B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Mayor Mamdani’s executive budget added $95.9 million in new money to build out pedestrian and bike greenways over the next five years — an infusion welcomed by advocates who nevertheless cautioned that the funds are not enough to fulfill New York’s growing need for car-free paths.

The city routinely takes more than a decade to roll out new greenways, which serve both as recreational spaces and key transportation corridors. When those greenways finally open, however, the city often allows them to slowly deteriorate by delaying or entirely foregoing basic maintenance, such as fixing sinkholes and repairing cracks.

“Projects that were funded many, many years ago, it takes such a long time to actually implement them,” said Hunter Armstrong, executive director of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. “We just cut the ribbon on a project a couple of weeks ago that was years in the works,” he added, referring to a project on Sunset Park’s waterfront.

Significantly, the new money for the Department of Transportation will pay for capital construction of greenways, which refers to projects that involve hardened infrastructure — not the usual paint and flimsy plastic bollards. The transportation-focused mayor also gave the agency some $200 million over the next four years to quickly build out bus and bike lanes and public realm upgrades as part of the Streets Master Plan.

Cycle of disrepair

Past mayors treated greenways as an afterthought and let crumbling sections languish, from the country’s first bicycle path on Ocean Parkway to the nation’s busiest one on the Hudson River Greenway.

This cycle of disrepair forces city leaders to spend costly political capital to fund overdue renovations, whose costs rise as conditions worsen over time. During those renovations, the Parks Department and DOT have repeatedly refused to repurpose excess car lanes for safe passage, and instead directed cyclists onto unsafe detours for months on end. New sections of greenway still require years to install.

For example, the city recently wrapped up a stretch of two-way bike paths along one mile of Brooklyn’s Third Avenue that took 14 years to finish – as long as it took to construct the Brooklyn Bridge in the 19th century. Another proposal has already broken that record: a two-way raised bike path on three blocks of Commercial Street in Greenpoint will finally break ground sometime in 2028 – 16 years after city officials identified the route for upgrades in 2012.

These projects, like a $217-million esplanade stretching for eight blocks along the East Midtown waterfront, carry sky-high price tags. “Unfortunately the cost of these projects does add up, so ideally there will be ways to efficiently and wisely spend this money,” said Armstrong.

The greenway bucks come as a $7.25 million federal grant for greenways is set to run out next year. Under Mayor Eric Adams, the city spent that grant on planning new routes across the five boroughs but never provided a timeline or funding for the proposals, which included paths along the Bronx’s Harlem River and the western Queens waterfront.

Federal grant money yielded this plan in 2023. to add 40 miles of greenways.

DOT said the new cash will help turn those proposals into reality. “This historic investment gives NYC DOT the largest budget in its history, including the biggest-ever funding pool for bus and bike projects,” agency spokesperson Vin Barone told Streetsblog. “That means more staff and additional capacity to deliver for all New Yorkers for years to come.”

Mamdani’s executive budget labels the new funds as “Bike Network Development 2030.” The money is dedicated to greenways now, but City Hall spokesperson Jeremy Edwards said the mayor could repurpose it for non-greenway bike lanes that are more immediately, pressing.

Still, the funding amounts to a small drop in the city’s $124.7 billion annual fiscal spending plan. The NYPD, by contrast, plans to spend nearly the same amount on overtime this summer alone, as Commissioner Jessica Tisch deploy cops on 12-hour shifts to patrol events like the upcoming FIFA World Cup and the celebrations around the United States’s 250th anniversary.

Capital woes

The Parks Department controls the majority of greenways and has its own $674-million pot of money for some longstanding greenway-related projects and spanning to mid-2034, according to agency rep Chris Clark.

But the agency does not have the staff and resources to realize its projects at a faster pace, according to the city’s greenspace advocates. Amid continuous budget cuts recent years, the agency hemorrhaged dozens of project managers, landscape architects and engineers.

“[These are] the very people who would be facilitating, if not spearheading, the capital projects that people want to see happen,” said Adam Ganser, executive director of New Yorkers for Parks. “The agency has been somewhat notorious in their ability to do capital projects, but it’s hardly their fault when they don’t have the staffing to do them.”

For example, the East River Esplanade alone has a $358.4 million budget for its renovation, but it has been crumbling into the water for years. “The funding has been there for a long time, but the project just continues to languish with no leadership or urgency,” Ganser said. “They’re in a tough spot because they don’t have the resources to push forward the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have been advocated.”

Like other city agencies that perform capital work, Parks must submit new projects to an extensive design, procurement and construction process. This inevitably requires Parks to correspond and collaborate with other entities — such as DOT, ConEd and National Grid — whose infrastructural assets overlap with their own.

But most bureaucratic friction actually arises in the intermediate stage where Parks solicits and chooses third-party contractors to construct projects. This stage is layered with city and state regulations, whose architects originally designed them to prevent city leaders from corruptly favoring their cronies. In practice, these rules slow down routine work, a former senior Parks official argued.

“Procurement sucks. So much of it is out of the agency’s hands. It’s really hard to reform procurement on a simple agency level,” said Sam Biederman, who was the agency’s chief of staff during the late de Blasio administration and now runs a communications consultancy. “I get the point of not wanting this thing to be corrupt – I’m from Chicago – but the effect of all these decades and decades of laws … is to catastrophically slow down the procurement process.”

