B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

This week, we’re chatting with Dallas developer, DART board member, and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about his recent publication, “An Atlas of Intercity Highway Impacts.” We discuss the tax base that highways removed from cities, what we could have done for cities with federal transportation funding, and the long term value we lost.

You know the drill: we provide three ways of enjoying the podcast: The full, AI-generated transcript; an edited excerpt at the end of this post; and the embedded audio player below.

Jeff Wood: What was the process like for putting together all these maps, all these data points, and making sure that you were on the right track in terms of the story that you were trying to tell?

Patrick Kennedy: It was an iterative process because I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I had a plan that I wanted to write a book on the history of the Interstate Highway System and how we got to this place, and a lot of it centered on Eisenhower and the person he appointed, General David Bragdon, to keep the interstate system on time and under budget.

Megan Kimble was working on her book, City Limits, and I talked to her about that. She ended up going to the Eisenhower Library and digging through the notes for that book. I was talking to a friend, Scott Polikov, about this, too. He was like, “Nobody cares about history. Focus on the actual data. What was the impact? And focus on the future.”

And that’s when I decided, you know what? I’m gonna focus on the data. I had been talking to some book publishers, and they were more interested in black and white text than images. So I was like, that’s not what this can be, right?

This has to be maps, and this has to be data. I’m just going to go my own way, just do it, and just do it for free and post it. I just focused on the real world impacts to every city. I started on every city in the Yellow Book, but I realized that was not enough. There were something like 90 cities. I expanded it to 142 because no cities in North Carolina were in the Yellow Book.

Phoenix might have been in the Yellow Book, but San Diego wasn’t. I just wanted to keep adding cities. And I just was assembling data and data and data. I was interested in what happened to population density since 1960 once we started building in earnest, what happened to population since 2000 to present.

I found an inflection point in demographics where millennials were entering the workforce and looking to come back to urban environments and walkable environments. I started keeping this huge database of these things. During the pandemic, I came across a report by the Philadelphia Federal Reserve — their study suggested that within three-mile radius of downtowns, highways become a disamenity and devalue property up to about a half mile away.

That was the key point where I started building these databases and said, “OK, real estate values in most cities is generally not as valuable in a three-mile radius.” So I built a one-mile radius and a three-mile radius, and I used that to collect population data points and my real estate data points regarding how much recent development is worth on the assessed tax rolls in all these cities.

I went through, found new development, looked it up on the tax rolls, and aggregated the total amount of highway right of way in each of these cities, in those geographies, the one-mile to three-mile radius, and said, “OK, if I developed these highway right of ways at 50 to 55 percent efficiency,” you’d have tax-exempt surface roads and schools and whatever else.

55 percent of private development, what would that be worth to the city? And I said, “OK, every city then has this value multiplied by the amount of land that highways take up in those one-mile and three-mile geographies.” And that’s what I used to determine the economic development potential of removals, and how much theoretical tax base was removed from each of these cities because of the development potential those cities lost by building highways.

Another book that was kind of the impetus to this was The Elephant in the Bedroom, which was a book about California highway building from the early 1990s. It was written by a couple of engineers. And when I was researching, thinking I was doing the book on the history of highways, came across a line where they said the 210 freeway through Pasadena wiped off 10 percent of the property tax rolls right off the map. I thought, “Oh, okay, there’s a number for every city,” and I wanted to know what it was.

Jeff Wood: I guess I have to disagree with Scott a little bit. I think the history is really important. I think it’s good to know.

Patrick Kennedy: No, me too. But the story was being told, you know? I was like, yeah … I’m just retelling the same story.

Jeff Wood: Yeah. We talked with Megan Kimble about Bragdon and what she found in the archives from Eisenhower’s library. But I think that’s really important to think about all the places where we could have gone in a different direction. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially in the 1970s with the oil crisis — kind of what we’re in now with the Iran oil situation.

