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Life after 52 days of wildfire Channel News brendan 1st October 2026 Teaser Media

A city in Washington state is taking rapid action to calm streets almost immediately after people are killed in crashes — debuting a novel new approach to traffic violence response that they think other cities should try, too.

In what its creators say is the first real-world deployment of the “Emergency Streets” concept — which calls on communities to implement temporary traffic calming measures within 72 hours of a fatal crash — the city of Spokane, Washington recently closed a lane at the site where 18-year-old motorcyclist Kiril Herlazhyi was killed in a single-vehicle collision just a few days prior.

In many communities, transportation authorities might have treated Herlazhyi’s death as an unavoidable “accident” for which the teenager himself was to blame, since he lost control of his vehicle at a high rate of speed and crashed into a pole. The city of Spokane, though, chose to treat the tragedy as part of a systemic traffic violence emergency, and take action to compel everyone to hit the brakes along a road where going too fast is all too common — thanks in part to road design that encourages speed.

“I’m hoping this opens up a community conversation, where we don’t focus exclusively on what happened and who’s to blame,” Snyder said. “It’s more like: okay, this is preventable. What can we do to prevent it? Because whatever happened, somebody died … There’s always something that could have been done.”

Recommended Talking Headways Podcast: ‘Normal’ is Not Correct, Someone Died Here Jeff Wood May 8, 2025

The experiment is part of Spokane’s first-in-the-nation “Emergency Streets” pilot, which will provide the city with grant funding for six post-crash deployments between now and June. But Snyder says the program was initially sparked by local advocates at Spokane Reimagined, who installed roadside “Ghost Bikes” at the sites where cyclists lost their lives.

That effort, Snyder says, helped humanize the cost of the traffic violence crisis, and memorialize its victims long after all other evidence of the crash had been swept away to keep the flow of traffic moving.

Over time, though, Spokane Reimagined found they wanted to do more than just remember victims: they wanted real infrastructure to keep drivers from creating new ones. And they didn’t want to wait the months or years it often takes for permanent traffic calming plans to be debated, approved, and installed — particularly along high injury networks where crashes happen over and over again.

“They came to me [to ask]: ‘Can we do something more?'” Snyder added. “‘How can we treat those fatality sites [differently]?”

Recommended What If We Treated Car Crash Sites Like Disaster Zones? Streetsblog August 6, 2024

Snyder found his answer at a presentation by Kevin Krizek to Spokane’s “Cooper Jones Bicyclist Safety Advisory Council,” the name of which itself memorializes a 13 year-old boy who was killed by a driver while riding. An environmental design professor, Krizek co-created of the Emergency Streets framework with advocate Tila Duhaime and went on to launch an organization of the same name.

Snyder says Krizek led a design class that helped hammer out the nuts and bolts of how Spokane’s program would work, down to the (MUTCD-compliant) pink traffic cones and door hangers for surrounding residences with QR links to a survey. He and his collaborator, though, credit the Washington city with having the courage to actually use those tools to test a bold and unfamiliar idea.

“Spokane’s leadership deserves high praise for this initiative, which speaks to a fundamental truth: having community members hurt or killed on their own streets is unacceptable,” said Duhaime in a statement to Streetsblog. “The victims cannot go back to their regular lives, so an appropriate civic response must stress the urgency of using our roads differently.”

Despite months of community outreach, though, Snyder was surprised by how many neighbors were still caught off guard by the city’s first Emergency Streets installation — and how resistant to even temporary change some of them could be.

Prior to the installation, they’d warned Spokanites that “Emergency Streets” were coming soon with notices on streaming services, utility bills, emails and more. Less than a week after the lane first closed, they’d already received more than 300 responses to their survey — which ranged from appreciative to outraged.

“It’s really sad to me to see how callous some people can be,” Snyder added. “Even if [the victim] made a bad choice, most of us probably made bad choices when we were 18. We just were fortunate enough to not make ones that had fatal consequences.”

Snyder looks forward to answering those responses with data, which Spokane is collecting as part of the pilot. At the time of his interview with Streetsblog, he says the lane closure hadn’t resulted in increased crashes, as some neighbors feared; even slowdowns had been minimal, according to comparisons of anonymized cell phone data to comparable periods.

“The inconvenience is so small it’s hard to measure,” he said. “We’re just pinching off the lane for a series of blocks, and then it opens back up again … We’re talking seconds, not even minutes. [But] for some people, that’s just too much.”

Of course, one of the beauties of the Emergency Streets initiative is that the road design changes it creates aren’t permanent — at least for now. And in some ways, the pilot may help the city develop skills to better weather driver backlash, and bring communities more meaningfully into the design process as they seek solutions to save lives.