Former Mayor Eric Adams convened a task force to improve the capital process, and the new administration should look into reforms, and fund planning staff at Parks to be able to advance projects, according to Ganser.

“It is fixable and it would require both that the agency just decide that this is going to be their top priority… and then having the mayor and the administration focus on the procurement and capital process citywide,” he said.

Parks’s greenway repairs heavily rely on the goodwill of local elected officials to allocate their own discretionary funds for projects. In 2019, the agency finally began renovating a mile of the historic Ocean Parkway malls. That project cost more than $4 million over five years, after officials secured funds from then-Council Member Mark Treyger and Eric Adams, who was still Brooklyn’s borough president at the time.

The agency lacks the budget to maintain its vast portfolio of greenways, playgrounds, pools, boardwalks and miscellaneous greenery in a state of good repair, so officials have relied on lengthy and expensive capital projects rather than routine maintenance.

“Because the agency doesn’t have the money to maintain, it almost becomes part of a strategy,” Ganser said. “The only way they get these things repaired is if they become capital projects. It’s the most expensive way to do this. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The circumferential loops of Central Park and Prospect Park offer two vivid counterexamples. These drives are relatively well-maintained because they fall under the jurisdiction of DOT and its robust road resurfacing program — a legacy of those paths allowing car traffic until 2018, when former mayor Bill de Blasio banned motor vehicles from both.

Consequently, advocates have repeatedly urged the city to reassign greenway maintenance to DOT. Conversely, some advocates have argued for Parks to take over trimming greenery along DOT’s greenways, a task with which the latter agency has struggled.

The missing one percent

On the campaign trail, Mamdani vowed to increase Parks’s budget to one percent of the city’s overall spending plan, but he has allocated only around 0.55 percent, or $685.4 million, in his annual budget.

“I am going to take the mayor at his word that he is going to get to one percent in his first term,” said Ganser. “It’s a difficult budget year. At the same time, the Parks Department budget is a tiny fraction over the overall city budget, so there’s no reason we can’t make significant progress.”

The city should select a few projects to show how they can speed up implementation, said Jon Orcutt, a safe streets advocate and former DOT policy director under the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations. “Pick a couple of projects already in the pipeline… and try to make them models for speeding them up,” he said.

The city should finally link three existing greenways in southern Brooklyn, Ocean Parkway, Shore Parkway, and the Jamaica Bay Greenway, by installing a bikeway on overly-wide Neptune Avenue and the Cropsey Avenue bridge.

How about filling in this gap in southern Brooklyn’s greenway network?

“Let’s use some of the Mamdani political capital honeymoon period to finally connect these three routes that have sat there with this big gap in the middle since the time of Robert Moses,” Orcutt said.

• One reason why American roads are so deadly is that we let habitually bad drivers keep driving no matter how many wrecks they cause. (Everyone Is Welcome)
• One way to keep such drivers off the road is passive drunk driving detection technology that, if it detects alcohol on the driver’s breath, won’t let them start the car. A provision in the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill required all new cars to have it within five years. But now Congress might block its implementation. (Love of Place)
• A new Federal Transit Administration dashboard will measure how “family friendly” transit systems are. (Metro)
• Crowdsourcing can help cities find broken sidewalks and fix them. (Next City)
• An NYU study found that bike lanes increase bikeshare ridership, especially among riders over 60. (Planetizen)
• Beloved Chicago bike planner Riley O’Neil was killed by a truck driver while riding his bike when he swerved out of an unprotected bike lane to avoid being doored. (Tribune, Streetsblog Chicago)
• Austin businesses are preparing to relocate to make way for light rail construction (KVUE). But the project still faces financial headwinds even after it was cut back from 20 miles to 10 (Free Press).
• High-speed rail would generate billions of dollars in property tax revenue for Arlington and Fort Worth, Texas. (KERA)
• Portland transit agency TriMet could be entering a doom loop. (Willamette Week)
• Jersey City is doing 100 quick-build traffic safety projects, while Hoboken is creating 25 all-way stops (NJ.com). Famous for going nine years without a traffic death, Hoboken did it in part simply by using cheap plastic bollards to daylight intersections (Carscoops).
• Kansas City is beefing up transit service for the World Cup. (KCTV)
• Celebrities are popularizing bike dates in New York City. (Times)
• Yes, it is possible to move an entire apartment’s worth of furniture by bike. (streets.mn)
• Dentures, wedding gowns and an ankle bracelet are among the strangest things people left in an Uber over the past year. (Mashable)

Energy price increases such as those triggered by the war in Ukraine make faster decarbonization more cost effective, according to a new analysis of the EU energy system. The net benefits could amount to roughly 3% of the bloc’s projected GDP in 2050, the study suggests.

In the past, the EU has been highly dependent on imported oil and gas. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 caused fossil fuel prices to spike and prompted EU leadership to reduce or eliminate imports of Russian natural gas.

In turn, this sudden drop in energy supply has left the EU with an “energy gap.” In the new study, researchers use a pair of computer models to conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of short- and long-term solutions to filling in the gap.

Short-term strategies to increase the energy supply such as burning more coal or biomass involve high costs, a heavy public health burden, or both, the analysis shows. Meanwhile, demand-side solutions like reducing private transportation by 20% or turning down thermostats by 3 °C to reduce heating demand have limited impact.

