B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

In 2025, the Amazon rainforest shrank by exactly 1.63 million hectares. But nobody can say how much wildlife vanished with it.

This illustrates one of the biggest challenges confronting scientists and others working to stem the loss of biodiversity. While satellites offer a sweeping birds-eye view of the planet, it can seem like ecologists tracking the ebb and flow of species in a place like the Amazon are studying a distant galaxy through a pinhole.

“If a tree has fallen almost anywhere in the world we know it almost in a matter of days. But I can tell you almost nothing about how biodiversity is faring below the canopy,” said Amy Rosenthal, who heads conservation initiatives at Planet Labs, a U.S. company that specializes in producing satellite imagery for various purposes.

But technology has reached the point where scientists and more than two dozen organizations including Planet are betting that they can pierce the forest canopy and create a near real-time view of trends in wildlife across the vast Amazon.

Last week, they announced the project Amazon.ia (the “i.a.” is an acronym for “inteligencia ambiental” or “environmental intelligence”). The plan calls for a network of between 10 and 30 sites across the Amazon, equipped with wildlife-tracking instruments. Their output can then be fed into computer models. Other sites could be added on a temporary basis. The end goal is a high-resolution picture of the state of biodiversity across the region, updated continuously as new data flows in.

While the project is still in its infancy, and observers caution that it may not be able to make good on all of the grand promises, there is also a sense that tools developed in the last decade are now at the point where it’s reasonable to launch such an effort.

“We’ve been talking like ‘Oh, we need to take an ecosystem and just do it,’” said Tanya Berger-Wolf, an Ohio State University computational ecologist who isn’t part of the initiative. “We need to monitor everything everywhere all at once and make sense of it all, often in real time. … This is the holy grail.”

In recent years, scientists have been working to devise ways to improve wildlife monitoring by marrying new tech with powerful artificial intelligence. Data from cheap, durable audio recorders and motion-activated cameras is crunched by computer programs capable of identifying individual species and discerning patterns. Increasingly, automated field labs can collect and sequence wildlife DNA from insect traps. Satellites equipped with hyperspectral imaging can see a broader light spectrum than visible light, enabling researchers to detect things like tree stress brought on by drought. Computer models can combine such data streams with a detailed map of a region’s geography to estimate what’s happening in places well beyond a specific research station.

Some of these new approaches were highlighted in a recent XPrize competition in which competing teams used drones, rapid DNA analysis, audio recorders and other technology to document hundreds of species in a patch of Amazon rainforest in 24 hours.

The new initiative would equip core sites with camera and audio recorders as well as insect traps and links to computers capable of making sense of the data. The organizers include several South American research groups already running field stations that will be among the first to feed into this network, including ones in Peru, Ecuador and Brazil.

The new initiative should help in part by enabling scientists to discern patterns across the entire region, rather than noticing them in one place and wondering what’s happening elsewhere, says Corine Vriesendorp, an ecologist and head of science for the Peruvian organization Conservación Amazónica, which operates a station on the Los Amigos River that’s in the new program.

One example of such blindspots is recent research showing that populations of birds in intact forests at a field station in Ecuador and another in Brazil have decreased. Based on scattered existing data, it’s not clear if it’s part of a broader trend. Nor do scientists know if insect populations – a food source for many of the birds – have also fallen.

Such region-wide insights could also help galvanize political action, she said. “Being able to say something about what’s going on in all of these places will be super important politically and also from a science research perspective.”

It remains to be seen whether Amazon.ia can live up to that hope. The organizers say they need $100 million to run the program for 10 years, with much of the expense in equipment, computers, staffing and training people in the various countries. So far, the group has raised around $20 million, said Rosenthal, with some $14 million of it from the philanthropic Bezos Earth Fund. They have recruited five locations to act as data-collecting points, including the Los Amigos site, leaving between five and 25 to be brought on board.

There are technical limitations that will almost certainly emerge. For instance, acoustic data can currently help scientists know whether a particular bird species has passed nearby. But it’s not very good at telling you how big that bird population is, says Justin Kitzes, a quantitative ecologist at the University of Pittsburgh who specializes in bioacoustics.

Then there is the challenge of producing a reliable, detailed view of things happening across a river basin spanning 7 million square kilometers, roughly the same size as the lower 48 U.S. states combined.

Even with advanced computer models and dozens of observation posts, Kitzes expects efforts to understand how biodiversity is changing across the Amazon will run up against a lack of data. “With 30 stations spread across the Amazon with that type of technology, will you know everything going on in the Amazon? Of course not,” said Kitzes. “Will you know a lot more than you used to? Probably.”

Same-day delivery? More like Hell on Wheels.

Amazon delivery drivers have spent the last five years racking up thousands of serious traffic violations, including speeding through school zones, blocking bus and bike lanes and parking next to fire hydrants, according city data collected by an organization looking to reform the logistics giant’s hiring practices.

A new interactive tool from the labor-aligned Alliance for a Greater New York details the many thousands of traffic infractions drivers for Amazon collected between July 2021 and June 2025. The interactive map, called Amazon Delivers Dangers, shows that Amazon-associated delivery vans drew 14,290 tickets from cameras and traffic enforcement agents over the five-year period.

The map sorts the tickets into the following categories:

• 3,602 citations for blocking bus lanes, bus stops, or other public-transit access
• 2,689 citations for obstructing curb access
• 2,366 citations involving traffic and intersection safety
• 2,162 citations for speeding in school zones
• 2,051 citations for obstructing emergency-response access
• 1,340 citations for blocking pedestrian or cyclist space.

Between 2019 and 2024, the number of packages delivered in New York City jumped by nearly 40 percent, from 1.8 million per day to 2.5 million per day. That trend has driven many more delivery vans onto city streets.

An illegally parked van in the Grand Street bike lane.

The map shows that Amazon delivery drivers’ dangerous habits are not limited to a single corner of the city or a few bad-apple drivers. The company’s drivers have received tickets in every last one of the city’s 51 City Council districts, and the 10 plates with the most combined citations accounted for only 904 of the 14,920 tickets.

The map is the latest lob in the fight between labor organizers and Amazon over the Delivery Protection Act, a bill proposed by Council Member Tiffany Caban (D-Queens). That bill requires the operators of “last-mile” warehouses to directly hire anyone doing deliveries out of that warehouse, which would effectively require Amazon to directly hire the delivery drivers who work for the company dropping off packages around the city.

Currently, Amazon relies on subcontracting its deliveries out to companies known as Delivery Service Partners, which are local independent logistics companies that lease Amazon trucks and uniforms from the online retail giant. By hiring DSPs as subcontractors that pick up deliveries from its warehouses around the city, critics say Amazon is able to skirt any regulations or responsibility for how those drivers behave on the road, despite the fact that Amazon is the company that tracks delivery times and sets routes for drivers.

Every dot is a traffic ticket collected by an Amazon-linked delivery van.

Caban’s bill would also mandate safety training for drivers and ensure that Amazon proper — and not an ever-changing roster of DSPs — is liable for the traffic violations by delivery drivers.

