Senior Editor
@streetsblogUSA
covering the fight to end car dependence + facilitate a just transition to a car-optional US. Ops mine. Tips➡️kea
@streetsblog
.org.
Hot take, but sometimes, I actually like how slow biking, walking, & even transit can be. So much of our lives are about brutal, relentless efficiency & productivity, often not even for our own benefit. Going slow can be a form of resistance, and it shouldn't be a big privilege.
If I die on a city road without a protected bike lane, I don't want a ghost bike. I want a memorial bike lane. And if the city says it's not possible, I want people to advocate until it is.
Last night at a community meeting, I heard a traffic engineer say they couldn't narrow the lanes on a dangerous road because it might create "side friction" between large vehicles and parked cars.
One of my neighbors: "I'd rather a parked car get dinged than person get killed."
This just happened on my 25 mph residential street with a road-narrowing median and ADA compliant sidewalks. But me again why installing speed governors on our cars would be more dangerous than this.
It drives me kind of nuts how vague our conversations about climate change can be, so let's just say the quiet part loud: 40% of US emissions come from the manufacture and driving of passenger cars. Not just "transport", not just "industry"; cars.
Wrote about why it takes many months (if not years!) to get even the most basic pedestrian improvements installed, and how Cincinnati is addressing that by hiring a 5 person crew to do only that.
Curious: do folks realize that Americans owe almost as much on their cars ($1.5 trillion) as they do on their student loans ($1.7 trillion)? Why do you think so many people consider the latter a national crisis, but not the former?
Forever fascinated by people who think drunk driving is bad but speeding is fine. Like...what do you think drunk drivers do, exactly, that kills so many people?
E-bike rebates are important for a lot of reasons, but IMO the most exciting thing about them is their potential to encourage cities to build a lot of protected infrastructure for them fast.
I ❤️my e-bike, but that thing is heavy, and on big-time chronic pain days like this getting it up even my 4 basement stairs is kind of a non-starter. We really need to have a conversation about accessible e-bike parking, including at private residences.
IDK who needs to see this, but here's 21 states openly admitting that their planned highway projects will increase greenhouse gas emissions, in a legal filing challenging a federal rule that would require them to tell the public...literally that exact information.
I have written 4-6 articles a week for 4.5 years about why car domination is terrible, and yet this paper STILL surfaced a bunch of stuff I had never thought about before. Digest below, short thread of some of the most surprising ones in the🧵.
Have you ever thought about how much we ask bus drivers to do at once? It's wild! The job description is basically "heavy machinery operator/ticket taker/social worker/security guard/tour guide; must be willing to go hours without peeing + endure constant abuse; pay $15-25/h."
I cried when I interviewed Dan Langenkamp about the death of his wife, Sarah. She was a hero who saved countless lives in Ukraine only to be killed on her bike by a truck driver in MD. Her story deserves to be told, and these deaths must be prevented.
Did a deep dive into how the Dutch do drivers license exams and how it complements their world-class self-enforcing infrastructure.
Suffice it to say: if you're an American, you would probably fail!
Having some feelings today about the secretary of transportation applauding America's first high speed rail project not for providing alternatives to driving/flying, but for ... giving the people who work on it enough money to put "a new car or truck in the driveway."
Sending solidarity to electric stove Twitter today, y'all are dealing with a lot of the same bullshit as bike/walk/transit Twitter have been dealing with for years🙏
I wish we would take more about biking as form of pleasure activism. Yes, we do a lot of things to make it miserable in a lot of American cities, but even still: name another form of daily climate action that brings so many people so much joy.
I’m at a community meeting and one of my neighbors just described being hit while crossing the 5 lane arterial on which he lives, having to drag himself out of the road by his hands to survive, and ending up with $45k in medical debt because the driver ran and was never found.
I used to be one of the only Vision Zero advocates I knew who hadn't lost an immediate family member to traffic violence. I can't say that anymore.
My uncle Jim was killed by a driver while riding his bike. We cannot stop fighting until this stops happening.
I can't tell you how moved I was by the story of Steven Hardy-Braz, who's been putting his body on the line on NC roads to bring attention to the dangers of inaccessible bus stops. Steven recently got arrested for his advocacy — but it certainly didn't start there. 🧵
I don't know if there's a better symbol of US safety culture than the way we treat hot car deaths. We could require automakers to install a $50 alarm that senses when a kid is accidentally left in the backseat. Instead we choose to let ~40 kids a year die, and blame the parents.