With short-term solutions inadequate and geopolitical developments in the Middle East and elsewhere suggesting the energy crisis is likely to persist and can’t simply be white-knuckled through, the researchers turned their attention to solutions that would fundamentally reorganize the EU’s energy system in the coming decades.

Three scenarios that involve increasing electrification, increasing renewable sources of energy like solar and wind power, and reducing private transportation while filling in the remaining energy gap with renewables would all reduce net costs to society by 2050, the researchers found.

New infrastructure and equipment required for electrification and building out renewables costs money. A lot of money. But the savings from lower fuel prices, reduced public health burden from air pollution, and lower costs to society from climate change are greater than those costs.

“Eastern EU countries such as Poland, Latvia, Slovakia, and Hungary are more reliant on Russian imports and exhibit the largest benefits,” the researchers write.

In fact, why wait for 2050 to complete the greening of the energy system? The analysis shows that if high energy prices persist, an even faster rollout of renewables and decarbonization is cost effective.

With energy prices as high as they were in August 2022, the benefits of moving the EU’s current 2050 renewables target ahead by 5, 10, or even 20 years outweigh the costs. The savings on fuel, public health, and climate change costs are greater than the expense of quickly building new power plants and other renewable energy infrastructure.

However, in some of the scenarios analyzed the outcomes differ by country: Even if the EU as a whole shows a net benefit, individual countries might not, highlighting the need to develop strategies tailored to each country’s situation to keep things equitable across the bloc.

The researchers also modeled an even more ambitious energy transition goal, a net-zero-emissions push that would require increasing the EU’s share of renewables to 80%. In this scenario, an accelerated green transition looks good at moderate fuel prices, not just high ones.

“This suggests that once energy prices surpass a certain threshold, initiating the transition earlier becomes increasingly beneficial,” the researchers write.

Source: Meng W. et al. “Rethinking energy transition strategies for the European Union amid rising energy prices.” 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

No money, mo’ problems.

Amtrak honchos officially showed off renderings for President Trump and Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s renovation of Penn Station on Monday, but left unsaid amid the unveiling of pretty pictures was the only aspect of the Penn Station redevelopment that matters: How much will it cost, and who’s paying?

One possible answer: Tenant railroads Amtrak, the MTA and New Jersey Transit. According to the development company vice president Peter Cipriano (who was a senior adviser to the U.S. DOT during President Trump’s first term), those tenants might have to pony up “availability payments” to cover a share of the project costs.

“Presumably there will be some level of availability payment at the end of the road on this project, like Amtrak has on 30th Street Station in Philadelphia,” the Halmar executive told reporters.

This type of payment scheme — which the railroads will almost certainly pass on to their riders — was the linchpin of the Halmar/ASTM plan that Cipriano’s team pitched the MTA in 2023. That plan would have involved Halmar and its parent company ASTM funding the renovation upfront, then collecting $250 million per year over 50 years from each over the three tenant railroads.

But neither Cipriano nor Andy Byford, Amtrak’s special adviser for Penn Station, would put a pricetag or timeline on the “availability payments.”

Byford, who has openly bragged about using President Trump to strong-arm New York into accept the project, insisted he would not allow an “unaffordable” funding scheme.

“I made it very clear in the RFP to the bidders: do not come with a proposal that saddles the railroads, of which Amtrak is obviously one, with unaffordable availability payments, because you won’t get through, you will not win,” said Byford. “My strategy is to minimize the gap between the overall cost and what we can raise through capital, like loans and grants, and what remains to be paid for via availability payments.”

One type of “availability payment” that Byford insisted is not in play is a surcharge on train tickets for trips originating from Penn Station. But riders will wind up paying in one way or the other if Amtrak plans to charge the railroads they ride, and the MTA is already raising objections to the proposal.

“Gov. Hochul has been clear from the day President Trump took over this project: if he wants it, then he’ll have to pay for it,” said MTA spokesperson Mitch Schwartz. “Secretary Duffy didn’t have any problem with that arrangement when he told Congress that his administration was ready to ‘give’ Penn Station $8 billion — the full cost of the project. Now, they’re admitting their real plan is to charge New York taxpayers billions. Their position may have changed. Ours hasn’t: we’re not interested in that deal.”

Amtrak held Monday’s press briefing in order to reveal renderings of the project, some of which were previously published in Gothamist. Cipriano, Byford and architect Vishaan Chakrabarti did not seem eager to discuss the project’s funding despite a barrage of criticism and concerns from Manhattan pols including Rep. Jerry Nadler.

Recommended



Penn Station Belongs to New Yorkers
Jerry Nadler

June 8, 2026

Byford eventually copped to a vague total cost of between $7 billion and $8 billion — the reported price for the previous Halmar plan in 2023. Part of that cost included paying Madison Square Garden owner James Dolan $500 million to buy the Hulu Theater (formerly the Felt Forum) and knock it down to make way for a station entrance on the Eighth Avenue side of the station.

Other wild cards remain in the offing: A recently passed amendment to the proposed federal Build America 250 Act would give Amtrak the power to seize local property tax funding to pay for station rehab projects.

The redesign promises a grand interior.