But there’s all these off-ramps that we could have taken over time, and we continue to go along the route that we’ve chosen. I feel like this is a negative way we’ve taken to building infrastructure in the country. But those inflection points are really fascinating.

I’m wondering how the Bragdon information spoke to you. You talked about the Philadelphia Federal Reserve. There’s a lot of little things that, in the past, kind of shaped how you’re thinking, but also kind of shape the politics of the way that things are going now.

Patrick Kennedy: To me, Bragdon was the most influential person. I’m drawn to those sort of Cassandras that fight the righteous battle, but then ultimately lose and are forgotten to history. But I also kind of wanted to tell that story because he was right and he fought the Bureau of Public Roads and all of the Robert Moses acolytes that worked there.

If people are this wonky and interested, his 1960 interim report is kind of fascinating because he argued that the interstate highway system was for interstate commerce. It was not to serve local traffic. If we were to build highways to serve the traffic projections in 1980, some of the highways through the bigger cities would have to be 40 lanes or more.

He said that it’s far better to use our dollars for actual high-capacity transit. And part of his job was to keep the entire interstate system under budget. It ended up going about five or six times over the original budget. I calculated that in today’s dollars: the interstate system ended up costing something like $750 billion.

He said the inner city highways, which were one-tenth of the lane mileage of the system, cost ten times per mile to build. And so it was the most expensive part. Roughly half the cost of the entire interstate system was just the property acquisition and construction of the inner city highways.

Montreal was building the first legs of its subway in the 1960s. We could have built the equivalent of 36 Paris Metros for that $375 billion at the cost that Montreal was building its subway. And so part of this is just creating like an Earth 2 in my mind. What if we had gotten it right?

We could have a Paris Metro system in Cincinnati and in Kansas City serving local traffic and not devaluing the downtowns and basically wrecking a lot of the local economies around the country.

Dictionary (WG) * Coordinators: Carlos Tornel and Franco Augusto * Members: Franco Augusto, Matthew Burke, Ashish Kothari, Vera Kozak, Lizah Makombore, Vasna Ramasar, Carlos Tornel, Matías Vaccarezza. Description * Our short project aim: To create a collection of concepts in an online platform where we foster intercultural knowledge of radical alternativesalternatives

Solar power is in its heyday, with installations growing rapidly around the world as costs drop. Recent studies have suggested that photovoltaics could be the dominant power source by 2050.

Those shiny sun-harnessing panels have a dark side right now though. They are slated to become a major waste problem at the end of their lives. Anywhere from 297 to 402 million tonnes of solar panels will be discarded by 2060.

But all that PV waste could deliver almost $1 trillion in economic benefits if recycled properly, according to a new study published in Nature. And with international cooperation and foresight, these benefits could be distributed globally, writes the international team from China and Sweden.

“Effectively recycling [end-of-life] PV modules is therefore not only an environmental imperative but also a strategic necessity to secure material supply chains for future PV deployment and sustain global decarbonization goals,” they write.

Right now when solar panels become ineffective or break, they typically end up in landfills. There, they can leach toxic heavy metals such as lead and cadmium into soils and groundwater systems.

 

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Solar modules also contain valuable materials such as silicon, silver, copper, and tellurium, which could be reused to make new panels. Silicon and silver are the most valuable metals in PV panels. But today’s commercial recycling technologies typically cannot recover either at sufficient purity to justify the cost of recycling. And there simply aren’t enough industrial-scale recycling operations in place today.

Veolia runs PV recycling facilities in France and Michigan. China, which is the world’s biggest PV producer, has a directive for manufacturers to take responsibility for collecting and treating end-of-life panels. Many Chinese solar PV manufacturers now have pilot recycling projects.

“The global landscape is far from uniform, characterized by an uneven distribution of recycling capabilities,” the authors write. High- and middle-income regions such as the EU, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea have the capacity to recycle most of the world’s solar panels. Meanwhile, low-income regions lack the expertise and capacity for recycling so they rely on outsourced recycling.