“Amazon’s business model is built on the routine violation of traffic laws,” Matt Multari, a former Amazon delivery driver, said in a press release announcing the new mapping tool. “Amazon surveils you and tracks you to the minute, forcing you to go faster. You don’t have time to look for parking. If Amazon’s AI notices that you are going slower than what they expect, you can get penalized, or eventually terminated.”

A majority of the City Council supports Caban’s bill. Amazon has spent $5 million lobbying against the legislation, and warned supportive Council Members that the company would stop using electric cargo bikes to deliver packages if it becomes law. It is unclear why Amazon would abandon its micromobility practices if the city required it to directly hire the people who ride company-branded cargo bikes.

“Companies like Amazon are using subcontractors to shield themselves from their responsibility to keep workers and New Yorkers writ large safe,” Caban said in a press release. “That’s why I’m proud to be the lead sponsor of the Delivery Protection Act, which would create a licensing system for last-mile deliveries, force companies to take responsibility for their drivers, protect against unfair retaliation and firing of workers, and require real training for workers.”

A spokesperson for Amazon claimed the company’s violations are a “tiny fraction” of its total deliveries, which “does not suggest a systemic issue” — and pointed to the company’s e-cargo bikes as evidence of Amazon trying to address the issue.

“Safe and responsible delivery practices are always a top priority. Delivery Service Partners are local, independent businesses, responsible for their own operations and for following the traffic and parking laws in the communities where they operate, including addressing any citations,” the rep, Leigh Ann Gullett, said in a statement.

“We work closely with them to promote safe delivery practices, from hands-on driver training to in-vehicle safety technology, and we continue to invest in solutions like our e-cargo bike and on-foot delivery programs that reduce the need for vehicles on city streets and help us be a good neighbor in the communities we serve.”

• The latest version of Transportation for America’s “Deadly by Design” report ranks congressional districts by pedestrian deaths, with the highest by far being the Arizona 3rd in Phoenix. Congress distributes billions of dollars in transportation funding to cities and states each year, but steadfastly refuses to hold those state and local agencies accountable for safety improvements.
• Almost half of parents report that their child has experienced a close call from dangerous drivers at a school bus stop or near a school, according to a survey by the Governors Office of Highway Safety. (Jalopnik)
• AAA says the average annual cost of owning an operating a new vehicle has risen more than $1,000 since last year, to nearly $13,000.
• Traffic congestion should be viewed as something motorists impose on themselves and other road users, as opposed to casting drivers as the victims. (Planetizen)
• Why do more Philadelphians die in car crashes than in comparable cities like New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C.? (The Conversation)
• Private passenger rail company Brightline cut a deal with investors on a $490 million lifeline to save it from bankruptcy (Miami Herald). Brightline demonstrated the appeal of high(ish)-speed rail in South Florida, but its financial problems once again beg the question, who will pay for the infrastructure? After all, airlines don’t pay for airports (Grist).
• Orange County, Florida is seriously considering an ambitious citizen-led plan for an Orlando mass transit system combining light and heavy rail with bus rapid transit. (Central Florida Public Broadcasting)
• Both Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healy and Republican challenger Mike Minogue want to suspend the state gas tax, which may be popular, but it only saves drivers a few bucks and sends the wrong message about transportation priorities. (Commonwealth Beacon)
• Dallas leaders believe the city needs a grand strategy tying together planning, transportation and infrastructure to keep up its economic momentum. (Morning News; paywall)
• Sacramento opened a new light rail station four months early. (ABC 10)
• Police have started ticketing violators in Pittsburgh’s new Oakland bus-only lanes. (TribLive)
• The Charlotte Area Transit System is implementing the first of improvements called for by last year’s transit funding referendum. (Queen City News)
• China opened four new high-speed rail lines with a combined length of about 700 miles on Monday alone. (China Daily)
• Spacing obtained the actual request for proposals Ontario issued for a construction company to physically tear up Toronto bike lanes, and it looks like retrofitting those streets for even more cars will be extremely disruptive and cost a lot of money.
• Meanwhile, cyclists in Alberta are pushing back on a similar policy, showering lawmakers with postcards. (Cycling Magazine)

The Trump Administration’s takeover of East Potomac Park is devastating for the residents of DC. East Potomac Park is home to some of the city’s best green space. Trump wants to redevelop the entirety of East Potomac into a single, PGA-caliber golf course, likely to be financially inaccessible to the majority of the course’s current demographic.

Trump’s approach reinforces elitism and promotes poor land use — the exact opposite of what an urbanist approach to green space should be.

As an urbanist, one of the most ironic qualities about me is I love golf. There’s nothing like the feeling of spending your weekend mornings outside and chasing the high of hitting a perfect shot. Yet at the same time, I often struggle with the moral conundrum of whether golf is fundamentally antithetical to the urbanist mission. There’s a world in which golf and urbanism can coexist, and DC is the best example of it, making Trump’s takeover uniquely problematic. 

Recommended A Lot of Golf Courses Should Probably Be Parks Roger Rudick April 28, 2020

Golf is a prime target for urbanists due to inefficient land-use. Other critics argue that golf courses serve a niche population who are typically older, wealthy white men.

While that may be true of many private country clubs in the suburbs, municipal golf looks quite different. It serves a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, races, and age groups. People of color and women are amongst the fastest growing groups of golfers, and the game has been shifting towards younger age groups. Cities also need green spaces, and those parks should come in a variety of shapes and sizes, whether they are traditional parks, gardens, a soccer field, or a golf course.

This shift is only possible when courses aim to grow the game and commit to accessible, affordable golf. The National Links Trust (NLT), a non-profit, 501c3 organization achieves this goal through its mission of “positively impacting our community and changing lives through affordable and accessible municipal golf.” NLT prioritizes sustainability and biodiversity in its core missions, focusing on reducing energy and water usage and ensuring that a variety of species can thrive in its golf courses.  NLT currently manages Rock Creek Golf Course, Langston Golf Course, and, for now, East Potomac Golf Links in DC.

The Langston Golf Course in DC is a historic course celebrated as a beacon of African American golf heritage. Today, the course offers free lessons and a caddie internship program for high schoolers to increase access to golf at minimal costs. Langston keeps green fees at an affordable rate.

The East Potomac Golf Course offers a similar blueprint for accessible recreation, with three affordable courses, 36 holes of golf, a driving range, several practice areas, and a mini golf course. The park surrounding the golf course is also filled with cyclists, runners, and fishers, while neighboring West Potomac Park hosts numerous recreational sports such as softball.

Cities need to prioritize these types of courses — easy access, low cost environments where people of all backgrounds can gather together.

Recommended How Rethinking the Golf Course Could Help Seniors Age in Place Tanya Snyder January 9, 2013

Yet in December, the Trump Administration terminated the lease agreement between the National Links Trust and National Parks Service for lease violations, leaving the future of East Potomac in limbo. After several months of uncertainty, NLT reached an agreement with the Department of Interior for new long-term leases at Langston and Rock Creek. NLT will temporarily manage East Potomac until the Trump Administration redevelops it.