The amendment is not yet law, but if it passes critics warn it will enable a federal land grab that could allow real estate titan Vornado to redevelop the area and send its billions in property taxes that otherwise would have gone to New York City to pay for what is essentially a facelift for Penn Station.

For his part, Cipriano suggested that proposed scheme was no different than what New York state had previously proposed for the project (somethong local critics also opposed).

“If Amtrak got that authority, Andy would probably go through a process that looks somewhat similar to the one that [New York State] undertakes now. He would go to the city and say, ‘This is what we want to do. Can we work together?’ Should this thing get built, I think it’s fair to speculate that the surrounding property values will go up,” he said. “People call that ‘value uplift.’ What we’re talking about is Amtrak, by virtue of having delivered this, especially if the state’s not participating in costs, Amtrak should get a piece of that value which it created. That’s all. It’s fair. It’s done throughout the world,:

Cipriano alluded to, but did not directly mention, the previous Penn Station redevelopment plan floated by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and briefly pursued by Gov. Hochul to do a similar value capture scheme in which New York seized zoning power around Penn Station through the creation of a land-use action called a General Project Plan.

Through the GPP, the state planned to give Vornado the power to develop multiple office buildings around Penn, and pay payments in lieu of taxes to cover the costs of the Penn Station renovation.

But the Cuomo-Hochul plan had built-in guardrail — including a chance for the state’s Public Authorities Control Board to review plans for each parcel of land. Critics of the GPP and the House amendment passed last week threw cold water on Cipriano’s spin.

“The so-called ‘Transit Oriented Development’ amendment … is an unprecedented power grab from the Trump administration and Vornado to steal New York City tax revenues for what appears to be an unnecessarily expensive facelift for Penn Station,” said Reinvent Albany Senior Policy Advisor Rachael Fauss. “It overrides all local authority over taxation and zoning in the area around Penn Station. Even if Amtrak did agree to consult with local officials, there is no requirement they do so and they could stop at any time if they don’t like what they hear.”

• World Cup host cities like Seattle, Atlanta, Boston and Kansas City are using the event to beef up their transit systems in ways that will hopefully outlast the global soccer tournament. (Next City)
• Both the location of housing near transit and the frequency of transit service are important for getting people to ride transit. Surprisingly, Los Angeles is at the top of the Urban Institute’s metric, followed by San Francisco and New York City. Less surprisingly, Sun Belt cities Dallas, Houston and Atlanta are at the bottom.
• A private company hires and trains bus drivers for Boston public schools. TransDev drivers were responsible for at least 60 deaths nationwide in the past decade, but most were not reported by the federal database that tracks such crashes, which means communities contracting with TransDev don’t know about its record. (ProPublica)
• The new Penn Station renderings are in, but the cost accounting isn’t. (Streetsblog NYC)
• Delays in Sound Transit projects have led to calls to reform the Seattle transit agency. (The Urbanist)
• California is cracking down on polluted runoff from parking lots. (Los Angeles Times)
• What’s the point of even having city governments if the Texas legislature can override anything they do? (Tribune)
• Passenger trains were delayed Saturday when a barge hit a rail bridge in Maryland. (New York Times)
• The Utah Transit Authority is addressing gaps in service. (Utah Public Radio)
• The D.C. Metro is closing three Red Line stations for construction this summer. (WTOP)
• Las Vegas is lowering the speed limit on Centennial Parkway as part of a Vision Zero effort to reduce deadly crashes. (Fox 5)
• Are Honolulu residents treating bikeshare like a mere novelty? (Civil Beat)
• Arkansas cities should do a better job of maintaining sidewalks. (Democrat-Gazette)
• Ann Arbor is experimenting with asphalt made from recycled tires. (Equipment World)
• Carmel, the small Indiana town of 100,000, has more than 150 roundabouts that have cut car crashes by 80 percent. (CNU Public Square)
• Feel like taking a scenic train trip this summer? Travel + Leisure suggests a few Amtrak routes.

California’s leaders have spent years telling the public that fighting climate change requires giving people alternatives to driving.

They were right.

The transportation sector remains California’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. If California hopes to meet its climate goals, it must give people realistic alternatives to getting behind the wheel. That means better transit, more homes near jobs and transit stations, safer streets for walking and bicycling, and communities designed around choices instead of traffic.

Unfortunately, Sacramento just made that job much harder.

Last month, the California Air Resources Board approved sweeping changes to the state’s cap-and-trade program, which the state insists on calling cap-and-invest. State officials argued the changes would reduce costs for consumers and provide relief to industries facing increasingly stringent climate regulations.

The changes will significantly reduce the amount of money generated through emissions allowance auctions that will go into the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the same fund the state uses to support public transit, affordable housing near transit, active transportation projects, and other programs designed to reduce driving and greenhouse gas emissions. Some estimates say they will reduce available transit funding by hundreds of millions of dollars. Others put the estimates even higher.

As we noted last week, for transit agencies, the decision could not have come at a worse time.

And for California’s climate goals, it raises an uncomfortable question: How does the state expect to meet its emissions targets while cutting funding for the programs that are supposed to help achieve them?

After slashing funding for the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, regulators with the Air Resources Board who oversee the cap-and-trade program gave us the answer: lobby your legislator.

“Nothing that we’re doing here is setting the priority for how the legislature may decide to appropriate funds,” Rajinder Sahota, deputy executive officer for climate change and research at the Air Resources Board, told KQED.