Snyder argues, though, that grumbling motorists can no longer be an excuse for total inaction — especially when people are dying.

“How much driver discomfort are we willing to absorb in order to do something positive that could have an impact on lower than fatalities and serious injuries?” Snyder asked. “I’m constantly shocked by how much we consign these deaths to acceptable collateral.”

“[Crashes] also act as a kind of terrorism against everyone who uses our transportation system,” he continued. “Even if you are not experiencing one of these crashes [personally], you may pull yourself back from walking, from biking, from taking the bus, or maybe even just driving a smaller car — all because you feel so concerned about safety.”

Snyder hopes that other cities can learn from their efforts and launch Emergency Streets pilots of their own, especially as his program continues to share lessons on how to use the strategy to the best effect. On the other hand, though, he’d be just as happy if Spokane didn’t have any lessons to share — because traffic deaths had stopped, and the Emergency Streets program was no longer necessary.

“I hope we don’t have to do any at all,” he said.

The U.S. economy is undergoing its biggest-ever capital investment boom, driven by government industrial policies, corporate tax cuts and AI data center spending. Profits as a share of the economy are at their highest in eighty years. The stock market routinely smashes records, and the unemployment rate remains near historic lows.

Such economic upswings normally spell political success for a U.S. president. But Donald Trump’s poll numbers are miserable, not only because of outrage over his reactionary policies but also because of working-class frustration about the cost of living and worries about AI-driven job losses. What’s more, the unpopular U.S. war on Iran and its global energy disruption, along with the trade war with China and other countries, have affected the U.S., driving up inflation. Meanwhile, the gains of the economic expansion have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthy—the richest 10 percent of the population now account for more than half of all consumer spending. The top 0.1 percent hold roughly $22.5 trillion—about 13 percent of total household wealth and around 5.5 times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined.

When the boom ends, corporate debt amassed in the murky private credit market—estimated at up to $2 trillion—could worsen any subsequent recession. At the time of writing, however, the U.S. economy is powering ahead. To understand why, it’s helpful to look at the turn towards economic nationalism and economic stimulus initiated in Donald Trump’s first term (2017-21) and embraced by Joe Biden’s administration (2021-25). Whatever their political differences, Trump and Biden reflected an emerging policy consensus that a trade war with China was inevitable and necessary to revive U.S. industry, that Washington should prioritise military might alongside tariffs and that economic stimulus is key to reviving the U.S. economy.

The post-pandemic economy

The excruciatingly slow recovery from the Great Recession (2008-09) enabled Trump to tap working-class discontent as he eked out a victory in the 2016 election. His $5.5 trillion in tax cuts favored corporations and the wealthy but failed to deliver the promised boost to economic growth. In part, that was because companies used their tax breaks on share buybacks to benefit investors. At the same time, Trump levied tariffs on China, with the promise of rebuilding heavy industry, but the trade war fizzled and manufacturing job losses continued.

On the eve of the pandemic in early 2020, the economy was growing at a respectable 2.3 percent; the unemployment rate of 3.5 percent was a fifty-year low. When the pandemic produced one of the fastest and deepest recessions in U.S. history, Trump and the Congress pushed through the CARES Act, injecting $2.2 trillion into the economy and preventing a collapse. Unemployment peaked at 14.8 percent in April 2020, the highest level since the Great Depression, but had been pushed down to 6.7 percent by the time of Biden’s election victory in November 2020.

Next came a series of stimulus packages: post-election Covid relief spending of $900 billion in the December 2020 budget, followed by a series of measures by the Biden administration. The American Rescue Plan Act of early 2021 injected $1.8 trillion into the economy, and was credited by Wall Street analyst firm Moody’s with avoiding a second recession. Profit rates as measured by the U.S. government hit their highest since 1950.

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More big spending followed: the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021 and, in the following year, the $52.7 billion tech-focused CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included $500 billion in new spending and tax breaks with a climate change and infrastructure focus. The result was the biggest fixed capital formation in the U.S. in decades as manufacturing construction soared. A writer for the Brookings Institution, a think tank, called this trio of legislation a “national pivot.” The business magazine Fortune called it a “headlong dive into industrial policy.”

The Democratic administration’s stimulus-and-build program was a more sophisticated attempt at industrial policy than Trump’s crude tariffs-plus-tax-cuts method. But it wasn’t enough to lift the political fortunes of Biden and his vice president and would-be successor, Kamala Harris. Not only was it overwhelmed by the global inflationary wave that sent living standards backwards, it was too little and too late to create enough well-paying jobs to revive and energize a Democratic base by election day in 2024.