Trump’s takeover does not shrink the game of golf. But it does capture publicly-owned land and privatizes it for use by an elite population. A park that serves thousands of DMV residents on a single day will now serve a few hundred, on a good day. On top of that, the reconstruction could cost between $20 and $49 million. Taxpayer money is quite literally subsidizing land-use for the wealthy. 

This discrepancy becomes more evident when evaluating the price of a round of golf. Right now, green fees for an 18-hole round at Langston or East Potomac cost anywhere between $34-48, depending on the day of the week. By contrast, green fees for some of the more ‘affordable’ PGA Tour courses start around $80-150 a round, while the most expensive courses can cost over a thousand dollars.

It is extremely likely that Trump’s new course will price out the average East Potomac golfer, at least if the President’s other courses are any indication. Trump’s Los Angeles golf course costs somewhere between $95-$575 a round. Using an average of $335 green fees as a benchmark for Trump’s course, and the high-end of $48 for an NLT course, a golfer would need to spend almost 600% more on green fees alone. This does not account for membership fees, caddy fees, or other expenses typical with private courses. 

What the game of golf needs, in DC and around the country, is more organizations like NLT to expand and grow the game. There should be an emphasis on sustainability and affordability, rather than exclusivity.

Within this framework, golf can thrive in an urban environment rather than be a competitor. Pairing this with access to high-quality public transportation options, such as bus routes terminating at course entrances, makes golf an urban amenity that will attract more residents to a city.

Upzoning the land around golf courses can encourage housing and businesses to open, too. The ease of access to a green space will in turn promote social and economic activity, rather than isolating golf from it. None of this is where East Potomac is headed.

The irony is not that an urbanist like me cares about preserving golf. It is that golf is not in competition with cities. The biggest threat to the game is exclusivity — which is all the Trump administration cares for. 

Natalie Campbell & Adriel Luis My friend Adriel: It is three in the morning, and I woke up to dash down some things I’ve been mulling over. First, obviously, the question “what does beauty mean?” demands a polyvocal response (thus, the roundtable format). What you wrote, though, speaks to why I wanted to dialogue on […]

The average child born in the UK in the 1950s was toilet trained by the age of two years and four months. Five decades later, the average child wouldn’t reach that milestone until after their third birthday.

Those statistics are more than just a curious reflection of changing parenting practices. They also shed light on the growing plastic waste crisis. Later toilet training means more used diapers, and since the diaper market also shifted from mostly cloth to mostly disposable over the same decades, that all adds up to a lot more diapers being tossed in the trash.

Today, more than 300,000 diapers are thrown away every minute around the globe. In wealthy countries, the vast majority of disposable diapers and other absorbent hygiene products such as incontinence products and menstrual supplies wind up in a landfill or incinerator. In parts of the world that lack good waste collection systems, diapers are often dumped or burned, resulting in plastic pollution, contaminated water, and the risk of disease.

Absorbent hygiene product waste amounts to somewhere between 160 and 200 million metric tons each year and makes up nearly one-tenth of municipal solid waste by weight globally, according to a new paper in Nature Sustainability. “With a growing and ageing population this problem is only getting worse, so it is important we act now to reduce the waste, and find more sustainable solutions for the waste that is inevitable,” says study team member Elze Porte, a materials sustainability researcher at University College London.

Porte and her collaborator, UCL materials scientist Mark Miodownik, spent two and a half years (if their study were a child born in the 1950s, it would be toilet trained by now) talking with manufacturers of cloth and disposable diapers, government agencies, waste collection and processing companies, and caregiving and healthcare professional organizations. They even visited a factory and a diaper recycling facility.

The result is three broad strategies for making absorbent hygiene products more sustainable. (Their strategies focus on diapers but are more broadly applicable, they say.) One is to reduce the use of disposable hygiene products. That could be accomplished by switching to reusable diapers or earlier toilet training – or, more precisely, reversing the trend towards later toilet training.

Changes to workplace and childcare systems are needed to make this more feasible for parents, the researchers say. But earlier toilet training can also be better for children’s bladder and bowel health. “For us, this was interesting to learn, because it means that reducing diaper waste by bringing back down the toilet training age can save money for families, support children in their development, and is better for the environment,” Porte says. “It is rare to find such a win-win-win solution.”

 

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A second strategy is developing technologies to recycle absorbent hygiene products. This is challenging because disposable diapers are a complex mix of materials: different kinds of plastics, fibers, superabsorbent gels. So there needs to be a way to collect used diapers separately from other municipal waste, then separate the different materials and then recycle each one.

But recycling diapers isn’t as pie-in-the-sky as it might first sound. There are several diaper recycling facilities already operating in multiple countries, although they generally only recycle part of the diaper and often result in downcycling of materials.

The final strategy is developing fully compostable absorbent hygiene products. The challenge here is making products that will break down in an industrial composter, but not when exposed to the similarly warm, moist environment of the human body.

A separate group of researchers have developed a biodegradable material based on cellulose and citric acid that could replace the fossil-fuel based absorbent gels used in conventional disposable diapers.

Both recycling and composting will require new technologies to remove pathogens and medicine residues from used hygiene products. Some jurisdictions restrict composting of human waste, so regulatory changes may also be necessary. In the meantime, “We are now doing more work on understanding worldwide toilet training practices in the Big Toilet Project,” Porte reports. “We ask parents and carers around the globe to help us by sharing their toilet training journey, helping us to gain insights into how and when they toilet train their children, understand best practices and identify where support is lacking.”

Source: Porte E. and M. Miodownik. “Research priorities for addressing global absorbent hygiene product waste.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine (baby photo: AndriyPorokhnenko/iStock.com)

“Unprecedented” reductions to federal transit and rail dollars in the latest stopgap bill could offer a taste of even steeper cuts to come, advocates fear — unless Americans demand stable funding for the shared transportation options we deserve, and on which our economy depends.

More than a hundred members of the American Public Transportation Association descended on Washington earlier this month to protest Congress’s decision to let billions of dollars for multimodal transportation lapse under a recent stopgap spending bill to fund the nation’s surface transportation programs until December 11.

That “fly-in” brought agencies, transit equipment manufacturers and more face-to-face with well over 100 lawmakers, who were forced to pass that extension because they’d failed to negotiate a bill to replace the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, or IIJA. The IIJA had previously been set to expire September 30.

Rather than simply copying and pasting that law for a few more months, though, Congress opted to exclude programs subject to the wonky funding mechanism known as “advanced appropriations.” That category disproportionately includes programs that benefit shared modes, while leaving most highway dollars untouched.

APTA — which represents agencies as well as private-sector interests that benefit from transit — estimates that public transit funding will take a 20 percent hit under the measure, and passenger rail will lose a staggering 81 percent of its formerly-guaranteed funding. And if the bill that replaces the IIJA or a subsequent extension mirrors it, the resulting loss of funding could devastate our collective transportation future.