Climate Goals and Policy Changes

California’s self-created climate mandate is to reduce statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, in accordance with Senate Bill 32. Furthermore, the 2022 Scoping Plan maps an aggressive trajectory aiming for an even deeper 48% reduction by 2030 to eventually reach carbon neutrality by 2045.

These are great goals, and California is making some progress. Emissions are dropping, but at an average annual pace of roughly 2.8%, whereas a 4.4% year-over-year reduction is required to meet the 2030 deadline. The state would need to double the decrease in emissions every year between now and 2030 to make its own goals. 

The Legislature and Governor Gavin Newsom reauthorized the cap-and-trade program last year but changed how revenues are distributed. High-speed rail now receives guaranteed funding. A substantial portion is also directed toward broader state budget priorities. Transit and many other climate programs were left to compete for whatever money remains.

That may have seemed manageable when policymakers assumed auction revenues would remain robust. As we’re seeing, that is no longer a safe assumption.

But as noted above, it’s the legislature and governor that ultimately decides how funds are spent. If there’s less money to spend, then the elected leaders have choices to make.

California’s budget year goes from July 1 until the following June 30. The state has a habit of passing budgets at the last possible moment, and this year is no exception. Last month, Newsom unveiled his final proposed budget and it did not include increased funding for transit to offset the changes to the cap-and-trade system. However, in recent years the legislature has acted to fix the governor’s shortcomings on transit funding.

In 2024, lawmakers rejected Newsom’s proposal to slash funding for the Active Transportation Program and intercity rail projects, arguing that California could not afford to abandon climate and mobility investments simply because they were politically easier targets than highway spending. While the final budget did not fully restore every dollar, legislators significantly softened the proposed cuts and preserved funding for programs that had been slated for the chopping block.

The same thing happened last year. Newsom’s May Revision proposed deep reductions to transit funding and declined requests for additional emergency operating support. After weeks of negotiations, legislative leaders restored much of the threatened funding and approved a package designed to prevent devastating service cuts at transit agencies across the state. The lesson from the past two budget cycles is clear: the governor’s May budget proposal is often the opening bid, not the final word.

So in 2026, as lawmakers negotiate the final state budget, they should be asking a simple question: if cap-and-trade revenues decline as expected, where will the replacement funding come from?

The answer cannot be nowhere.

Otherwise, the state is effectively admitting that its climate goals are aspirational rather than operational.

The most recent US dietary guidelines have taken a sudden U-turn, suggesting that there should be doubling of animal protein intake in the country. In a recent analysis, scientists warn that the new diet—which also recommends reducing the intake of ultraprocessed foods—would more than offset any benefits of that move with the suggested spike in animal proteins, triggering rising greenhouse gas emissions, land, and fertilizer use.

The guidelines result from the work of a scientific panel called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), which meets every five years to review and update dietary recommendations for the United States. Those are usually adopted into the official guidelines: these were the focus of the current PNAS research.

In it, the scientists looked at the environmental outcomes of current and previous dietary recommendations. They simulated diets in which ultraprocessed foods (UPFs) were completely eradicated, alongside varying levels of suggested protein intake—in one scenario matching animal protein intake to previous years’ guidelines, which suggested Americans should consume about 0.8 grams per kilogram weight of protein. In another, they simulated a diet that reflected the upper bound of what the new guidelines recommend, which is a doubling of that previously suggested protein intake to 1.6 grams per kilogram weight.

In each case they explored the greenhouse gas impact, land-use, and fertilizer consumption effects of the particular diet, and compared the findings with the mean American diet.

This revealed that even though the new diet does cut environmental impacts by reducing intake of UPFs—which have a high animal protein content overall—this was more than offset by the rising animal protein intake. In fact, the analysis shows that increasing protein intake would cancel out the environmental benefits of UFPs by an excess of 32%.

 

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The paper highlights one plus of the new suggested diet, which is a reduction in water use by between 7 and 19%, compared to the mean American diet. However it notes that the suggested diet would otherwise “confer net environmental harm” across almost all environmental metrics. And besides, a diet low in UPFs but higher in plant-based proteins would tick all boxes, the study finds, lowering water use even further, bringing down greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer, and land use. 

“There is considerable potential benefit for both public and planetary health if prevailing diets remove UPFs, and replace them with plant dominated whole foods,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, nonprofits, scientists, and health professionals not involved in the research have collectively noted that the new guidelines reject the majority of recommendations made by the DGAC science panel, and that the process this time around involved significant conflicts of interest with the US meat and dairy industries.

As a closing note in the PNAS paper, the researchers call for an urgent realignment of the guidelines with established science and evidence, which time and time again has shown the harmful effects of excess meat and dairy consumption on human and planetary health. 

Shepon et. al. “The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are associated with higher land, water and nitrogen use, and greenhouse gas emissions.” PNAS. 2026. 

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Driverless taxis spend just as much time driving around without a passenger as regular taxis, according to a new study — a finding that reveals a major shortcoming for a technology that boosters say will revolutionize transportation forever.

The study in the journal Transport Findings reveals that robotaxis spend roughly 45 percent of their total mileage without passengers — which is so close to regular taxis that one transportation industry expert feels he’s been lied to.