So the researchers created a computer model that examined 1,708 recycling scenarios across 32 global regions. They took into account recycling technologies, material prices, international trade and subsidy policies. They found that combining region-specific recycling technologies with outsourced recycling strategies gives the highest benefits. It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 3.32 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent. And it would generate a net benefit of around US $530 to over 935 billion by 2060.

But these benefits would concentrate in upper-middle-income regions with advanced technologies. One strategy that would help make recycling more equitable is a declining subsidy model, the researchers found. This approach gradually reduces financial support as recycling becomes commercially viable.

International cooperation mechanisms, such as the Paris Agreement, should also prioritize technology transfer and targeted funding to develop recycling capacity in low-income regions, they write.

“We suggest that regionally adapted recycling strategies and international cooperation, with a focus on technology transfer and funding for recycling capacity in low-income regions, provide effective ways to achieve equitable and scalable PV waste circularity,” the team writes.

Source: Chen Wang et al. Towards an equitable future of global photovoltaic waste recycling. Nature, 2026.

Image: AI-generated / by Magnific

 

For a farming community that depends on seasonal consistency, climate change creates uncertainty at every stage of production.

Rewetting and restoring wetlands, building small dams, and restoring streams create landscape-level discontinuities that interrupt how fire propagates by putting water back into the land rather than letting it run off. EcoAtivo is one organisation putting this directly into practice.

Fish are often treated as reflex-bound creatures, bodies without minds. Yet, study by study, from anatomy labs to behavioural experiments, mounting evidence to the contrary has emerged.

• The Trump administration is repealing a ban on roads in millions of acres of public land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. Allowing greater access by motor vehicles could disrupt numerous environmentally sensitive habitats. (Field and Stream)
• Traffic engineers could take advantage of aviation technology to detect and deter conflicts at intersections. (ITS International)
• The CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority blames increasing regulation for slow progress on the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line, 20 years in the works. (Fresno Bee)
• As the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority electrifies its trains, should it go with tried-and-true overhead wires or cutting-edge battery technology? (Commonwealth Beacon)
• A spike in serious crime on Charlotte Area Rapid Transit last year coincided with a drop in ridership (WCNC). Meanwhile, North Carolina’s state auditor is calling for gates or turnstiles at every light rail station to improve security and fare collection (Queen City News).
• Atlanta transit riders want the same impeccable service MARTA offered during the World Cup to continue on. (Appen Media)
• Amtrak’s Mardi Gras line along the Gulf Coast has served 150,000 passengers in its first year, twice the initial projection. (Transportation for America)
• Seattle shattered a record for bike and scooter trips across the Fremont Bridge in July, a sign that the pandemic dip is over. (Seattle Bike Blog)
• Stephanie Nahkleh argues that a car-centric zoning code, not greedy developers, is to blame for Santa Fe’s ugly sprawl. (We Can Have Nice Things)
• Smart Growth America highlights a quick-build road diet in Winchester, Kentucky.
• Lloyd Alter says he expected a Canadian appeals court to overturn a ruling calling Doug Ford’s anti-bike lane policy unconstitutional, but he didn’t expect the judge to sound like such a car-brained jerk. (Carbon Upfront!)
• A Dutch town built a chain-driven ferry for cyclists and pedestrians to pull themselves across a river. (Core 77)
• In Tokyo, visitors can ride on one of the few streetcars that survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima. (Japan Today)

The North American plains bison stands as a symbol of both rampant devastation wrought by colonizing powers and of the potential to bring a species back from the brink of extinction.

The legacy of that destruction, and the promise and perils of the recovery, are indelibly etched in the DNA of the survivors and their ancestors, according to research just published in Science.

“Ancient DNA is rewriting the story of one of America’s most iconic conservation successes,” said Beth Shapiro, a University of California Santa Cruz researcher and the paper’s senior author. The new results show “both what the 19th-century collapse actually did to bison genomes and what a smarter, genomically informed path forward could look like.”