“We’ve never seen an authorization act that has cut funding,” said Ward McCarragher, APTA’s vice president of government affairs. “This is a first.”

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McCarragher explained that, while advocates have lauded the IIJA for making historic investments into mobility options besides driving, billions of those dollars were only guaranteed through the original five-year duration of the law. That left the door open for Congress to cut them now.

That’s because Congress funded a lot of discretionary programs using “advanced appropriations,” a novel funding strategy that critics argue is intended only for emergency situations where non-recurring programs need a chunk of guaranteed money for a few years, after which they’re expected to lapse.

But transit advocates argue that between sky-high traffic deaths, an escalating affordability crisis, a climate catastrophe and more, America is experiencing an ongoing transportation emergency — and as long as that emergency still rages, Congress must extend advanced appropriations for programs that could help address it.

“There have been some transit critics who said that this was intended as only a one-time investment, that this is not the way we’ve ever managed the transportation programs,” McCarragher added. “[But] you can’t address decades of underinvestment in public transit with a one-time, five-year investment — not when we’ve spent the last 50 years under-investing in the program.”

Many highway programs, by contrast, receive guaranteed funds under the IIJA, even though drivers haven’t paid enough in gas taxes and other road user fees to cover their costs for decades. The endless highway spending that followed has failed to deliver the congestion, safety, or affordability benefits that its backers promise.

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Worse, legislators originally designed many of the specific programs slashed by the extension bill to address America’s most urgent transportation needs.

Popular competitive grant programs to make streets safer, eliminate deadly railroad crossings, and give cities direct funds to build multimodal infrastructure have all been at least temporarily chopped, with total cuts amounting to a staggering $36.8 billion, the National League of Cities recently estimated.

To be fair, some car-focused programs, such as the Bridge Formula and Investment Program, ended up in the budgetary crosshairs, too.

But Kevin X. Shen of the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that Congress made those cuts “without any measures to prioritize roadway maintenance over expensive expansions,” and that they’re unlikely to achieve the legislative body’s budgetary goals. That’s especially urgent against the backdrop of widespread attacks on shared mobility, which APTA says returns $5 to the economy for every public dollar invested — but whose benefits vanish when the money disappears.

“Regardless of budgetary mechanisms, in the end, a cut is a cut,” Shen continued. “Communities across the country will feel this in the coming months, amid tight budgets, high gas prices, and strained transit services.”

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Despite setbacks this fall, McCarragher and his fellow APTA advocates aren’t giving up on restoring what public transit has lost. After the “fly-in,” many left their meetings with congresspeople feeling optimistic about the future.

“We got broad support for the effort to restore [this funding], and I think there’s going to be a renewed effort to address this issue as we turn to December,” McCarragher said. “I think they recognize the great economic benefit of these investments … beyond just the impact to the riders themselves. Every billion dollars invested [in transit] creates more than 41,000 jobs. [These are] the things that lawmakers have really taken hold of and recognized as important, not only for transit riders but for the broader U.S. economy.”

And even if their message didn’t land this time, advocates will almost certainly get a few more bites at the apple.

Because they’re so difficult to negotiate, federal transportation bills are notorious for needing endless extensions to keep America moving, and some suspect the IIJA will require several more before a replacement bill is finally passed. And in the meantime, the midterms are nigh — which means voters have a unique chance to voice their support for better policies.

“I think the timing is perfect for every citizen to engage with their members of Congress as we head into an election in November,” McCarragher added. “There are many opportunities to get their attention on this issue, and demand that Congress restore these funds in December for public transit and passenger rail … We [need to] create that bridge, so that when we complete the long-term authorization, Congress will have an opportunity then to continue to build upon the success we’ve had and strengthen our economy.”

A version of this article recently appeared on Love of Place. It is republished with permission.

The New York Times recently ran a big expose about how big trucks and SUVs are killing Americans. According to their analysis, these large cars lead to between 200 and 400 extra deaths a year, although they said it was a conservative estimate. Even Trump commented about it, along with GM CEO Mary Barra. 

This did not surprise me. Federal agencies, like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, have known about the increased risk since at least 2015, when they published a research review (though their estimate was higher than the Times.) The Detroit Free Press also found the same thing when they conducted a similar study about a decade ago. 

I wrote a book about all this that was published a good six years ago and have traveled quite extensively speaking about it since. Along the way, other credible agencies, like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and Consumer Reports, have done studies and come to similar conclusions. I don’t think there’s any debate that larger vehicles are killing people on the roads. This finding has been replicated so many times. 

This has been an open secret for a long time. And in fact, when I was working on my book, I found experts that had warned about SUVs and pickups killing pedestrians as far back as the 1990s. But then everyone forgot.

The only reason the New York Times was able to do the kind of study they did, is because a few years back, Consumer Reports took it upon themselves to gather all the data about hood heights for consumer cars and trucks. Prior to that, no one had that data. It just wasn’t tracked because it wasn’t considered a consumer feature.

When I wrote my book, I went around with a tape measure to see how tall grilles of cars were. The Detroit Free Press did the same thing in their analysis and actually theirs was a lot more rigorous than mine. They went to dealerships to do the measurements, in order to assure tire pressure etc. wouldn’t interfere with the results.

One thing that is annoying about this discussion, though, is that whenever I try to bring this up, reactionary people freak out because they think I want to BAN PICKUP TRUCKS.

I basically agree that an idea that extreme is a political nonstarter. However, there are about 1 million intermediary steps we could address short of that could help minimize the risks large consumer vehicles pose to innocent people, without making it impossible for plumbers and landscapers to do their jobs. 

The good news is, just last week for the first time NHTSA unveiled its first ever pedestrian safety rankings for cars. I like to think my work helped contribute to this ridiculously modest reform.

While it’s good that there is finally an acknowledgment of these risks, the new rating is a half measure at best. Instead of making pedestrian impacts part of the well known “five-star” rating system, they way they do in Europe and parts of Asia, NHTSA created this dumb little side measure — a separate category — for pedestrian safety that won’t appear on the hood of cars in the dealership. They’ll just be displayed on NHTSA’s website.

I assume they added a pedestrian safety rating but then hid it away to capitulate to some American auto companies that are heavily invested in pickup trucks, like General Motors. Still, at least they finally did something. 

Nobody’s asking me. I’m just a person with a blog and middling following. But if I were president of the universe, here are the additional half-measures (short of banning pickup trucks I would take:

1. Ban after-market vehicle modifications — or at least regulate them more

It’s one thing that pickup trucks roll off the factory floor with 55-inch grilles; that’s a bad thing. But we allow any rando to buy an after-market lift kit and jack it up even more — enough so that entire standing adults will be invisible at close range.

Not only is lifting a pickup dangerous to everyone, it’s more dangerous to the drivers themselves, because it becomes really top heavy and is more likely to roll over, which is likely to cause a fatality. There’s a reason racing cars have a very low center of gravity. 