“I’ve been assured by these industry insiders that deadheading would fall to very low levels with robotaxis, but it’s pretty clear that’s not happening,” said David Zipper, a contributing writer at Bloomberg.

The concern is obvious: Commercial robotaxis are on the rise across the United States. According to the study —  “Millions of Trips, “Waymo” Empty Miles: California’s First Thousand Days of Commercial Robotaxi Service” — robotaxi prevalence has grown by an average of 15 percent monthly since they were first introduced in August 2023. That 15 percent is consistent across all measures: trips completed, miles traveled and passengers carried.

Here’s a Waymo in San Francisco.

But the potential for robotaxis is also obvious: Unlike traditional taxi companies, which manage individual drivers, robotaxi companies manage fleets of cars. As a result, these companies should be able to program the vehicles’ routes to avoid excessive deadheading. Instead, both traditional ride share and robotaxis travel almost half of their mileage without passengers. 

But change is happening … a little. According to the study, robotaxis now spend an average of 18 minutes empty between consecutive passenger trips, down from 28 minutes since 2023, likely due to an expanded fleet size which has allowed for a more efficient distribution of robotaxis, according to the author of the study. 

Still, author Awad Abdelhalim, added that a larger fleet means more cars deadheading overall, so “it cancels some of those benefits.” 

Awad said he wasn’t surprised by the findings because taxi companies like Waymo are deploying their fleets using the same old methods of offering taxi service — namely by sending cars out of a depot.

“There is quite a bit of deadheading naturally required to distribute vehicles across the service area to be able to serve customers,” said Abdulhalim. He added that traditional ride share has “some ‘natural’ distribution of vehicles based on where drivers are starting from based on home locations.”

Robotaxis also travel without a passenger while waiting to be assigned one, and this measurement has remained steady throughout the course of the study. 

“That’s the biggest problem,” said Zipper. It’s unclear exactly what robotaxis are doing during that time, but reporting from San Francisco and other cities where these cars operate suggests that they are, more or less, driving around aimlessly, passengerless.  

Robotaxis only operate in select metropolitan areas included San Francisco, the Bay Area and Los Angeles, highly congested areas where deadheading only makes matters worse.

“The presence of empty robotaxis does thicken traffic,” Zipper said. “All of these deadhead miles seem to counteract the safety claims that robotaxi companies have.”

Waymo, the company leading the charge on robotaxis, has claimed — extensively, on its website — that its vehicles will make streets safer.

• A Planetizen analysis found that the majority of 13,000 public comments on the House transportation funding authorization bill want Congress to fund transit, walking and biking, safety, wildlife crossings and faster approval for projects. Instead, the bill cuts funding for public transit and passenger rail (Rail Passengers Association). It will also give red states more freedom to spend federal dollars on highways, but give a greater share of funding to mostly blue municipalities (Brookings Institute).
• Two-thirds of Americans over the age of 50 say public transit is important to them, and three-quarters support transit-oriented development, according to an AARP poll.
• After Sound Transit opened the Crosslake Connection in March, ridership on Seattle’s Link light rail system rose by 46 percent (Seattle Transit Blog), making it the busiest light rail system in the country (The Urbanist).
• Sound Transit is also installing fare gates at 14 stations. (KOMO)
• The Philadelphia city council approved a budget that did not include Mayor Cherelle Parker’s proposed taxes on rideshares and deliveries (6 ABC).
• Meanwhile, a state lawmaker from Philadelphia proposed outlawing surge pricing during major events like concerts and games. (NBC 10)
• The Plain Dealer wonders what to do about e-bikes taking over Cleveland sidewalks. Maybe build more bike lanes?
• The transit and transportation safety advocacy group Activate St. Pete endorsed Brandi Gabbard for mayor of St. Petersburg. (Florida Politics)
• Atlanta launched an autonomous shuttle linking MARTA to the Beltline. (AJC; paywall)
• Lincoln, Nebraska’s switch from streetcars to buses really was the result of a conspiracy. (Flatwater Free Press)
• A Huntsville nonprofit refurbishes donated bikes and gives them to the homeless. (WAFF)
• Ethiopia’s air is getting cleaner since it instituted the world’s first ban on importing gas- and diesel-powered cars and started buying electric buses. (DW)
• Toronto is closing a dangerous intersection to cars and diverting drivers elsewhere. (CBC)

Reflexiones sobre la seguridad en una época de profunda crisis civilizatoria - Una conversación Fecha y horario * Fecha: 17 de junio, 2026 * Horario: 1pm GMT * Enlace de Registro: Aquí * Participantes: Manuel Rozental (Colombia) y Deepa Sinha (India)

Conceptualizing Security in a Time of Deep Civilizational Crisis - A conversation Date and time * Date: June 17th, 2026 * Time: 1pm GMT * Registration Link: Here * Speakers: Manuel Rozental (Colombia) and Dipa Sinha (India) * Moderation: Madhuresh Kumaralternativesalternativesalternatives

A new solar-powered desalination device could help address society’s growing thirst for freshwater and energy. The device has specially engineered solar panels that pull potable water from seawater while also extracting salts, including lithium. Because it removes salts, the system does not produce harmful brine waste.