For millennia, an ocean of bison numbering in the millions swept across the center of North America, shaping ecosystems and the Indigenous peoples who lived there. But by the early 20th century, there were just a few hundred left, their numbers depleted by overhunting, habitat loss and systematic slaughter sanctioned by the U.S government to help subjugate bison-dependent tribes.

Since then, conservation work by some of these same tribes, and others, has led to a modest recovery. Today, more than 20,000 bison live in the wild, largely in protected land such as Yellowstone National Park. More than 400,000 are raised for commercial uses such as meat.

But the recovery has been dogged by questions. Since current bison are descended from such a small population, have they lost genetic diversity or become inbred? Did a quixotic attempt to breed bison with domesticated cattle irreversibly tamper with their genetics? Similarly, did a decision to move thousands of plains bison into the territory of wood bison break down the genetic wall between the closely-related species?

To answer these questions, Shapiro and colleagues turned to the latest scientific tools for deciphering a species’ history in its DNA. They collected samples from 115 ancient bison, dating back as much as 20,000 years and as recently as 100 years ago, when the last survivors of the slaughter remained. They also gathered tissue from 45 modern-day bison.

When they sequenced the genomes, the results offered both good news and cautionary lessons about the current state of bison conservation.

 

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Among the ancient samples, the genetics of plains bison were remarkably similar regardless of their location. That suggests a genetic flow across the landscape relatively uninhibited by geography. By contrast, today’s wild plains bison are confined to small pockets of land. There are at least four groups with distinct, shared genetic fingerprint that differs from the other groups.

The findings point to the need for managing the remaining bison more as a single herd, the authors write. Given the geographic barriers, that could mean using modern reproductive techniques to help blend the DNA of these different herds, much as modern cattle are carefully bred using tools such as artificial insemination.

While this points to the potential risks of continuing with traditional management methods, the findings also show reasons to be hopeful. Although the modern herds are distinct from each other, collectively they contain levels of genetic diversity similar to their ancestors.

Fears of contamination from cattle also appear to be overblown. The analysis turned up traces of livestock DNA in roughly a third of the modern-day bison genomes. That means the majority of bison hadn’t been tainted. And in those that did contain evidence of cattle, it represented less than 2% of their genomes.

The news is slightly more complicated for wood bison, the larger relative of the plains bison that lives in Canada’s boreal forest. In the 1920s, the Canadian government moved around 7,000 plains bison into Wood Buffalo National Park, which at the time was home to the last surviving 1,500 wood bison.

The legacy of that transplant remains today. The study showed that wood bison are genetically distinct – having diverged from plain bison approximately 3,000 years ago. But it also revealed that today’s wood bison carry significant plains bison DNA. The individual wood bison genomes were between 7% and 64% from plains bison.

Despite this, the results show “that wood and plains bison are substantially distinct and should continue to be managed separately,” said Parks Canada bison ecologist Greg Wilson, a coauthor of the study.

Now, thanks to DNA, bison managers have a clearer roadmap for moving forward, and the tools to know if they are veering further off course.

“Until now, managers didn’t have a genetic baseline for what ‘healthy’ bison diversity looked like before the 20th-century collapse and management,” said Shapiro. The new study “is a great example of using ancient DNA to facilitate management decisions in the present.”

Oppenheimer, et. al. “Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison.” Science. Aug. 6, 2026.

Photo: Getty Images for Unsplash

You can’t win them all, but a new bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario is winning pedestrians and cyclists on both sides of the US-Canada border.

The bicycle and pedestrian path on the brand new Gordie Howe International Bridge opened on Aug. 5 — nine days after the bridge itself opened, and despite President Trump’s threatening to hold up its opening earlier this year amid deteriorating relations and trade disputes with the country’s northern neighbor.

“It is quite the game-changer,” remarked Chris Palmer, one of more than 3,400 visitors of the path on its opening day. “It is … a remarkable political phenomenon. It was a great experience.”