Microchips and other high-tech manufacturing require huge investments but create few jobs. So Biden’s program lacked the immediate social and political impact of the 1930s New Deal jobs programs of President Franklin Roosevelt. And while promised manufacturing jobs awaited the building of new factories, the Biden-Harris administration hammered workers, ending pandemic income relief by cutting the expanded child tax credit (CTC). As journalist Ryan Cooper noted, “[T]he end of the brief CTC expansion made for a terribly toxic combination with the end of the pandemic pop-up welfare state.” That helped smooth Trump’s path back to the White House.

Trump inherited this economy—along with an established get-tough-on-China and rebuild-America bipartisan policy context—when he took office in January 2025. He then dramatically upped the stakes with the “Liberation Day” announcements of steep tariffs on scores of countries, including an island inhabited only by penguins. Since then, tariffs have fluctuated based on various agreements and a U.S. Supreme Court decision invalidating many of them. But they remain on average the highest import duties since the 1940s.

Many leading U.S. capitalists considered the Liberation Day tariffs destabilizing, even if they were sympathetic to tariffs as a negotiating ploy. But Trump wanted to force a quick shift in business behavior. The goal was to reshape global trade and investment patterns to benefit the U.S. while allowing him to posture to his electoral base as a defender of the working class. Manufacturing jobs, however, declined by 91,000 between January 2025 and January 2026, before rising modestly in the first quarter of 2026 to 12.6 million. Yet Trump isn’t relying on tariffs alone to stimulate investment. Building on Biden’s pro-manufacturing policies, Trump’s budget bill allows businesses to fully deduct from their taxes the costs of building new factories.

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Tariffs are just one front in a trade war fused to several imperialist power plays, from U.S. threats to annex Greenland and, less seriously, Canada, to the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicholás Maduro. However, Trump failed in his central aim of forcing China to cave under sky-high tariffs of 145 percent after Beijing retaliated by cutting rare earth exports critical to U.S. manufacturing. This led to a trade truce largely on China’s terms. Trump’s much-hyped May 2026 visit to China with several tech CEOs in tow, including Elon Musk, yielded modest results in promised U.S. exports to China, chiefly soybeans and a smallish order of Boeing jets. “Trump and top CEOs leave a more self-reliant China with few deals to show for it,” CNN observed. After the Supreme Court tariff decision, the baseline was 10 percent with higher duties on steel, autos, pharmaceuticals and more that pushed the average to about 30 percent. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was compelled to pay importers $94 billion in tariff refunds.

The U.S. had been moving away from the supposed rules-based trade order for years, going back to the Obama-era sabotage of the World Trade Organization and the “buy American” requirements of the Great Recession government spending of 2009. These were a precursor to Trump’s 2017 tariffs that Biden kept in place.

Today, Trump is replacing the old trade blocs and dispute systems with a hub-and-spoke model with the U.S. at the center. There is now a broad consensus across political parties for an economic nationalism that puts AI, aerospace and tech-driven rearmament at the forefront of a program for U.S. industrial revival to counter China and rebuild the U.S. defense industrial base. The stimulus and pro-manufacturing tax breaks have accelerated the turn to U.S. domestic production, with energy production and AI at the center.

Big business leaders sometimes grumble about Trump’s heavy-handed interventions, but they embrace his economic nationalism.

Republicans and Democrats embrace this approach. Biden’s Department of Defense issued the first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy in January 2024 to “catalyze generational change from the existing defense industrial base to a more robust, resilient, and dynamic modernized defense industrial ecosystem.” Trump put his own stamp on this effort, insisting on a “golden share” for the U.S. government as a condition for a Japanese company’s takeover of U.S. Steel, and investing billions in multiple other companies in what a leading foreign policy journal calls “Trump’s state capitalism.”

Big business leaders sometimes grumble about Trump’s heavy-handed interventions, but they embrace his economic nationalism. “It has become painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing—all of which are essential for our national security,” Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank, said when announcing a $1.5 trillion investment fund for key minerals and technologies last year.

A few weeks later, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the top foreign-policy think tank, weighed in with a book-length report, U.S. Economic Security: Winning the Race for Tomorrow’s Technologies. It declared: “[T]he United States is engaged in an unprecedented competition with China across military, political, economic, and technological domains. It is therefore imperative that we address the most immediate challenges facing U.S. economic security.” Notably, Biden’s former commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, was a key author.

Thus, by the time Trump’s Pentagon proposed a $1.45 trillion military budget amid the Iran war, the military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned against was shifting into high gear.