Researchers at the University of Rochester reported the device in the journal Light: Science and Applications. And in a recent related paper published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, the team showed that the panels can be tweaked to separate lithium from the recovered salts. The modified device extracted about half of the lithium from Great Salt Lake water samples.

According to the United Nations, the world has entered an “era of global water bankruptcy”. About 2.2 billion people do not have access to safely managed drinking water, and 3 billion live in areas where total water levels are declining or unstable.

Many parched regions of the world rely on desalination plants that convert seawater into fresh water. But the technologies used today are energy-intensive and expensive. They also generate large volumes of concentrated briny water that is discharged into the ocean where it can damage local ecosystems.

So the Rochester team took inspiration from the coffee ring effect to design their new solar desalination device. First, they etch small, black metal panels with ultra-fast lasers to make special solar panels. The textured black surface absorbs nearly all incoming sunlight and is very good at attracting water.

The patterned region quickly wicks water. As the device absorbs sunlight, the water evaporates and is distilled into fresh water. Meanwhile, the metal’s grooves are patterned in a way that they guide the salts and minerals outward to the edges of the active area, much like a coffee ring is formed as liquid evaporates and push the solid particles out in a circle.

For lithium extraction, the researchers embedded hydrogen titanate nanoparticles into the panel’s grooves. The particles selectively trap lithium ions selectively while other salts move to the passive collection zone.

“Mining lithium from the Earth has proven to be very taxing from an energy and environmental standpoint, so pulling lithium directly from saltwater could be a very important future route,” said Chunlei Guo, a professor of optics and physics, in a press release.

Sources:

• Luheng Tang et al. Additive-free and brine-discharge-free solar-thermal desalination with simultaneous complete mineral mining from ocean water. Light: Science, 2026.
• Luheng Tang et al. Rapid lithium extraction via solar-thermal interfacial evaporation with zero liquid discharge. Journal of Materials Chemistry A, 2026.

Image: University of Rochester photo / J. Adam Fenster

An encounter with a singing cardinal in a quiet spring woodland prompts a reflection on what birdsong can teach us about listening and the overlooked connections that bind human life to the wider living world.

In flood-prone northern Bihar, women transformed savings groups and kitchen gardens into a thriving local market that boosts incomes, strengthens food security and helps communities adapt to increasingly unpredictable climate.

Many participants framed the first international Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Colombia as a historic turning point. But with no binding pledges and reliance on voluntary coalitions, its impact now hinges on whether governments turn rhetoric into enforceable policies.

Believe it or not, America has the largest train network in the world, but it’s mostly used by freight companies who ship coal at five miles per hour. But how on earth did things get so bad for trains that carry people?

If you need a crash course in why it’s so hard to travel a long distance in America outside of a car or an airplane, look no further than one of our favorite YouTube channels, Climate Town, to learn about the last 200 years of U.S. passenger rail history in under 30 minutes.

And because it’s created by the hilarious “guy with a climate science and policy degree” Rollie Williams and his crack team of researchers and producers, we promise it’ll be one of the most informative and funny things you’ll watch all month. Seriously: make it all the way to the end for a truly deranged illustration of a horse, more than one jump scare of Jim Cramer eating Spam, and most important, a recipe for fixing this mess and getting America’s transportation future back on the rails:

• Can more investment save Brightline? The first privately owned intercity rail company in the U.S. since the formation of Amtrak in the 1970s looked like it would be a huge success, but is now on the verge of going bankrupt. It’s not quite fast enough, a bit too expensive, and because it uses existing at-grade rail lines, kills a lot of people. (Fast Company)
• Despite high gas prices, Americans were driving more than ever in April, according to new Federal Highway Administration statistics. (Wall Street Journal; paywall)
• Electric vehicle owners save money on gas and maintenance, but they pay an average of $1,000 extra for insurance because EVs cost more to fix after a crash. (Grist)
• Planners have retreated from politics since the Jane Jacobs area and no longer lead community discussions about transportation or other issues, writes Billy Cooney. (Southern Urbanism)
• Commercial roads lined with aging strip malls could become transit-oriented boulevards with mixed-income housing instead. (Architect Magazine)
• Almost half the miles driven by California’s Waymo robotaxis are “deadheading,” without any passengers inside. (Findings)
• Texas is cracking down on immigrant school bus drivers, already in short supply. (Observer)
• Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek’s administration is treating the failure of a transportation funding referendum as a PR problem, not a policy one. (Oregon Public Broadcasting)
• Voters in two Bay Area counties overwhelmingly approved a sales tax measure to fund rail transit. (KQED)
• The Illinois legislature passed a bill allowing Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize. (Capitol News)
• Transit advocates want to make sure addressing a funding shortfall is at the top of Pennsylvania legislators’ minds. (Capital-Star)
• As the Trump administration continues to make hay over a supposed crime wave on transit, the Federal Transit Administration is now investigating MARTA after a stabbing on an Atlanta train and another at a station. (WABE)
• Minneapolis bikeshare Nice Ride shut down in 2023, but could return with e-bikes. (MinnPost)
• Warsaw is turning a large parking lot in front of a government building into a park. (Pragmatika)
• Coach operator FlixBus restored the route number 666 to a bus connecting Krakow and the Polish seaside resort of Hel. (BBC)
• Walking and biking rather than driving made an Irish Times writer feel more connected to her city.