So great, in fact, that bridge officials temporarily closed the path to manage the massive inaugural crowd.

Drivers must pay to cross the 1.5-mile span, but access to the car-free portion is free and open to the public year-round. Visitors can explore scenic trails and protected bike infrastructure at both ends of the trip — neatly documented in an online map created by the Detroit Greenways Coalition, a Michigan-based bike advocacy organization.

The Gordie Howe Bridge has one of the only bikable crossings between the US and Canada.

The president, meanwhile, spent the better part of the year leveraging the Gordie Howe in US-Canada relations — and succeeded in delaying its opening by a month. The Canadian government, which funded the entirety of the project, disinvited US officials from the bridge’s opening.

All that drama failed to put a damper on the thrill of a new bike connection for Detroit-Windsor locals.

Recommended ‘Big Brother’ At U.S. DOT: Bike Lanes Aren’t Just ‘DEI,’ They’re Also Unsafe Gersh Kuntzman July 17, 2026

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” said Todd Scott, the executive director of the Detroit Greenways Coalition.

Scott has advocated for the inclusion of bike and pedestrian access on the bridge since 2009, when the Gordie Howe Bridge — named for the Canadian-born star player for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team — was little more than a hypothetical. But when Canada first sought public input on the bridge’s design, the two most common responses were requests for biking and walking access.

“I have to imagine that [the bridge’s planners] are super glad with their decision,” said Scott.

The cable-stay bridge contains a twelve foot pedestrian and bike pathway, connecting the US and Canada.

Seventeen years later, both sides of the border have significantly upgraded their waterfronts to include bike routes, protected lanes and car-free trails.

On the Detroit side, the under-construction Joe Louis Greenway circles the city with nearly 30 miles of car-free routing. Pedestrians and bike riders can use the greenway to connect virtually anywhere in the city upon its completion in the early 2030s. Six new miles are expected to open by the end of this year. The route will connect directly to the Gordie Howe Bridge, extending its benefits across the border.

“‘This is one, I think, of the most important urban trail projects in the country,” said Scott.

The Gordie Howe Bridge has spurred infrastructure investments throughout Detroit.

The ride across the Gordie Howe rivals the extensive infrastructure upgrades on each of its ends.

“You’re riding over a piece of art,” Scott said. “It just looks stunningly beautiful.”

Americans aren’t the only ones celebrating the newly-opened link.

“It was absolutely thrilling,” said Lori Newton, the former executive director of Bike Windsor Essex, which spearheaded advocacy for the bike trail on the Canadian side. “It changes the whole view and the whole feeling of the neighborhoods that it goes through.”

Pedestrians and cyclists have advocated for nearly two decades for a path across the Detroit River.

The ride across was particularly impactful for Newton, who has spent several years advocating for the path alongside Scott and whose cyclist husband passed shortly before the bridge’s opening.

“He would be so excited that I was going up there for a ride with Todd,” she said.

Newton and Scott’s longtime partnership reflects one of the more extraordinary benefits of the newly-established car-free route. Windsor and Detroit have long celebrated a close relationship, but after the US tightened border security following the Sept.11 attacks, the two cities’ relationship weakened.

The new bridge represents a new day for the two cities. The inclusion of a car-free lane on the Gordie Howe promises immense economic benefits for the entire Great Lakes region — which won over otherwise bike-skeptical politicians and business leaders.

“There wasn’t a fight … it was building a business case,” Newton said.

Recommended Study: Bicycling Generates $365 Million in Economic Activity in Iowa Angie Schmitt January 26, 2012

And the largest benefits of the trail are those still yet-to-be seen.

Local advocates hope to see new tourism and local investment as a result of the bridge. Newton hopes bridge will bring a wider array of people onto bikes, particularly seniors searching for an accessible way to stay mobile.

“Cycling is more than 20 guys in Lycra on bikes zooming past,” she said.