Q for a story: what are some of the ways we use euphemisms or everyday language to invisibilize the role of car dependency in our society? Thinking of the obvious stuff like "traffic accidents" instead of "car crashes", but curious if folks have other examples...
Headline is horrifying, but there's a big buried lede here: yes, 48% of Americans are afraid they or someone they love will be hit by a driver while walking... but that's excluding the 18% who already had a close call, and the 4% who were *already hit.*
TFW a ton of urbanists on my timeline are cheerleading an oil industry ghoul who signed near-total abortion/trans healthcare/critical race theory education bans because he has a 101 level understanding of car culture + would be cool with building more neighborhood coffee shops.
“We built cities all over America that are designed for automobiles and not designed for people... Our housing costs are high, in part because of the way that we've designed our cities."
-
@GovDougBurgum
North Dakota comments during the
@NatlGovsAssoc
winter meetings
A horrific crash claimed the lives of 6 road workers on the Maryland beltway.
I'm not talking about the Key Bridge collapse. I'm talking about the 6 *other* workers who were killed a year ago by a driver—and why we treat the two disasters so differently.
My cancelable urbanism take forever: we *should* be skeptical of camera enforcement that generates big money for city general funds. It's a sign that road design is encouraging dangerous behavior, and that we need to use that $ to rethink that infrastructure.
I spent a while digging around in this fantastic new trove of road safety data that DOT just gave us, and a few things really stood out.
#1
. In all of these cities, no one has died in a car crash for 4 years straight.
Don't ever let anyone tell you Vision Zero is impossible.
Morbid but 100% serious question: Is there a place where advocates to end traffic deaths can pre-upload their obituaries that make it clear how they want their deaths to be covered by the media, and how they want policymakers to respond, if they are killed in car crashes?
Only in America would we call it a "miracle" when four people (including two children) narrowly survive a horrific crash on a dangerously designed road in a car whose manufacturer falsely advertises it as being capable of "full self driving."
Okay but: can someone explain to me why we don't have similar lawsuits against businesses that sell lift kits that bring a truck's bumper up to the level of an adult pedestrian's head, license plate covers to avoid plate readers, modded headlights that blind other motorists...
DOJ announced that it's suing eBay for selling 343,000+ "rolling coal" devices that enable trucks to violate the Clean Air Act. Fines could reach $2 billion.
We love to see it.
I think a lot of Americans honestly believe that speeding is a victimless crime in part because they don't know just how deadly "slow" speeds like 35 mph are for pedestrians. (Which is not to say they would necessarily care if they *did* know, but still.)
Something street safety advocates tend to forget is that in the minds of most people in America, there is no traffic safety crisis. Most people identify strongly as drivers, and until a couple years ago, streets really were getting safer almost every year, at least for them.
The thing about cycling and walking advocacy is that virtually every single person in this movement has lost someone to a sudden, violent death on our roads, and everyone that hasn't, statistically speaking, *will* lose someone sooner or later.
A thing I think cyclists should talk more openly about is that one bike often *isn't* enough to meet all your transportation needs...which is why a lot of us have two, or three, or more (plus a well-worn bus pass + car share membership for trips that bikes truly can't do.)
Snark aside: we know that bike lanes actually boost *most* businesses, just not exclusively auto-oriented ones. Has any city tried to be proactive about helping the body shop owners of the world cope with these transitions, relocate, etc.?
I love this op-ed we just published. I can't promise I'll never use the term 'micromobility' again but I will definitely question why we don't have a similar buzzword for cars that are drastically oversized for the tasks we use them to perform.
A surprising thing I learned while writing this: male car crash victims outnumber women 3:1 *in the Netherlands*, where safe transportation systems are the norm, just like in the U.S, where they're very much not.
And we really need to talk about why.
Quick rant since this wildly misunderstood stat is getting memefied again: no, 100 companies are not directly contributing 70% of global emissions without any help from consumers like you, and yes, it matters how much plastic you use, and more importantly, how much you drive. 🧵
I would much rather cities use infrastructure to physically prevent people from parking in bike lanes, but until that happens: please remember this story every time you consider pulling over onto some green paint, even for a second. Her name was Lily Grace and her life mattered.