Sometimes, you have to take the long view, so this week, we’re joined by Ryan Avent, author of, “In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies” to discuss The Big Issues: human evolution, the impact of collective knowledge and culture, and the need to create a new story about the future of society. It gets deeper than that: We also discuss grass-is-greener thinking on infrastructure, the nature of belief without the need for evidence, and the fact that there is no perfect past.

This is a “Talking Headways” for the Ages, so let’s review all the ways you can enjoy this spirited content:

• Click here for a full transcript, albeit with some AI typos.
• Click the player below to listen.
• Or check out the lightly edited excerpt below the player.

Jeff Wood: Usually when I’m thinking about cities and reading a book like “The City History” by Lewis Mumford or whatever it might be, it’s always usually going back 5,000 years. It’s not going back 100,000 years, which I got from reading your book.

That was a really important part of it, because this slow process is building upon itself and all of the cell creation and whatever was happening to apes led to civilization as it is now. And that process was really interesting because usually we think about civilization as like a point that we started building cities, and then we went from there. But actually it goes back even further to this idea of care and caring.

Ryan Avent: As humans, as historians, people love to chop things up into eras and say, “Oh, this sort of revolution unfolded here, and thereafter we were completely different.”

And we do this all the time. We do it with agriculture and the first cities and states and with the Industrial Revolution. And I think it’s important to realize a couple things. One, that these big moments come together slowly out of a lot of accumulating changes in the past, and we can only understand them in that way, right?

As much as it might seem like there are specific individuals or societies or civilizations that figure something out that no one ever figured out before, change is generally evolutionary. But the other side of that is the question of whether there is this process of cultural adaptation that’s going on throughout our whole history, right?

And we have to learn to develop the ideas and the stories that allow us to kind of exploit particular niches, right? So agriculture, when we first became dependent on it, was awful. It was way worse than hunting and gathering. People did back-breaking labor all the time and were, were malnourished and, and it sucked.

And for this to be sustainable, there had to be the emergence of ideas and ways of understanding our place in the world that made sense to people, and that somehow made it OK for them to keep doing this really arduous work. And I think the same thing is true of early settlements. Like, we weren’t born ready to inhabit an urban environment as a species.

We had to come up with the modes of thinking that allowed that to work. And so you have this process of trial and error where early settlements don’t last very long. They kind of flash in and out of existence. And it’s only over time that we come to figure out how to be urban by coming up with the ideas and the sort of cultural touchstones that allow us to adapt to that existence.

And the book sort of follows this line of thought throughout our history. And that’s kind of how we should think about how we got to modern economic growth. And I think if we want to enjoy future prosperity that’s greater than what we enjoy now, we might have to do some similar sort of adapting in terms of our ideas about what we’re doing here.

Jeff Wood: The cultural explosion was interesting as well, and you mentioned the DNA aspect of it, where you’re passing along information through DNA. But then you have this cultural kind of aspect of it, where apes can teach each other how to use a stick to get ants, those types of things. And then you share it, and then you learn it together, and then it gets shared throughout culture, and then you specialize, and then you move forward with that.

I’m wondering if you could kind of explain that a little bit in more detail. It’s really important, especially until we get to the point where Christianity and religion kind of creates this larger cultural experience throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.

Ryan Avent: This is really the heart of the book. I think when we kind of think about humans and what makes them special, we tend to focus on the fact that we’re these big-brained creatures who can reason and use logic to solve difficult problems. We can do calculus!

But I think, actually, if you look back at our history, the thing that’s really allowed us to become such technologically capable animals is this capacity to support culture. We’ve got a genetic inheritance — a lot of information that’s useful to us that gets passed to us through our genes, and that’s driven our long-run biological evolution.

But the thing that really sort of marked us off as different as we split off from our ape ancestors was this emerging capacity to use a collective knowledge and collective information processing in the form of culture. And culture, in a nutshell, is a body of information that is passed down over time socially rather than genetically, and sort of lives in the heads of all the people who are helping this process along.

And it includes instructions for all sorts of things. You know, I think when humans occupy an ecosystem, the thing that allows us to adapt and really exploit that ecosystem effectively is not, as with many animals, these biological tricks. It’s these cultural tricks that allow us to figure out when to hunt and gather and what things to take out of the ecosystem and how to prepare them and how to survive the hardships associated with that ecosystem.

But cultural knowledge also includes other things beyond sort of these kind of, you know, practical moment-to-moment things. And it’s what’s really allowed us to scale up and become the amazing creatures that we are, is the way that our social technologies evolve over time. And we’ve found ways to operate, to cooperate, I guess, in larger numbers to better purposes.

We’ve found ways to generate and preserve knowledge at enormous scale, and I think that’s kind of the fascinating part of our history, and it’s not something that individuals authored sort of using their own brains is something that kind of we stumbled on and that’s led us here, and, and now we’ve sort of forgotten that that was kind of our special trick, even though it’s still holding our societies together today.

You, me, and everyone we know were born on the Titanic. Some are shouting about icebergs. Some are shoveling coal into the furnaces. Some are jamming out while the band plays louder than ever. In this special episode Alex reviews the odyssey thus far.

This chapter from r3.0's latest Seeds Series explores how societies can move beyond extractive economic systems by embracing systems thinking, place-based resilience and regenerative approaches to food, energy and community development.