What if the greatest strength of modern civilization—its incredible complexity—is also its greatest weakness?

Activist Catherine Murupaenga-Ikenn discusses food sovereignty, Māori leadership and challenging colonial frameworks in an interview with Agroecology Now!

Investigating how and why complex societies or civilizations have risen and fallen in human history, anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter uncovered a dynamic that can help us make sense of our present situation and future prospects.

• Apparently downloading music is more important to some drivers than not killing people, because researchers found that traffic deaths rose by about 15 percent on the release dates for major albums, and the trend was even more pronounced among young people. (CNN)
• A University of Minnesota study found that cheap infrastructure like bollards and curb extensions made drivers more likely to slow down and stop for pedestrians.
• Drivers have killed 28 people in Washington, D.C. already this year, topping last year’s number of 25 for all of 2025 (DC News Now). In Maryland, motorcycle deaths are up, but overall traffic fatalities are trending lower than last year’s (WTOP).
• Despite “near universal” support among visitors, Seattle is scaling back car-free hours at Pike Place because some merchants perceive that sales will drop over the winter. (The Urbanist)
• Kansas City needs to find a stable source of funding for transit instead of bailing out its transit agency at the last minute over and over. (KCUR)
• Tailpipe emissions in Utah have fallen by 73 percent since 2011, even as the population and miles driven have grown, thanks to a cleaner type of gasoline. (KUER)
• Nashville is committing another $100 million to Choose How You Move transportation projects. (Fox 17)
• A Nebraska fund is offering loans to businesses affected by Omaha streetcar construction. (KMTV)
• Charlottesville officials and cyclists are calling for safer conditions. (Right Now)
• Florida wants cities to get rid of their rainbow crosswalks, but apparently faux brick is fine. (Suncoast Searchlight)
• Villanova students are using virtual reality to study how drivers would behave before going through the expense of building new infrastructure. (NBC Philadelphia)
• An Outside contributor writes about how her Denver family became a one-car household.
• The U.S. could’ve had high-speed rail 120 years ago. (CT Mirror)

The following submission was in response to “Waymo Speaks: We Have More In Common With Urbanists Than You Might Think” by Arielle Fleisher, Waymo’s Policy Development and Research Manager.

The Deadheading Problem

Ride-hail services such as Uber and AV operators such as Waymo share a structural problem: a large share of the miles are driven empty between drop-off and pick-up. A recent piece by a Waymo representative cites a figure that roughly 40 percent of ride-hail and AV miles run empty. Those miles add to vehicle miles traveled (VMT), congestion, and pollution. Even electric cars still generate brake and tire particulate and contribute to traffic.

Fleisher’s proposed fix is staging: letting AVs park at the curb between rides instead of continuously circling. Staging is already allowed, as cars can pull over to the nearest empty curb space while waiting for the next ride, as long as they follow existing parking rules and fees. Fleisher argues cities should create a specific permitting standard to formalize staging, similar to how taxi stands work.

The centerpiece of the argument is a study, funded by Waymo, by researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine modeling how staging affects VMT for a simulated San Francisco AV fleet. The model simulated roughly 1,700 AVs and found that banning staging and forcing vehicles to circle instead increased daily VMT by more than 200,000 kilometers. That’s a strange comparison, since staging isn’t currently banned in San Francisco. Waymo notes it self-restricts to one staged car per block, but the real concern seems to be a lack of available curb space, not any city law banning staging.

Who Pays for the Curb?

One question the op-ed never answers is whether Waymo wants free curb space or is proposing to pay for it. The premise of modern curb policy, based on Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking, is that curb space is a scarce public asset that should be priced to increase turnover. San Francisco already runs a dynamic-pricing meter pilot on that logic. There’s no reason one of the most valuable companies should get free access to a public right-of-way that residents pay for.