The AI economic accelerator

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 set in motion the greatest investment boom in U.S. history, surpassing the national railroad expansion of the 1870s and the dot-com internet investments of the late 1990s. In the first half of 2025, spending on AI data centers accounted for nearly all U.S. economic growth, according to a leading liberal economist. Much of the data-center spending is on AI chips imported from Taiwan. But it also radiates throughout the economy, from construction companies and electric power utilities to the revenue of big cloud computing companies that sell AI services to businesses at premium prices. Competition compels such investments, as AI requires power, cooling and networking that older data centers cannot handle.

The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 set in motion the greatest investment boom in U.S. history.

The AI investment in 2026 could be the equivalent of 2 percent of U.S. GDP, which may seem modest until one considers that U.S. GDP was $30.8 trillion in 2025. The AI spending dovetails with the wider favorable conditions for investment in manufacturing created by Biden’s policies, including new semiconductor plants, which drove two-thirds of manufacturing construction by 2024. Trump’s tax cuts of 2025 provided still more incentives, cutting the cost for machinery, fleet and equipment by 21 percent.

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Skeptics have compared the AI investment boom to the tech bubble of the late 1990s and predict a bust. While the boom will certainly end, as all capitalist expansions inevitably must, there are important differences this time. The concentration of technology markets in the hands of a handful of Big Tech companies allowed them to fund their initial investments with their own cash. Only more recently have they begun to issue bonds—totaling $121 billion in 2025, a nearly fourfold increase over the previous four years. This figure does not count off-books “shadow debt,” much of it from private credit, making AI-related financial risk impossible to assess. “The hidden risks are building, we don’t know if that’s ever going to come up,” a prominent Wall Street economist noted this year.

A key feature of the AI economy is tens of billions in circular financing among chip manufacturers NVIDIA and AMD, cloud computing giants Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Oracle, and AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s a multi-trillion-dollar scorpion dance, as established Big Tech firms sell computing capacity to fast-rising AI rivals while holding on to their corporate customers as well as the consumer market, which Meta aims to dominate with its own AI efforts.

If excessive spending ever does get Big Tech and its AI frenemies into trouble, they have a reliable backstop in the U.S. government.

If excessive spending ever does get Big Tech and its AI frenemies into trouble, they have a reliable backstop in the U.S. government. The U.S. semiconductor industry has always been central to the U.S. military, and the AI generation is now cashing in. Elon Musk thus merged his X.ai venture with SpaceX, a company critical to U.S. military and civilian space programs. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is reviving the military-Silicon Valley nexus that gave rise to chip maker Intel, in which the Trump administration took a 10 percent stake. Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz, billionaire tech venture capitalists and Trump backers, are focused on AI and defence. “The technology landscape that we will be investing into is ... intensely competitive with China ... At this moment of profound technological opportunity, it is fundamentally important for humanity that America wins,” Horowitz said in an interview.

The exemplar of this trend is Palantir, an AI company holding contracts with U.S. intelligence services and immigration agencies and the provider of targeting technology for the Israeli military to assist the genocide in Gaza. Trump’s AI policy chief, David Sacks, is Big Tech’s agent in the White House. The godfather of the tech-Trump-AI alliance is Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who is close to both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and whose company has deep relationships with the U.S. and Israeli militaries.

The entry of AI into the longstanding Pentagon-Silicon Valley network underscores the role that AI will play in the wider economy. While U.S. policy wavers between a hands-off approach and some nominal regulation as a concession to the growing anti-AI backlash, there is no question that AI is central to corporate America’s drive for competitiveness and the projection of U.S. imperial power. If the AI bubble bursts, the biggest players will get a bailout.

Stocks, profits, debts, deficits and doubts

Tech companies’ disproportionate weight in the U.S. stock market is unprecedented. Just seven—Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Tesla—account for more than 30 percent of the value of the S&P 500, an index of the biggest 500 publicly traded companies in the United States. All have market values exceeding $1 trillion as investors hope to cash in on AI. Certainly, their share prices will fluctuate and may even dive sharply when the AI boom runs its course. But the current stock price surge is based not only on AI, but on record profits.

Consider the U.S. government’s own measure of profits before and after taxes. Corporate profits before taxes have reached $4.2 trillion, or 13.7 percent of GDP. Since 2021, corporate profits before taxes have been at their highest since the Second World War and the Korean War, when military production was the driver. Trump’s biggest gift to capital—an effective tax rate of about 16 percent—funnelled the great majority of these profits into corporate coffers and benefited shareholders, adding to a concentration of wealth in the U.S. more extreme than even in the days of the robber baron capitalists of the late 1890s. While technology companies were central to these profits, other sectors also scored big: financial services, oil and gas, and infrastructure-related industries benefited from the investment boom. Manufacturing profits were beginning to flow strongly in 2025, even if the promised jobs boom was more of a trickle.