Some states do regulate after market vehicle modifications like this, or like “bull bars” which eliminate the crumple zone on cars — no bueno. They also pose additional risks to pedestrians, which is why they are banned in other countries, like the UK. Even the states that do regulate this kinda stuff are very hands off, which I can sort of understand, to be honest.

Rather than making police responsible for this kind of thing, we should just not allow third parties to sell after-market products the threaten public safety. We regulate vehicles for safety and crash impacts; you shouldn’t be able to just undo that with some dumb $150 kit you bought online. It’s dangerous to you and to others. 

Short of that, we should at least stop purchasing these kind of after-market kits for public fleets. I saw bull bars on Portland police cars the last time I was there, which is disappointing because they’re a “Vision Zero” city, which means they ostensibly care about traffic safety.

Taxpayers shouldn’t be asked to pay extra for vehicle features that make public cars less safe, and which also could put them on the hook for extra damage if someone is struck and the agency is sued — something that happens to police departments a lot.

Some will claim they need them to move a car off the road or something; if so, they could just have them on one vehicle they use for that purpose. Not every vehicle needs them. In my opinion, though, police just use bull bars to make their cars more military/intimidating looking, which is bad for public relations anyway. 

2. Regulate grille heights — or at least require front cameras if not

Many of the best selling pickup trucks in America now have 55-inch grilles. That’s tall enough to obscure the average standing 4th grader, not to mention anyone in a wheelchair. This might not be the hugest deal in the world in like a rural setting or on a highway, but it becomes a big deal in parking lots and cities, and these things are everywhere. 

One option is that we could just require car companies to lower hood heights and make them more sloping, and car like which would be way safer. The shape of the hood alone has a surprisingly large impact on survival. IIHS finds box-y grilles are 45 percent more deadline. 

Car companies are resistant to changing that, though, because it messes with the appearances of the trucks — the “face.” 

The National Association of City Transportation Officials, for example, says there should be a “direct vision” requirement, meaning you should be able to see what’s right in front of your car. Unfortunately, our regulatory agencies are loaded with a bunch of auto industry veterans and political hacks, so that may be too much to ask.

Failing that, we should at least require front cameras instead of having all these people just flying blind with the huge front blind zone.

Some places in Europe are doing more to try to counteract the growth of monster SUVs and pickups. They’ve proposed things like higher license fees for large cars, higher parking prices. I think a few places in the U.S. have discussed this, but I don’t know how far we will get with that. 

3. Don’t buy pick-ups for public fleets (unless they’re seriously needed)

I was driving through Parma, Ohio last week and I noticed a police car that was actually a pickup truck. All I could think was “why?!” The boring answer is that public agencies get “upsold” by car dealers the same way average Joes and Janes do. I swear: every time I see a police department with SUVs or pickup trucks, I make a mental note not to vote for their next levy.

And police departments are just one agency. Parks departments etc, should scrutinize these purchases a little more, too. If they legitimately need an F-250 because they’re hauling logs or something, fine. But if they’re not, maybe it’s overkill, and a golf cart could do the job just as well — or a Kei car.

One thing you might notice about these proposals is they’re all very modest. And still, we don’t seem to be able to muster the political will to do any of it.

I wish people would quit yelling at me and acting like I have the power to Ban Pickup Trucks just because I have been trying to raise attention to this overall issue. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have any power to improve the situation short of a full-on ban. In fact, the low hanging fruit is practically on the ground — and we still seem to lack the will to act.

At least the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Bill included a provision that will make Automatic Emergency Braking and Automatic Pedestrian Detection standard on new vehicles. This is not nothing. What people who don’t follow this stuff closely don’t understand is that we actually have a lot of power to shape safety outcomes. It just takes a lot of pretty boring and reasonable little reforms — if we could just muster the courage and interest to do them.

• The Brookings Institute calls for a new paradigm in transportation, one that prioritizes prosperity and public health. This will involve various levels of government working together to address longer and longer commutes, the rising expense of car ownership and traffic death rates that remain far too high.
• Cities can’t keep widening freeways indefinitely, and subways and light rail are too slow to span sprawling megalopolises. That means high-speed rail is the future of regional transportation, according to Jonathan English. (The Transit Brief)
• Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) introduced a bill to spend $300 billion over 10 years on transit-oriented affordable housing. (NJ.com)
• Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is backing a bill from Sen. Bill Haggerty (R-Tenn.) that ties federal transit funding to crime rates and security infrastructure like cameras and fare gates. (Metro)
• “Smart headlights” that automatically steer blinding beams away from oncoming traffic have been approved for U.S. vehicles. (New York Times)
• Lloyd Alter argues that transportation, housing, energy, etc. should not be in silos, but all fall under the umbrella of the “built environment.” (Carbon Upfront!)
• SEPTA bus ridership has risen by double digits since the Philadelphia transit agency adjusted its routes. (Tribune)
• Massachusetts is providing free transit passes for residents 75 and up who don’t drive. (WBUR)
• The L.A. Metro bought 220 battery-electric buses. (Clean Technica)
• The first section of Denver’s East Colfax bus rapid transit line has opened. (ABC 7)
• A Pierce County, Washington sales tax referendum would increase Tacoma bus service by 50 percent. (The Urbanist)
• Bad drivers in Nevada are costing themselves and everyone else money. (Governing)
• An Aloha State News columnist believes the success of Honolulu’s Skyline should be judged by jobs, not riders.
• Salem, Oregon is lowering the speed limit on residential streets to 20 miles per hour. (Statesman Journal)
• Amtrak’s new Airo trains debut Wednesday on the Cascades line. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• Some European cities are providing tax incentives or even paying people cash to bike to work. (Momentum)
• Barcelona recently joined the ranks of cities that no longer require parking for downtown apartments. (El Pais)
• Singapore is not playing when it comes to inconsiderate transit riders. (CNN)

Courtney Allen, owner of Believe Fitness in London, Kentucky, is the star of this highlight. The Believe Fitness mission is to “to help women break free from the world’s unrealistic fitness standards and pursue health without comparison, shame, or pressure, focusing instead on strength, joy, and identity rooted in” their faith.  

This highlight will not be me recounting Courtney’s story, as she will be doing that herself at a virtual workshop we are hosting on Monday, October 12th at 3:30 PM (register here). Instead, I will give you the behind-the-scenes scoop of how she used more than 40 hours of business support to grow not only her business, but herself as well. 

Courtney came to Mountain Association in 2024. Because Courtney is a lending client of Mountain Association, she can participate in a business support project free of charge. This technical assistance service provides entrepreneurs and nonprofits with the resources that they need to fill the gaps their business is experiencing.  

Courtney’s first project (25 hours of support) was with S Media, a consultant whose business is also based in London. After some big changes to her fitness business, Courtney wanted to visually align her brand more with her vision and faith. The purpose of this project was to design and deliver a cohesive set of digital marketing assets that strengthened the fitness studio’s brand presence, increased visibility across digital platforms, and supported member acquisition and retention efforts.  