Ugh. Heartbreaking. The child's father saw this
3-Year-Old Girl in Bike Carrier Dies When Mom Goes Around ComEd Truck Parked in Bike Lane and Is Hit By Passing Semi – NBC Chicago
us: hey, it would be cool if we did some very gentle regulatory stuff so fewer kids got [life-shortening asthma from cooking Kraft dinner]/[crushed by Hummers] over time
them: you and your government will steal my [in-home N02 factory]/[murder car] over my literal dead body
This is heartbreaking and unacceptable on so many levels, but the thing that's rising to the surface to me today is this: we badly need to design streets and vehicles where reaching 45 miles per hour in places where people walk is impossible, regardless of who's behind the wheel.
Janae Edmondson, a 16-year-old Tennessee girl visiting St. Louis for a volleyball tournament, lost both of her legs after she was hit by a reckless, speeding driver who crashed while she was walking back to her hotel.
By my count, this is the sixth fatal hit and run crash against a cyclist or pedestrian in STL in a single month. Six. That is astonishing and unacceptable # for a city of 300k.
@ksdknews
, this is part of a trend and you badly need to contextualize it.
I am once again begging regulators to stop selling cars that can go 120 miles per hour to people who are not licensed race car driver who pledge to only drive them on closed tracks, never mind literal children. There is no defensible reason for this.
Unreal video from Fairfax County Police. Officer was doing a traffic stop near Fairfax when FCPD says a 17 yr old driving a BMW M3 over 120 mph lost control & slammed into the pulled over car. It’s a miracle but no one involved was seriously hurt. Turn the sound up to hear it.
Driver survived with a head injury, no passerby hurt, but that was sheer luck since kids play on this yard literally every day. A car flipped onto the sidewalk in an eerily similar way one block from here last year. This is not normal, but it is normalized.
Writing this one made me curious: if you are car-free or car-light, what percentage of your household income do you spend on transportation, and what privileges make that possible? I'll start: 2% total, aka one tenth of the average American, apparently. 🫣
I've gotten more emails about this one than anything I've written in a while, and they're almost all horrifying or heartbreaking. Intercity bus lines are lifelines for a lot of people and the death of the bus station as we know it is a *massive* loss.
Mayor
@JohnBauters
is one of those rare Twitter-famous people who is even more inspiring offline. Wrote about his successful (and super-fast) campaign to put seats at every bus stop that didn't have them in his town, longer interview coming soon. :)
Pedestrian deaths have not been this high since six years before I, a whole ass grown adult who wrote this article, was even born.
Drivers didn't all magically get worse. Pedestrians didn't stop looking both ways. This is the result of policy failures, and we can fix them.
Pedestrian deaths in the United States climbed once again in 2022, reaching their highest point in 41 years.
And if that stat sounds disturbingly familiar: frankly, it is.
@streetsblogkea
explores why the bloody trend shows no signs of stopping.
Finishing up a long read on hit and runs that'll probably run tomorrow, but for now, a few stats that floored me:
Less than 2% of vehicle occupants are killed by drivers who flee the scene.
For bicyclists and pedestrians, it's 20% on average — and in 2020, it was *24%.*
Mostly, though, I want you to sit with this quote from her husband, Dan. We can no longer lie to ourselves that car crash deaths are unfortunate but necessary to keep the world moving. They are violent, they are preventable, and they cost us so much more than we can afford.
Felt this so deeply today: "If a Black, seven year-old child can step outside and instinctually know that the street is not safe for her, we have a problem that is bigger than just where to put paint and bollards." -
@DrDesThePlanner
.
#unurbanist
More than 20 million people are seriously injured or killed in car crashes every year worldwide. Have you ever just stopped and thought about how much untreated trauma and grief follows that, and what a terrible cycle that can create?
The truck that struck her is large enough to fit 27 bicyclists in its front and side blind spots.
@USDOT
knows this — they funded the site that made this graphic — but refuses to require simple detection technology to save lives like hers
This is exactly the kind of road where ~75% of pedestrians die. High speed, multi-lane, flanked by homes and businesses where people are obviously going to walk. It is unacceptable and it needs to change.