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It is too soon to say whether this represents a long-term restoration in the rate of profit and a sustained increase in the average U.S. economic growth. Following the Great Recession, U.S. GDP growth averaged 2.4 percent per year, jumping to an average of 3.3 percent from 2021 into 2025 amid the post-Covid recovery and economic stimulus. Nevertheless, it marks a big turn in the U.S. economy—a boom driven by industrial capital investment for the first time in decades. Whether this is sufficient to counter China’s challenge is a separate question. But the U.S. economy is being reshaped by a revived industrial sector.

This boom has several contradictions. Some are chronic, others are Trump-induced. Deficit spending by Congress has been amplified by Trump’s tax cuts, while the high level of government borrowing since the Great Recession and immediately after the pandemic has pushed federal debt to more than 100 percent of GDP. Some of this is the result of the calculation by successive U.S. administrations that the lack of a credible international alternative to the U.S. dollar as a universal trading currency means that buyers will always be found for U.S. government bonds to finance that debt. Trump wants to double down on this bet by pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates to fuel an even hotter economy, tolerating higher inflation as a means to reduce government debt in real terms over time.

The other factor is that even U.S. capitalists who oppose Trump have mostly kept their mouths shut while benefiting from his smash-and-grab agenda of cutting taxes and slashing social spending. They may complain about Trump’s government deficits but see them as political cover for still more cuts in social programs.

From boom to bust?

The AI spending boom looks unhinged, and the associated debt could detonate a financial crisis and undermine U.S. economic growth. But from the standpoint of the companies involved, the decision to undertake vast investments is perfectly rational if it allows them to retain market dominance. In the view of U.S. government officials across successive administrations, tech companies are the flagships of a new wave of industrial investments encouraged by government policies, demanded by national security considerations and serving as economic engines, with serious regulation unlikely unless popular pressure or a crisis forces the issue.

Debt is the wild card in this high-stakes AI investment poker. The novelty of private credit’s big role in the financial system—along with shadow banks and cryptocurrency outfits—makes it impossible to do more than speculate about the impact of an AI bust. And the ripple effects of the energy crisis created by the U.S. war on Iran have disrupted global supply chains and hit consumer demand in the U.S., which could also continue to drag down growth.

When the AI expansion finally ends, working-class people already soured by the current economy are likely to turn bitter.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: George Hodan; modified by Tempest.

The post The economics of U.S. imperialism (part 1) appeared first on Tempest.

The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) extends its warmest congratulations to the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA), one of its core members, on being named a 2026 Right Livelihood Laureate. The Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” honours RWA “for organising rural women across Southern Africa into a united force defending land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate and patriarchal dispossession.”

The recognition belongs to a movement built from the ground up. Since 250 rural women founded it in Limpopo Province, South Africa, in 2009, RWA has grown into a self-organised movement of more than 178,000 small-scale farmers in eleven countries: Angola, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Through its flat, volunteer-led structure and its Agroecology and Feminist Schools, RWA advances feminist agroecology and food and seed sovereignty across the region. It has established 24 seed multiplication sites and documented hundreds of Indigenous seed varieties, protecting farmer-managed seed systems from commercialisation and strengthening communities’ resilience to climate shocks. The movement’s collective voice helped secure Zambia’s 2016 law mandating equal land allocation to women and Eswatini’s landmark 2018 Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Bill.

Dr Million Belay, General Coordinator of AFSA, said:

“Our hearts are full today. We congratulate our sisters of the Rural Women’s Assembly on this richly deserved recognition. For years, RWA has shown all of us what food sovereignty looks like when it is built by the women who grow Africa’s food, save its seeds and hold its communities together. This Award honours every woman farmer who has stood her ground for land, seed and dignity. It also sends a message to social movements across Africa: our struggles for agroecology, for justice and for control over our own food systems are seen, they matter, and they are bearing fruit. The future of African food is being sown, patiently and collectively, by rural women.”

For AFSA and its members, this Award affirms a conviction we share: food sovereignty is inseparable from women’s rights to land, seed and bodily autonomy, and lasting change grows from people organising together.

RWA’s journey, in the words of its Regional Coordinator Mercia Andrews, shows that   “no single voice moves a mountain; it is the patient, collective weight of thousands of rural women organizing together that has shifted what was once thought immovable.”

AFSA is proud to stand alongside RWA and joins the global community in celebrating this achievement. The 2026 Laureates will be honoured at the Award Presentation in Stockholm on 1 December 2026.

When a fatal crash occurs, we tend to focus immediately on the individual: What was the driver doing? What did the cyclist or pedestrian do? Who made the mistake? 