The Local Business Claim Doesn’t Add Up

The op-ed also claims staging is a net positive for local businesses: “the cumulative value generated by staging far exceeds that of a curb space occupied by a privately owned vehicle.” For a commercial district, staging could supposedly mean eight to ten times as many potential customer visits compared to space reserved for private vehicles.

I don’t see how an empty Waymo idling outside a storefront generates more value than a parked private car, whose owner at least has some chance of being a customer. The argument rests entirely on total curb turnover, as more vehicles cycling through a spot, in theory, means more potential trip origins and destinations nearby. But that’s a claim about vehicle throughput, not foot traffic to any specific business the AV happens to be parked in front of. An AV staging on a block isn’t necessarily dropping off or picking up passengers on that block, it might just be the nearest available spot. Treating idle Waymos cycling through a space as a proxy for customer visits seems unsupported.

Who Uses the Staging Spaces?

Another question underlies both of the above: are staging zones meant to be exclusive to Waymo and other AV operators, or could locals park there too? I’d assume the former, since the pitch depends on reliable curb availability for the fleet. If so, the “benefit to local business” argument gets weaker: the city wouldn’t just be adding turnover to a general-use curb, it would be converting public spaces into a private company’s dedicated spot. That sounds less like curb management and more like a request for exclusive use of a public asset.

None of this means staging is a bad idea, but a version of this proposal centered on effective curb management would focus on pricing a scarce resource appropriately. A priced staging system could still cut deadheading substantially, since a modest curb fee is likely cheaper for an operator than driving empty, while generating public revenue instead of giving away space for free.

The op-ed’s argument for staging access reads a bit like an ultimatum: “deadheading can never be fully eliminated, so the real question is how many empty miles the public should tolerate in exchange for AVs’ benefits.” That framing positions the VMT and congestion increase caused by AVs as a necessary price for a service that seems to mostly exist to give relatively wealthy people another option to get around in a private vehicle. It also avoids the more obvious lever for cutting AV-generated VMT: limiting how many AVs are on the road in the first place.

San Francisco has no legal permitting authority over AVs. Fleet size, operating hours, and where AVs can drive are all decided by the DMV and the California Public Utilities Commission, not City Hall. In the wake of the July 4th Waymo meltdown, Mayor Lurie called on the state to tighten restrictions on AVs. Maybe it’s also time to give cities authority to manage them.

***

Chris Kucera is a climate and transportation advocate based in San Francisco’s Alamo Square neighborhood. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Solutions.

Interviews series about Radical Democracy Franco Augusto and Shail Sathi conducted these conversations during the “Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self-Determination (RaDASD)” from 1 to 6 February 2025. The recording were produced by Franco Augusto and Basil, edited by Marco Andrade.

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Before people can reduce their carbon footprint, they need to know what actions will most help them do so. Research has shown that this domain of knowledge, known as “carbon competence,” is relatively low among the general public. But until recently there hasn’t been much investigation of why, or how to improve it.

A new study identifies two familiar cognitive biases as psychological barriers to improving carbon competence, “meaning inaccurate understanding of climate impact is not just a knowledge gap but also a behavioral and communication challenge,” says study team member Claudia Schneider, a psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

The team’s findings suggest that simply telling people which climate actions are most effective—until now the gold standard of climate communication—won’t move the needle for everyone. Instead, boosting carbon competence might require an individualized approach.

Schneider and her collaborators conducted an online study of more than 500 U.S. citizens in which they asked participants to estimate what percentage of the average North American’s carbon footprint could be saved by each of 34 different actions.

“Many people misjudge which personal climate actions cut emissions most, often overrating familiar actions like recycling and underrating higher-impact changes such as flying less and eating less red meat,” Schneider says. Those findings are in line with previous studies.

 

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In the new work, people tended to overestimate the effectiveness of actions that were top of mind and those they themselves participated in, and people with higher environmental values were likely to rate all actions more highly, reflecting optimism about the impact they can have as individuals.

Taken together, the results suggest that two well-known cognitive biases, the availability heuristic and motivated reasoning, distort people’s understanding of the effectiveness of climate actions.