I’m at the site of the crash where a driver killed my coworker and friend Shawn Soares last night while he was walking on the sidewalk here, and it’s not hard to see that Main Street is not safe. Lower the speed limit, build raised crosswalks, force drivers to slow down.
Stray question: how much of good road design's ability to calm traffic comes from the fact that it physically prevents drivers from driving dangerously, and how much comes from the fact that good infrastructure sends an implicit message that there's a social contract here?
I cannot say how many conversations I've had with friends who are terrified they will die on a bike or on foot, and explicitly asked their loved ones to raise hell if that happens so they don't die in vain. IMO policymakers need to know how common that thought is.
One idea from this paper that I don't want to get buried: expanding e-bike rebates to incl. bikeshare memberships, *in addition to* buying folks bikes of their own. Could be so clutch for people who don't have good storage, can't lift bikes up stairs, etc.
Often, as a journalist, grieving families will ask me not to share certain details of what happened to their loved ones’ bodies because they’re so disturbing. Underride truck/bike crashes are *always* the worst. Trust me: We need this regulation yesterday.
I don’t know what point there is to be made with this but it is never not stunning to me how often we can hear stories like this and how little changes. Vision Zero is about so much more than ending deaths. It is about ending horrific traumas that cost so many so much.
Stray thought: has anyone ever used VR or AR to help people instantly visualize what a street would look like if it were redesigned around people? Like, an app on your phone that you could point at any street in your city and imagine it with fewer cars + better infrastructure.
I know a lot of folks' impulse is going to be "screw these dinosaurs, we won't need their services once we're all biking", but IDK. Almost every bike lane battle I've covered has a small business like this leading the charge. I don't think we can just ignore them.
Fav humble-but-super-effective traffic safety thing of the day: speed cushions, which are basically just speed bumps but with cut-outs near lane lines so ambulances/fire trucks/snow plows can drive over them without slowing down or bottoming out, but passenger cars can't.
New
@nhtsa
crash stats from 2022 Q1 just dropped, and they're up 7% nationwide from 2021.
Would particularly love to hear y'alls theories on wtf is going on in the mid Atlantic, where deaths are up 52% (!).
Heading to Philadelphia for a conference in a few weeks and just realized I've never been before! Accepting suggestions re: stuff to do, places to bike, interesting city-nerd stuff to gawk at + of course, things I really, really have to eat.
I really wish this article had mentioned everything
@dlangenkamp
has done in the wake of his wife's death to organize for policy to save future lives. Posting a few links in the thread. Sarah Langenkamp deserves an extraordinary legacy and we can all help fight for it.
Solutions safety orgs are funding, with actual American dollars, to reduce holiday drunk driving: A "Nothing Uglier than a DUI holiday sweater campaign", insurance company-themed mocktail recipes.
Meanwhile, most bars in America are required by law to build parking lots.
Raise you’re hand it you’re shocked that the
#cop26
transport agenda is focused almost exclusively on solutions that make the automotive industry money and not transit or active transportation.
Here's your semi-annual reminder that traffic studies are bullshit, and not just because they almost universally over-estimate how many new driving trips building that new apartment building in a walkable neighborhood will "generate."
I get particularly irked when we say "transport" is the leading source of ghg emissions, because it gives folks cover to assume that maybe things like jet fuel and cruise ships are the real problem. They're *a* problem, for sure...but not nearly as big as how much we drive.
Another thing I kinda knew but have never seen quantified exactly this way: The US has ~twice as many cars per capita as most European countries, 4x as many as China, and way more than pretty much every other country on Earth.
"Vegetables evolved around 10,000 BC. In the subsequent eons, humanity has found more efficient alternatives to feed people both in terms of caloric density and convenience, like high fructose corn syrup."
The bicycle was invented in the mid-1800s. In the subsequent 175 years, humanity has found more efficient alternatives to transport people in terms of both speed, efficiency, and convenience.
Redesigning streets to disproportionately accommodate a solution that has already been
Bike culture is complicated, but at its very best, it is a culture of humility, of harm reduction in a violent world, of care for an imperiled planet, and of resistance to systems that push us, constantly, to consume at others' expense. I hope we can remember that in her honor.
In 2019, the average distance a pregnant person had to travel to access abortion care in the US was 29 miles. Already largely inaccessible to people without access to a car, especially in an emergency.