Emergency Streets aims to shift that framing. A fatal crash is also a failure of the surface transport system. And often it is a failure that, at some level, was predictable. For aviation or rail sectors, thorough review protocol are enacted upon to reveal systemic failures. Why not for streets? 

Those of us who study streets know that certain priorities have become deeply embedded in transport planning in the United States. Speed and vehicle movement are institutionalized through turning radii, lane widths, multiple travel lanes, sight distances, signal timing, slip lanes, pedestrian crossing times, and measures such as automobile Level of Service.

No single one of these practices created our safety problem. Collectively, however, they have shaped the system we have today—and what we expect.

The problem is that when the system fails, our normal response is often to clean up the crash, restore the street, investigate what happened, perhaps conduct a traffic study — and eventually, return the system to normal. But what if the crash itself became a reason not to return immediately to normal?

Recommended Steal This Idea: ‘Emergency Streets’ Strategy Gets First Real-World Pilot Kea Wilson October 1, 2026

That question led us to develop Emergency Streets. The idea is straightforward: following a fatal crash, temporarily change the street in ways that meaningfully reduce kinetic energy. Make the intervention visible. Explain to the community why it is happening. Use the event not only to respond to one crash, but to ask what the crash reveals about the larger surface transport system. And, how to prevent such crashes in the future — including how money flows and how future practices are prioritized.

The underlying proposition is that we already know a great deal. We know the relationship between speed and crash severity. We know that accessibility, particularly local accessibility, does not necessarily require maximizing vehicle speed. And we increasingly have new ways to provide access, from e-bikes and smaller mobility devices to changing patterns of connectivity and travel. 

So the question becomes: Can a fatal crash become a catalyst for doing something differently?

Spokane: The Real-World Test

That idea has now moved from a theoretical idea, to an academic proposition, to a municipal practice. Spokane, Washington, has adopted an Emergency Streets pilot protocol and recently deployed its first intervention following a fatal motorcycle crash. 

The significance isn’t simply the cones or temporary street treatment. Spokane has created an institutional response: following a qualifying crash, the city must develop and implement a temporary traffic-management plan. That means the crash triggers action, rather than simply analysis.

The intervention is deliberately temporary because part of its purpose is learning. It is temporary to shortcut/circumvent traffic engineers’ long habits to over-engineer and study stuff, to provide decision-makers cover from public pressure for making uncomfortable changes to the street, to use swift timing to tie the error with the correction, to allow drivers to practice more careful driving for a non-trivial but non-disruptive period of time, etc. 

Recommended Talking Headways Podcast: ‘Normal’ is Not Correct, Someone Died Here Jeff Wood May 8, 2025

At the end of the treatment period, the city must decide what happens next: extend the intervention, return the street to its previous condition, or meaningfully move toward a more longer-lasting change.

That creates an unusual opportunity. Emergency Streets isn’t simply a traffic-calming intervention. It’s intended to become a way of asking whether a disruption to normal practice can change the trajectory of future transportation decision-making.

So what should we measure, and how? There are at least three dimensions.

First, physical and behavioral change, largely tied to kinetic energy. Did speeds decline? Was hard-braking reduced? Did vehicle behavior change around the intervention? Did the kinetic energy around the crash site lessen? These are relatively tangible questions and can be measured using speed observations, GIS and mobility data (including vehicle characteristics), and other behavioral indicators.

Second, institutional change. Did professional understandings change? Did organizational routines change? Did departments begin working together differently? Did the intervention influence subsequent funding, design standards, or decisions about how accessibility should be provided? 

An institutional trace is evidence that something generated through Emergency Streets persists beyond the physical removal of the temporary intervention. This trace may not be immediate or tangible. It might be visible in changed professional understandings; altered organizational routines; new relationships between departments or agencies; different expectations about how fatal crashes should be treated; changes to approval, design or decision-making processes; the use of evidence generated during deployments; subsequent temporary interventions; proposed capital works; allocation of funding; or permanent physical changes to the street.

Recommended What If We Treated Car Crash Sites Like Disaster Zones? Streetsblog August 6, 2024

The institutional part of the evaluation therefore distinguishes between temporary effects and institutional consequences, without assuming that institutional change must result in permanent infrastructure at the crash site. Rather than simply asking “does Emergency Streets reduce vehicle speeds?”, this study asks whether temporarily refusing to restore a fatal-crash site immediately to “normal” can interrupt the routines, assumptions and institutional relationships through which unsafe street conditions are reproduced.

More specifically, a thorough evaluation can reveal:

• What, institutionally, is different from when the trial began?
• How did Emergency Streets contribute to those changes?
• What mechanisms appear to have enabled change?
• What institutional structures or countervailing mechanisms constrained or prevented change?
• What disappeared when the cones disappeared, and what remained?