Jason, owner of S Media, and his team helped Courtney update her branding and develop an app that allows studio members to access a library of prerecorded workouts, anytime, anywhere.  

“I am also grateful for the tools and knowledge that Mountain Association and S Media helped me to gain through this process,” Courtney said at the end of the project. “Jason, Greg, and Maggie at S Media were always accessible and extremely helpful with any issue or question I had. Their assistance in building and navigating our new website and software was priceless and alleviated a lot of stress for me.” 

Courtney’s second project, business coaching with Misty Lakes Coaching, helped to diversify revenue streams and establish back-end systems that help to make her life easier. With business coaching, I watched Courtney’s confidence in her ability to lead not just her studio, but her employees, grow. As her point person on the Mountain Association’s Business Support team, it has been amazing to watch her grow. 

Courtney and Misty spend 29 hours together strengthening the harmony between her personal life and business responsibilities while preparing her studio for future growth. This project provides peace-centered, purpose-driven business development training to help her lead confidently, build organizational clarity, develop her team, streamline her operations, and prepare for expansion. The project included training on various topics such as “brand voice development,” “personality training and team communication development,” and “CEO mindset and delegation.”  

At the end of the project, Courtney explained, “Working with Misty was a complete joy and answer to my prayers! She shared such insightful knowledge to help grow and scale my business, as well as promote better communication within my team.” 

We’re excited to host the upcoming workshop with Courtney, S Media and Misty Lakes and hear how this support is helping not only her small businesses in London, but businesses across the region. 

Please join us for “What 40 Hours Did for My Business” on Monday, October 12 from 3:30-4:30PM in a special edition of our Learn with an Expert series.  

Register here: https://mtassociation.org/workshop  

The post What 40 Hours Did for My Business: A Client Highlight  appeared first on Mountain Association.

Marinette County could well become a model of sustainability. However, sprawling development may impede its progress as the next iteration of an economic threat to ecosystems.

Unlike previous technological revolutions, AI has the potential to reshape economies, education, science, healthcare, communication, and political decision-making.

Although rewilding is often thought of as keeping humans “away”, people must be integrated into much of the rewilding process, living alongside and allowing space for wildness.

• The New York Times ran a rather uninquisitive article about problems with electric school buses that doesn’t really explain why they’d need a range longer than 90 miles, other than the occasional field trip, or why electric city buses and freight trucks seem to work just fine. The broader issue for ending long dropoff and pickup lines is that districts are increasingly building schools on huge far-flung tracts that students can’t walk to and buses can’t efficiently serve, all but forcing parents to drive their kids (The Argument).
• Railway Age suggests using technology like enforcement cameras to keep motorists off of train tracks in dangerous situations.
• Micromobility encompasses a range of devices that should be considered differently, especially within the context of how auto-centric the city is. (Vital City)
• Sound Transit could save money by building elevated light rail rather than boring underneath Seattle. (The Urbanist)
• The Austin Transit Partnership scrapped widely panned plans to move into a $47 million new office space. (KUT)
• The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is about to start using bus-mounted cameras to warn or ticket drivers who block bus lanes. (WBUR)
• Bikeshare bikes are dwindling in Baton Rouge. (WBRZ)
• The Oklahoma DOT is spending $25 million to upgrade a freeway interchange for a Buc-ee’s truck stop. (Oklahoman; paywall)
• Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine warned against fellow Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal to suspend the state gas tax. (Signal)
• The Minneapolis Green Line is scheduled to open next June. (Fox 9)
• Chattanooga will resume booting illegally parked cars on Oct. 1 after an amnesty period ends. (Times Free Press)
• Lexington started citing drivers who park in bike lanes on Sunday. (WKYT)
• Even in ancient times, sprawling cities like Angkor were less sustainable than denser ones like Rome. (Planetizen)
• Real estate around a future rail line in Montreal has already gotten so valuable that it could undermine plans for transit-oriented development. (Connect Canada)
• Electrifying Mexican transit could cut the country’s fossil fuel imports by a third. (Mexico Business)

Why is it so hard for Americans to imagine a future where they can live in their city without constantly driving?

That wasn’t exactly the topic of Time’s recent viral essay, but I sure thought about it a lot while reading it.

In “We Have a Climate Imagination Problem,” author and entrepreneur Solitaire Townsend argued that we won’t avert planetary disaster if the fight to do it remains “merely an ad nauseam echo of ‘climate change is real, humans are to blame, and the consequences are catastrophic.'”

Townsend is right, of course, that the “magic” of storytelling is an essential ingredient in any fight for systemic change, not just “the spoonful of sugar to help the scientific medicine go down,” as she put it. But it may be particularly difficult to spark our public imagination about our transportation future — never mind inspiring anyone to demand real change.

In other ways, though, transportation may just be the sector that has the most potential to inspire a new vision for how the world could be — if we just learned how to tell a better story about it.

Recommended Report: Confronting Car Dependence Won’t Just Help With Climate Change; It’s a $6.2 Trillion Opportunity Kea Wilson October 30, 2024

To understand how storytelling could inspire transportation change, though, it’s important to be honest first about why so many advocates struggle to do it.

Perhaps more than any other part of the climate problem — or the affordability problem, or our many intersecting public health problems, or whatever else we may happen to care about — streets feel like something we can’t change. They are literally cast in concrete and steel, at the cost of unfathomable trillions of dollars that most people cannot imagine “wasting” by, say, tearing highways down — even if, with only a fraction of those trillions, we could do just that, and build world-class transit in every major city in America.

Moreover, transportation infrastructure is all around us — unlike, for instance, coal-fired power plants that so few Americans actually see on a daily basis. And because roadways are so ubiquitous, we become emotionally attached to these fixtures of our mobility landscape in a way we don’t to other kinds of fossil fuel infrastructure.

Even a climate denier might not have a visceral reaction to news that an oil field in Texas has quietly shut down. But many drivers will go to absolute war over new bike lanes that remove a single parking space.

Ask even a eco-conscious voter to imagine removing the interstate that they use every day to care for their grandmother, and the outrage can be even more acute.

Recommended This Year’s Park(ing) Day Hopes to Inspire Big Policy Change Kea Wilson September 5, 2024

In some ways, transportation reformers are actually pretty good at navigating this minefield — at least at the neighborhood scale.

A quick Google search is all it takes to find a motherlode of “street redesign porn,” where advocates have documented the transformation of formerly car-dominated places and challenged others to imagine similar renaissances across the country. Sites like the one you’re reading right now are stuffed to the gills with other policy ideas that your community could steal right now, as well as stories of how doing it could make all our lives better — and those stories are backed by quantitative data and emotional experience.

Many advocates go beyond pointing out what other places are doing well, too. In arguably one of the more defensible uses of generative AI, advocates have used tools like Craiyon and Gemini to instantly illustrate how even the worst stroads could be reborn as pedestrian paradises with the right mix of asphalt and new laws (though, to be clear, hiring a human illustrator would result in an even more effective advocacy tool.)