Here's what the post-Roe distances would be in key trigger law states.
There isn't anything magic about a white line on the ground that makes drivers reckless. But in the U.S., we tend to paint those lines on big arterials where we should really build protected infrastructure—and then act surprised when people get hurt.
Cute thing someone just sent me: a version of Frogger without the cars. The frog just...crosses the street without incident, then chats with random characters about how much they love sustainable cities + collects points to ride a bullet train. 😂
Side note of personal interest: Cincy and STL both have populations around 300k.
But in 2021, 20 pedestrians were killed in STL; in Cincy, it was 5. STL in 2020: 22 dead. Cincy: 6.
Cincy has been investing a lot more into saving lives, even before this crew. We should, too.
I *did* know that when we talk about microplastics, we're basically talking about car tires, which are like 75% of all particulates. I did *not* know that shit ends up in the fucking arctic circle.
Car crashes are nearly 10% higher every year than probably realize — but because those deaths happen in things like driveways and parking lots, regulators and even Vision Zero advocates don't make it a priority to save those ~4,000 lives. 🧵
(Before my reply guys come after me, no, this tweet is not arguing against BRT/rail, duh. But it is arguing for us to stop trying to debate car culture on car culture's terms.)
I'll admit I was a little bit of a roundabout skeptic before I wrote this (as I am of any traffic safety thing that gets held up as a silver bullet), but I learned a lot about them while I wrote this that makes me more optimistic. Quick thread...
A thing I did not totally understand before I wrote this article is that our super-fast delivery economy as it exists today *does not work* if truck drivers travel at speeds that are less likely to kill someone. And we trade ~1,000 lives every year for it.
Big tech to drivers: Here's an app that shows you where road work started 5 seconds ago, how it will affect your commute time and 3 alt. routes.
Big tech to non-drivers: Here's a walking route! Maybe there's a sidewalk, IDK! Not sure about wheelchair ramps either. Good luck?
Sarah was remarkable, but her death, sadly, was not. The street where she died is exactly the kind of road where ~75% of biking deaths happen, but we stubbornly refuse to redesign them for safety, even though we absolutely know how.
Big action alert: The federal manual that police depts across the country use to decide which crash data to include on reports is up for review. And it's recommending that *all roadway design data* be removed to an optional supplement.
Going on record that I am not a fan of the “people who drive huge trucks have small dicks” thing. Skip the tired body shaming and gender essentialism shit, focus on the fact that these things kill a lot of kids.
Memes like this are well-intentioned, but IMO if we want to end car dependency we need to stop focusing so much on the economics and start unraveling all the cultural, habitual, and purely pragmatic reasons people drive so much. Economics is powerful but it isn't the whole story.
We all know that a shocking number of people died on U.S. roads in 2020, but this study dug *really* deep into who those crashes happened to, and some of it honestly blew me back.
#1
: A ton of people without valid licenses. And we don't really know why.
There's a *really* cool new tool from USDOT to visualize exactly how bad your specific city/county is at road safety. Here's St. Louis, which ranks in the top 25 most dangerous large metros.
One big one: "transportation sector emissions," which is accurate, I guess, but dear god I wish we had a shorthand way to highlight quickly that 80% of those emissions = cars and trucks
(I get that a lot of this is coming from blue state folks who are thirsty to hear their democratic politicians give soundbites even remotely close to this, but like...google him once before you say you want him to be president, I beg of you.)
I don't know why we have to keep saying this, but: if you think scooters/bikes etc. riding on the sidewalk is dangerous for pedestrians (same!), you should be fighting for those modes to have their own lane, not for folks to stop riding, and certainly not for more cops.
My spicier personal take on this: a lot of Vision Zero advocates (including me at times!!!) devote *way* too much energy and time to the pushing for the "safe vehicles" slice of the Safe Systems pie, and we will badly regret it down the line.
All across America, we require cities to design roads that actively encourage sober drivers to reach deadly speeds. We actively allow automakers to install distracting infotainment systems in cars that we know cause motorists to drive *worse* than if they were drunk.
#2
: We have done a *really* good job at hiding how bad traffic violence is in a lot of cities by focusing on car-centric metrics like deaths per vehicle mile traveled. This is the breakdown per capita for cities over 50k pop., and IMO, it is pretty stunning.