A null or uneven outcome can reveal organizational, legal, procedural or resource barriers that prevent rapid-response approaches from influencing longer-term infrastructure decisions. The broader theoretical contribution is to understand whether deliberately disrupting the normal institutional response to road death can create conditions for institutional change.

Third, public expectations. Did people begin thinking differently about what a street is for, what constitutes an acceptable level of risk, or what should happen after someone is killed? Did the intervention create public discussion about what could be done differently to provide for accessibility?

And that leads to the larger research question: To what extent can Emergency Streets empower municipalities to adopt meaningfully different transportation-planning practices?

The cones eventually disappear. The more important question is what remains after they are gone. 

If professional practices, institutional relationships, public expectations, investment decisions, or street designs begin to change, then Emergency Streets has accomplished something much larger than temporarily slowing traffic at one location. It has used a specific failure as an opportunity for the system to learn from itself — and change. 

• The Trump administration’s war on electric vehicles continues, as the U.S. DOT rolled back average mileage standards from 50 miles per gallon by 2031 under President Biden to 35, which will further increase the amount of greenhouse gases vehicles are pumping into the air (New York Times). The decision will cement this country’s reliance on fossil fuels for years to come (Heatmap). Not only that, it will cost the average driver up to $1,600 a year, thanks to Trump’s war with Iran driving up gas prices — far outpacing the $1,300 the administration claims consumers will save when buying a vehicle (Autoblog).
• Meanwhile, we’re falling behind the rest of the world. China has developed a charger than can refuel an EV to 70 percent in five minutes (Ars Technica). And in Europe, driving an EV is now only half as expensive as a diesel-powered vehicle (Transport and Environment).
• Politicans who call for suspending gas taxes are just pandering to voters. It has a minimal effect on gas prices, but blows a big hole in transportation budgets (Politico). A better way to reduce household costs is to invest in transit so that people don’t have to drive so much (Urban Institute).
• Federal transit funding from the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act expired at midnight, meaning steep cuts are coming for passenger rail and local transit. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Jalopnik explains how a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule meant to protect car drivers and passengers from rollovers resulted in thick A-pillars around windshields that put cyclists and pedestrians in blind spots.
• Philadelphia is creating green corridors to connect an increasingly dense and walkable city. (The Architect’s Newspaper)
• Some Philly bikeshare users who want exercise are frustrated that 70 percent of Indego’s offerings are electric. (Billy Penn)
• Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law giving the California High-Speed Rail Authority eminent domain power. (Railway News)
• The Federal Transit Administration is only giving the Utah Frontrunner double-tracking project half the money it requested. (Railway Supply)
• Cyclists took over Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. to emphasize the need for better bike infrastructure. (WUSA)
• A debate is brewing in Houston over whether Metro funding would be better spent on infrastructure or improving service. (Fox 26)
• Ontario health care providers denounced Premier Doug Ford’s plan to rip up Toronto bike lanes, citing the lives they save. (CBC)
• Aukland leaders hope the city’s first subway line will erase its reputation as a cultural backwater. (Monocle)

Frontline municipalities, worker cooperatives, and civil society prove decentralized organic waste systems are ready for immediate scale as climate finance continues to favor capital-intensive disposal. 

Jakarta, Indonesia 29 September 2026 — At the conclusion of  the Second Regional Congress on Organics and Climate held on September 23-24, city and municipal leaders, civil society organizations, researchers, and waste workers across Asia united to adopt the Jakarta Declaration.  The declaration sets out a roadmap calling on national governments and financing institutions to halt funding for  incinerators and redirect climate finance into low-cost decentralized organic waste management systems and measures for food loss and waste reduction. 

With COP31 approaching and as governments face mounting scrutiny to demonstrate tangible climate mitigation measures, delegates  underscored a staggering funding imbalance: while the world has funneled nearly 4 billion USD into capital-intensive waste incineration projects, capturing 94% of waste-sector methane finance, barely 1% reaches organic waste management and food rescue systems. 

Speakers at the Congress, which was organized by GAIA Asia Pacific together with Dietplastic Indonesia and Aliansi Zero Waste Indonesia, demonstrated that preventing food loss coupled with scaling low-cost, decentralized organic waste diversion is  the single fastest climate intervention. Organic matter, primarily discarded food and agricultural matter, makes up 50% to 70% of the total municipal solid waste stream in Asia, rotting under anaerobic conditions in landfills and open dumps, generating climate superpollutants such as methane. 

Participants of the Second Regional Congress on Organics and Climate.

For the delegates, the debate over whether community-led solutions work is closed. The urgent challenge now is securing the policy mandates, institutional support, and dedicated public financing to make decentralized organic waste management and food waste prevention a permanent public service. 