Tactical urbanists have even brought a version of these speculative possibilities to life with events like Park(ing) Day, which temporarily turns curbside spots into cafes, green space, and just about anything else you can imagine besides car storage for a single driver. Open streets, pop-up bike lanes, and other events do the same thing at the scale of an entire block.

Recommended TACTICAL URBANISM: Let’s Make More Plazas Eve Kessler May 28, 2021

When it comes to the big picture and the long term, though, many transportation reformers struggle to paint a vivid picture of how our country could work better without so many damn cars.

The lowest-lift strategy might be to harness those moments when cars are already displaced from the top of our transportation hierarchy, and go the extra mile to challenge our neighbors to notice that the world didn’t end — and maybe even that they’re better off without so much driving.

In major cities, massive events like the World Cup, the Olympics, and Taylor Swift concerts can all become powerful catalysts for mode shift and new — albeit temporary — investment in transit. They’re not always catalysts for deliberate conversation about how sustained transportation changes could reshape our collective lives, but they could be.

What if we papered every subway car with urbanist propaganda on game day, along with links to petition drives to change transport policy?

Recommended How — And More Important, When — To Get Motorists to Ditch The Driving Habit Streetsblog July 13, 2023

In smaller communities without a stadium, tactical urbanist experiments could be expanded to a bigger scale, a longer time frame, or a more ambitious, repeated program that gradually becomes permanent.

There’s no reason why, say, a Park(ing) Day demonstration can’t be done at the scale of a mega-mart lot, or that the regional craft market can’t reclaim that space every Saturday … and Sunday … and eventually, every day of the week, by installing more durable pop-up retail. With enough resources and coordination, the single, sad traffic-cone “bike lane” to your kid’s school could be part of a week-long blitz, sketching out a complete cycling network that makes not driving anywhere an actual option.

Pair it with a strong messaging campaign, and you could launch a whole movement of advocates who have glimpsed the possibility of a different transportation culture and want to make it permanent.

Big cities should think bigger about this stuff, too. Why shouldn’t Chicago hold more events like Bike the Drive on its notorious lake-front highway? Moreover, why can’t we treat bike events as a publicly funded demonstration of the future we all deserve, rather than a premium experience that costs $69 each — and that’s not including the price of the commemorative T-shirt?

Recommended Study: COVID-Era Pop-Up Bike Lanes Increase Cycling Trips Up to 48% Kea Wilson January 27, 2022

Let’e be clear: lack of imagination is far from the only reason why so many American cities are ultra-car-dependent hellscapes.

We can could send every mayor in the country on a fact-finding mission to Amsterdam, and they wouldn’t all come home raring to build woonerfs. Not every driver who begrudgingly left his car at home for the Beyoncé concert can be transformed into a transit rider by encouraging him to just open his mind — or even by giving him a discount on his next month of rides.

Systemic reform is primarily about moving power, and it can take a frustratingly long time. Our country looks like an oil executive’s fever dream because those executives, and their allies in Big Auto, spent billions of dollars on lobbyists for a century, not just because they wished upon a star.

Still, it’s urgent that transportation reformers offer our neighbors a better vision for the future, rather than just doom and rage about where we’re headed if we fail to make a change. And to be frank, it isn’t even that hard.

Recommended Bill McKibben Talks How Walking Can Help End the Climate Crisis — And Make Americans Happier Streetsblog October 31, 2023

A city where you don’t have to depend on cars doesn’t mean you can’t visit your sick grandmother across town, because there’s no interstate to take you there and nowhere to park where you arrive. It’s a place where grandma can afford to live around the corner, and you can simply walk to reach her, the sun on your face and the wind in your hair. You can drive if you want to; if you don’t, you aren’t forced to.

When enough people aren’t functionally forced to drive, our cities become more joyful, peaceful, healthy, safe, affordable, child-friendly, accessible to people of all abilities, and fun. And that’s not even the end of the list.

If we fail to tell that story – and so many of us do — then it’s no wonder why so few people believe it’s possible to make it real.

Earlier this year, a string of intense winter storms brought weeks of subzero windchill and 41 inches of snow to the East Coast. The repeated precipitation, combined with persistently low temperatures, prevented melting for several weeks. 

In response, New York City deployed extensive plowing operations, dropped approximately 380,000 tons of salt, requested emergency civilian shoveling support, and deployed snow-melting “hot tubs” across the five boroughs. 

At the same time, the Department of Sanitation repeatedly suspended the city’s “alternate-side parking” rules, which usually require car owners to move their car once a week so that the agency can clean — or plow — one side of the street. With no risk of fines, many owners simply let their cars sit where they had parked them just before the storms. 

Recommended



Snow Problem: Can New York City Handle Big Winter Storms Anymore?
Sophia Lebowitz

February 9, 2026

New Yorkers witnessed the result of these conflicting policies. Endless miles of waist-high snowbanks stood for weeks. Ice and slush rendered curb lanes unusable, immobilized vehicles and narrowed sidewalks. Across the entire city, residents struggled to access bus stops, navigate intersections and patronize businesses.

These winter storms suddenly and totally transformed New York’s urban fabric, inviting intense and widespread scrutiny of street infrastructure and exposing systemic weaknesses in roadway design. This transformation was most visible at the curb, where hundreds of thousands of snow-entombed cars stood motionless for weeks on end. 

Even the police have nomobiles.

I like to call these vehicles nomobiles: street-parked cars incapacitated by snow or ice that do not move for an extended period of time. These cars no longer fulfill their central function as instruments of private mobility and instead become static, semi-permanent elements of the public realm.

This temporary metamorphosis provides an unusual opportunity to assess the underlying assumptions of curb management and roadside infrastructure and raises a crucial question: If hundreds of thousands of vehicles went offline for multiple weeks without halting everyday life, what role do privately owned cars actually serve in dense cities, and who ultimately pays for their presence? Nomobiles force us to evaluate the promise of convenience attached to car ownership, the consequences of publicly subsidized vehicle storage, and the labor required to maintain access at all times.

Recommended



Video: Another Way The Snow Reveals Our Misallocation of Public Space
Henry Beebe-Center

February 9, 2026

Nomobiles impose both tangible and immeasurable costs on the public. Obstructed curb lanes slow down plowing routes, while obstructed bike lanes require even more resources to clear. The economic value of the curb is not an accident. Recent statements by the Mamdani administration indicate growing interest in treating curb space as a fiscal and administrative resource, by expanding metered parking to generate revenue and practicing more deliberate curb management. 

Recent research shows that “curb parking on New York City streets is worth $12.3 billion annually if drivers paid the market rate for storing their vehicles in the public right of way.” This winter’s storms momentarily suspended the social contract surrounding this public, shared resource, thereby exposing who ultimately pays the cost of the shared space.

Not only does this nomobile raise questions about urban mobility, but it affects other modes, such as cycling.

