. (Vice)
• The White House is backing a ride-sharing oversight bill introduced by Rep. Chris Smith after a fake Uber driver killed a New Jersey woman. (NJ.com)
• Vision Zero programs often don’t work because cities implement small recommendations and don’t do the big, expensive ones. (D Magazine)
• Denver’s Regional Transportation District is proposing a major overhaul of bus routes that will cut service to the suburbs while refocusing on the riders who stuck with transit during the pandemic. (Colorado Public Radio)
• Closed to traffic during the pandemic, Ocean Drive in Miami Beach is reopening to cars, but with new two-way bike lanes and a block that will remain pedestrian only. (City Lab)
• Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority CEO Jeffrey Parker has died in an apparent suicide, stepping in front a train Friday night. (Saporta Report)
• Utah is building a 15-minute city from scratch. (Streetsblog USA)
• An Illinois bill would allow smaller cities outside of Chicago to levy a gas tax for the first time. (WREX)
• San Francisco lowered speed limits on parts of seven streets to 20 miles per hour. (NBC Bay Area)
• Milan is building a 466-mile network of protected bike lanes. (City Lab)
• A citizen-drive plan in Berlin would create the largest car-free zone in the world. (Fast Company)

• The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is no new New Deal. The $550 billion in new spending will mostly go to a vast backlog of small projects and deferred maintenance because, for all the damage interstates did to cities, the highway revolts of the 1960s and ’70s had the pernicious side effect of tamping down any appetite for ambition or central planning. (City Lab)
• Transportation data collection and a road-use charge pilot program are two overlooked provisions of the infrastructure package. (Governing)
• The White House wants states to appoint “infrastructure czars” to oversee spending all the cash they’re about to receive. (Route Fifty)
• The Federal Transit Administration is rolling out American Rescue Plan grants, including $6 billion to New York’s MTA (ABC 7), $1.6 billion to New Jersey Transit (Insider) and $1.2 billion to the L.A. Metro (NBC Los Angeles).
• Transit advocates don’t want the L.A. Metro to resume collecting fares in March after two years of being fare-free. (KCRW)
• Maryland’s Purple Line is now four years behind schedule and $1.4 billion over budget. (Washington Post)
• The Memphis Area Transit Authority is exploring ways to extend transit to a nearby Ford plant that will employ 6,000 people. (Commercial Appeal)
• Portland’s Biketown bike-share is expanding into new neighborhoods. (Oregon Public Radio)
• Lime is launching new e-bikes in Washington, D.C. as part of a $50 million expansion. (The Verge)
• Phoenix canceled plans to widen a downtown street and instead will install a protected bike lane after a drunk driver killed a cyclist there. (New Times)
• The transit hub in St. Louis, Grand MetroLink Station, is disconnected from the surrounding community. (St. Louis NPR)
• Ann Arbor officials want to take over state highways within they city because the Michigan DOT won’t let them make safety improvements. (MLive)
• A Duluth, Minnesota, resident is fighting to turn 14-lane I-35 into a six-lane parkway. (Minnesota Public Radio)
• What should Cincinnati do with its 100-year-old abandoned subway tunnels? Wine cellar? Nightclub? What about — hear me out now — mass transit? (The Drive)

This isn’t even a new low.

A new viral Dodge ad has some street safety advocates outraged at the notoriously aggressive carmaker — but others are pointing out that this is just the latest chapter in the company’s long history of commercials that openly promote the deadliest driving behaviors.

On Thursday, the Stellantis subsidiary tweeted a new ad for the Durango SUV, which depicted a simple image of the 2.5-ton assault car with a shiny red paint job menacing the lens, followed by the tagline, “A predator doesn’t need camouflage” and a smirking emoji.

The company later deleted the tweet, but only after it had sparked angry responses from hundreds of users, many of whom questioned a marketing strategy that highlighted the Durango’s killing power on the heels of one of the bloodiest years on American roadways in recent memory.

The federal Department of Transportation estimates that more than 40,000 people died in car crashes in 2021 — the most since 2007 — and experts say the rising proportion of trucks and SUVs in the national vehicle fleet is one of the drivers the surge, particularly among pedestrians, whom the drivers of large vehicle are two to three times more likely to kill than motorists who choose smaller cars.

The US has a record year of pedestrian deaths caused by oversized pick ups.@Dodge: How do you do fellow predators? https://t.co/mt28otjUlT

— Thomas Eckert (@thomaseckert_) January 12, 2022

This "predator" is now available in:
'Blood of Children' Red
("Doesn't need camouflage") https://t.co/3JUUN2mcTE

— Spokey (@Byclemore) January 13, 2022

all car ads are like you can literally murder hundreds of pedestrians with this thing and look pretty sweet doing so ? https://t.co/eLsd6mG02y

— vanilla coke enjoyer (@capittalism) January 13, 2022

Sadly, this wasn’t the first time Dodge openly compared its customers to killer carnivores.

A 2015 dual ad for the company’s Hellcat and Viper models featured a Phil Collins soundtrack over a growling voiceover, which despaired a modern reality where human beings “don’t have to worry about predators like our ancestors did; no saber tooth tigers stalking from the brush, no dire wolves circling the camp. There are no more monsters to fear — and so we have to build our own.”

When that commercial made an appearance in Streetsblog’s America’s Most Toxic Car Ad contest last September, we wondered why, exactly, anyone in their right mind would be on “team make-America-a-violent-prehistoric-hellscape-again” — and what it says about American culture that the idea of deliberately stalking and killing anything with an automobile would be such a strong selling point.

Even that ultra-aggressive messaging though, though wasn’t quite bad enough to beat out the competition. The infamous Dodge “Predators” commercial didn’t even make it past the first round — because it was matched up against another Dodge ad that compared its cars to supernatural demons capable of shattering glass with the sound of their speeding engines alone.

Dodge’s violent ads aren’t just a matter of poor taste. There’s evidence that depictions of aggressive driving can inspire such behavior among motorists on real-world roadways — evidence that countries around the world have answered by barring auto advertisers from airing them.

In the particularly strict nations like the United Kingdom, even the perennial “professional driver on a closed course” isn’t exempt. A 2018 Ford ad was banned from Britain for including a voiceover of the famous Dylan Thomas poem “Do Not Go Gentle” — you know, the one that urges readers to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” — over images of officer workers growing increasingly furious over the everyday indignities of spilled coffee, crowded train commutes, and obnoxious lectures from the boss.

At the end of the ad, a Mustang revs out of a parking garage and onto an empty public road; the car isn’t speeding anywhere nearly as quickly as the average car in a Dodge commercial, but British Advertising Standards Authority still thought the behavior in the spot put “the driver, other motorists and pedestrians at risk.”

For now, American watchdogs aren’t very likely to step in even when companies like Dodge openly market driving as a violent and predatory activity —never mind a horrifyingly fuel-intensive way to decorate a Christmas tree.

Giving this tree some much-needed skrt. #HappyHolidays pic.twitter.com/wO1RsadT2x

— Dodge (@Dodge) December 24, 2021

But with enough advocate pressure, someday they might – and in the meantime, those same advocates will be fighting for the kind of road designs that will slow even the most speed-hungry drivers.

And along the way, they’ll even throw in a free biology lesson or two for the company’s advertisers.

Your chosen fursona, the ram, is a vegetarian. Also, name a predator that doesn't have camouflage. Go ahead. pic.twitter.com/1doR6L6wDO

— Municipal House of Pancakes (@peasantvision) January 12, 2022