The researchers then designed two more studies, each involving about 1,200 participants, to test strategies to overcome these psychological barriers. Reasoning that people like heuristics—rules of thumb used to speed and simplify decision-making—the researchers decided to offer more accurate ones.

They told one group of participants that more effective climate actions tend to have higher costs in terms of time, money, or comfort. Another group was informed that more common climate actions tend to be less effective at reducing emissions. For a third group, the researchers simply listed the four most impactful personal climate actions.

The researchers found some heartening evidence that people are willing to try to overcome a tendency for motivated reasoning: in one of the studies, people who were told that more common actions tend to be less effective were then able to avoid overestimating the impact of their own actions.

But overall, the interventions didn’t improve people’s ability to assess the effectiveness of climate actions as much, or at least as reliably, as hoped. Surprisingly, even straight-up telling people which actions were most effective didn’t necessarily enable them to later identify which actions were most effective.

Instead, the impact of the interventions varied a lot from person to person. “Our data suggests that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution to overcoming these psychological barriers,” Schneider says.

As well as figuring out how to tailor messages for different audiences, the search for a broadly effective strategy to improve carbon competence needs to continue, the researchers say.

“An important follow up question concerns the factors that drive engagement in climate actions, above and beyond judging their impact,” Schneider adds. She and her collaborators are investigating the role that perceptions of fairness play in these decisions, she says.

Source: Herberz M. et al. “Psychological barriers to improving carbon competence.” Nature Sustainability 2026.

Image: Based on photo by Am on Unsplash.

• Bad press about the threat of e-motorbikes is threatening the broader mobility movement in general, with the fast vehicles getting lumped in with e-scooters and ordinary e-bikes. While some regulation is needed, over-regulation could put the brakes on a fast-growing mobility mode that often replaces driving. Meanwhile, the real threat — cars — gets less media attention. (The Guardian)
• The Federal Transit Administration awarded Amtrak $5.3 billion for 43 projects, including bridge and track repairs, new trains, locomotives, double-tracking in Massachusetts, North Carolina and San Diego, and a Chicago maintenance facility. (Trains)
• NPR‘s “All Things Considered” explored the U.S. DOT’s war on “DEI” bike lanes.
• Air quality in Manhattan improved slightly since congestion pricing started, and it didn’t get any worse in the outer boroughs. (New York Times)
• Oren Hadar writes about how Los Angeles caters to drivers, to the point that pedestrians have to wait a frustratingly long time for a crosswalk signal so that cars don’t have to stop. (The Future Is L.A.)
• California rideshare drivers are on the verge of forming a union. Now can they negotiate a contract? (L.A. Progressive)
• Light rail service to West Seattle has been delayed for another three years. (KIRO)
• Jarrett Walker is encouraged that a transit referendum passed in a right-leaning town like Spokane. (Human Transit)
• Doubts are growing in Charleston that the Federal Transit Administration will come through a $374 million grant for a bus rapid transit line. (Post and Courier)
• The Utah Transit Authority is expanding its microtransit service area. (KSL)
• Public comment on Utah’s new five-year transportation plan overwhelmingly favored rail over highways. (Salt Lake City Weekly)
• Pittsburgh closed a loophole in its longstanding law banning parking on sidewalks and in bike lanes. (USA Today)
• Joe Cortwright argues that the Rose Quarter Freeway widening project in Portland is turning into a fiscal black hole. (City Commentary)
• The Cincinnati Enquirer profiled a mother who’s been advocating for safer streets since losing her daughter in a hit-and-run eight years ago.
• A Daily Tar Heel column in favor of light rail also gets in a few digs at Duke.
• The Ontario Court of Appeals ruled that Premier Doug Ford can rip up Toronto bike lanes, overturning a previous ruling. (National Newswatch)
• Bus trips in Ho Chi Minh City are up 44% since 134 routes went fare-free. (Vietnam Plus)