The storms pointed a spotlight on New Yorkers who own cars, and their justifications for doing so in such a transit-dense city.  The 2022 Citywide Mobility Survey found that the majority of residents who purchased vehicles during and after 2019 did so because they “wanted the flexibility and convenience of having a vehicle.” Many of these drivers found themselves stranded by frozen cars.

The continued provision of free curbside storage reinforces these New Yorker’s expectation of reliable mobility. More than 97 percent of New York City’s three million parking spaces are completely free. This arrangement obscures the true costs of preserving curbside vehicular access.

Recommended



FLASHBACK: What Happened To Car-Free ‘Snow Routes’ — And Could They Have Helped City Clear the Streets?
J.K. Trotter

February 6, 2026

“I basically just wrote it off for two weeks,” said one Brooklyn schoolteacher I spoke with. “I was like, alright, I just don’t have a car right now.” The teacher had purchased a vehicle to shorten a long commute to a neighborhood without robust transit options and relied on curbside parking at home. “I hate that I have to own a car … Whatever kind of autonomy I have is illusory and, you know, for suckers.”

During the storms and their aftermath, the teacher spent several hundred dollars on rideshare trips, incurred additional transit fares attempting to connect between networks, and paid more than a thousand dollars in winter-related mechanical repairs while their vehicle was immobilized.

Beyond fiscal expenditures, households also absorb significant amounts of unpaid physical labor: digging vehicles out of compacted snow and ice, walking extended distances to reach alternative transit, and recalculating commutes. 

“The best case scenario is that you get plowed in, you dig yourself out, but you get plowed back in again,” said a St. George resident who purchased a vehicle after years without one to supplement limited borough connectivity. “The worst case scenario, at least on Staten Island, is that you don’t even get plowed in because the plows haven’t gotten to your street yet. So you can dig all you want, but good luck getting anywhere. It’s so obvious that something isn’t working here.”

As the economic burden of car ownership snowballs, those with greater financial flexibility are better positioned to maintain mobility through viable non-automobile options, while those without such resources must supply labor, tolerate prolonged immobility, or rely on more constrained transportation choices. 

This winter reminded New York City that car ownership does not insulate individuals from unreliable systems. Nomobiles disrupted the street as a whole. These vehicles did not generate movement, but they continued to generate work in a layered subsidy structure: public funds provided baseline accessibility, private labor absorbed recovery, and informal makeshift markets monetized the gap between the two. This system persists not because it is efficient, but because its costs are delayed, dispersed, and rarely itemized.

Free curbside parking is central to sustaining this arrangement. It is a publicly subsidized habit that maintains the illusion that private mobility is largely self-contained. Nomobiles highlight the limits of this assumption, revealing the payments we make in our fiscal and political economies to sustain private mobility, even when that mobility becomes obsolete. As climate change produces heavier snowfall and longer freeze periods, the gap between perceived convenience and actual cost is likely to further narrow.

Nomobiles provide a lens to critique and more precisely examine roadside infrastructure. Let them serve as a warning to citizens and planners alike: where habit and preference prevail, function will suffer.

Why don’t cities roll out the red carpet for new greenways — even as they host splashy ribbon-cuttings for the latest car infrastructure?

Miami Beach residents Charles Fischer and Matt Gultanoff asked themselves just that this summer, when local leaders in their home of Miami Beach staged an opening ceremony for a new parking garage. Those same leaders, though, didn’t consider active transportation infrastructure worthy of a photo-op. So the two men opted to host one themselves.

And their neighbors showed up in force. On September 17th, an unofficial ribbon-cutting event they had planned for a new bike lane attracted dozens of people and became a rallying point for safer streets.

“What started off as a little tongue-in-cheek way to poke fun at the city … turned into an actual meet-and-greet [for] neighbors who were passionately in favor of this bike lane,” Fischer said.

A young resident cuts the ribbon as Matt Gultanoff and Charles Fischer cheer on the new bike lane.

With only a Facebook post’s notice the day before the event, Fischer estimates that 35 to 40 neighbors showed up for their “guerrilla” event. Amongst the crowd were families and bike advocates, as well as elected leaders from Miami Beach and the neighboring town of Surfside. One group of cyclists spontaneously joined the party after riding past it from the new path.

Neighbors agree that the protected, two-way bike lane is a much-needed safety improvement, connecting homes along Jefferson Avenue to the rest of the Miami Beach. It’s widely popular, too — averaging nearly 600 daily trips, according to advocates with Better Streets Miami Beach and the Flamingo Park Neighborhood Association. One local mother, Miriam Haskell, even said that the bike lane gives her son the freedom to bike to soccer practice safely on his own.

Residents of the Flamingo Park neighborhood celebrated the bike lane as a needed alternative to driving.

But behind every smile at the ribbon cutting was a frustration with the city.

“We’re so focused on car and parking and car culture,” Fischer said.

The parking in question is a 300-space garage in the northern part of Miami Beach. In July, city leaders held their own ribbon cutting to celebrate the opening of the first 150 spaces to the public.

“We know how dire the need for parking is for the North Beach neighborhood, and this fills that need with 150 spots,” Mayor Steven Meiner said at the event, according to StreetsWatch, which is operated by Better Streets Miami Beach.

But the city’s own data, along with eyewitness accounts, tell a much less exciting story. One month after the splashy stunt, advocates found only three cars parked in the garage on a Friday afternoon; the following Sunday evening, there were seven.

A new parking garage in north Miami Beach has stayed mostly-empty since its July opening.

That underwhelming usage isn’t because the area is unpopular; the garage is just a five minute walk from a major commercial corridor. But with stops on two major bus lines just one block away — and one of those lines running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as often as every nine minutes — neighbors don’t really need to drive to reach it.

And for those who do, there are already four other lots within a one-block radius of the new garage.

Giving more space to cars simply isn’t a priority for Miami Beach neighbors, local surveys show. Year after year, Fischer says those documents have demonstrated that traffic congestion is the most-pressing issue residents face — a problem that’d be better solved by getting drivers out of their cars and onto bikes and buses.

“You can’t get off this island because there are so many cars,” he adds.

Recommended Study: More Protected Bike Lanes = More Micromobility Users Kea Wilson December 18, 2025

Fischer says city leaders aren’t solving any problems by making it easier to park, particularly when better mobility solutions like transit are already in full effect. Rather than celebrating what hasn’t worked — and what continues to fail — they could take a note from their own constituents.

Luckily, those constituents are making their priorities loud and clear. The advocates behind the ribbon cutting made a point to gather participants’ contact information, so they can alert them about future opportunities to show their support for people-centered infrastructure.

“A lot of people came [to our ribbon-cutting] ready to be activated and to move onto the next one,” Fischer said. “We met a lot of [neighbors] that I didn’t know at all … that felt so passionately about this that they showed up.

“Not only did they want to celebrate this, but they wanted to see what’s next — and they wanted to help make what’s next happen,” he continued.

11-03 * 13:00 - Energy and Thematic Group (Bea)

10-13 * 13:00 - GT FT meeting (Bea)