The human and environmental toll of centralized dumping took center stage as a spate of landfill disasters, from massive fires to landslides, struck the region within months, blanketing cities and  towns in toxic fumes and claiming residents’ lives, many of them waste pickers

GAIA Asia Pacific’s Regional Coordinator, Froilan Grate delivers keynote address.

“The landfill crisis is not telling us to set up more landfills. It is telling us that our disposal-dependent system has reached its absolute breaking point,” said Froilan Grate, Regional Coordinator, GAIA Asia Pacific. “When communities prevent food waste and sort organics at the source, we win twice: we cut methane emissions at the source and eliminate the toxic landfill fires choking our neighborhoods. This is justice-centered, cost-effective climate action.”

Economic data released by the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) dismantled the myth that high-tech, centralized infrastructure is  superior. CPI’s cost-benefit analysis of decentralized systems in Bandung, Indonesia,showed  that community initiatives save local governments up to IDR 30 billion (USD 1.7 million) annually in avoided transport and tipping fees. 

Bandung is not an exception. Other communities in Asia taking a similar approach are proving that zero waste systems deliver measurable economic and environmental results:

• Barangay Potrero in Malabon City, Philippines: The community of 43,000 residents proved that operational costs must prioritize people over machines. With 19% of its total budget allocated to integrating  80 waste workers into its waste management system, it diverts over 100,000 kg of organic waste annually.
• Hoi An, Vietnam: Tackling commercial food waste driven by tourism, the city secured voluntary reduction commitments from over 50 hotels and restaurants to eliminate single-use plastics and curb kitchen surplus. Edible surplus is addressed upstream, while residual prep discards are channeled to the converted Eco-Hub, where workers process 200 kg of organic material daily per person via composting and bioconversion. 
• Hong Kong: Partnering across wet markets, bakeries, and supermarkets, Greeners Action established daily logistics pipelines to intercept unsold fresh produce and staples at risk of being discarded. The program routes fresh, safe food daily to registered low-income beneficiaries, proving that retail-level surplus redistribution effectively prevents edible food from entering landfills. 
• Pune, India: Solid Waste Collection and Handling (SWaCH) leverages its 4,000 door-to-door waste pickers to enforce daily source segregation across 1 million households. By working directly with 3,000 commercial bulk waste generators to prevent mixed dumping and running in-situ treatment at 270 sites, workers divert 25 tonnes daily of organic waste while eliminating secondary municipal transport entirely. 
• San Fernando City, Pampanga, Philippines: The city paired strict source-separation ordinances with commercial food-waste monitoring for restaurants, markets, and institutions. By enforcing on-site organics management for commercial establishments alongside 35 barangay recovery facilities, the city pushed municipal waste diversion to an unprecedented 89%. 
• Siquijor Island, Philippines: Lacking space for an extensive landfill, the island mandated backyard composting and decentralized collection,preventing 70%of its waste, mostly biodegradable food discards, from going into landfills.
• Surakarta (Solo), Indonesia: Confronting a city landfill where food waste makes up 60% of daily intake, youth-led network Care Food Solo partnered with hotels, bakeries, caterers, and farmers to intercept edible surplus. In 2025 alone, the initiative rescued and redistributed 46 tonnes of surplus food to vulnerable households and care homes through 12 neighborhood storefronts, routing only non-edible scraps to black soldier fly processing. 
• Tanzania: Starting in Bonyokwa, community-built recovery facilities and door-to-door education proved zero waste works in East Africa. The model has expanded to seven communities and across four major cities, replacing centralized dumping with local sorting. 

These cities and communities do not only illustrate that Zero Waste solutions are key to effective organic waste management, but, more importantly, that the path forward is to scale these proven solutions, while placing the people who make them possible at the heart of policy, program design, and implementation.

“We cannot continue treating waste management as an exercise in disposal while volumes of food and organic matter rot in landfills,” said Shibu K. Nair, Regional Organics Campaigner for GAIA Asia Pacific. “Infrastructure alone is a hollow investment if we do not fund the people who run it. Waste workers are the backbone of public health and climate infrastructure.”

GAIA members Dietplastik Indonesia and AZWI pass the baton to the Philippines—represented by Mother Earth Foundation, PNWWA, and the Zero Waste Cities Network—as the next hosts of the Regional Congress.

As the world marks the International Awareness Day for Food Loss and Waste, delegates sent a clear message to COP31 negotiators: The solutions already exist. The task now is to make them the norm.

The post Regional Leaders, Waste Workers, and Cities Urge COP31 Negotiators to Defund Incineration and Finance Community-Led Methane Solutions first appeared on GAIA.

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