🔥 Electric cars won’t fix global warming

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently issued a dire report, warning that extreme increases in temperature are already threatening every region of the world. In response, Forbes argues that, for commuters who want to avoid environmental meltdown, it’s not enough to simply switch to electric cars. Instead society as a whole must embrace greener modes of travel. “Replacing all of today’s fleet of fossil-fuelled motor vehicles with electric ones would be potentially crippling for electricity supply networks and demonstrably bad for the planet. The real fix is far more straightforward: stop, or at least massively reduce, driving. Driving for short journeys that could be easily walked or cycled has to be made as socially unacceptable as smoking in public.”

🏗️ Infrastructure gripped by infighting

Following lengthy negotiations, earlier this month the U.S. Senate passed a sweeping $1.2T bipartisan bill to overhaul the country’s ailing infrastructure systems—the largest such modernization effort in a generation. The proposed investments include $110B for roads and bridges, $66B for passenger and freight rail, $39B for transit, $15B for EVs, $11B for road safety, and $1B for highway removal. Climate and safe streets activists were quick to point out the bill’s flaws. Streetsblog covered the backlash, citing the glaring imbalance between funding for drivers and transit users. The bill now goes to the House of Representatives for debate. 

 🤏 What if we built thinner roads?

Speaking of infrastructure, Planetizen has some interesting recommendations for how the U.S. and other governments could save tons of money on streets. If more people walked, biked, or scooted, roads could be built narrower and shallower, which in turn would save the world billions of dollars a year in asphalt, cement, and aggregate. Ironically, investing in our infrastructure future might mean building less, not more. 

🛴 Introducing Netflix for scooters

Is subscription the future of micromobility? It’s a question that TechCrunch recently explored in-depth, looking at the growing interest among startups and investors in bike and scooter leasing schemes. It’s not just that shared micromobility operators have been struggling to retain ridership during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are also long-term structural advantages that could favor the subscription model. One VC summed up the pitch for consumers: “Repeatedly paying per ride is both expensive and cognitively taxing. People want low friction in transportation. Getting from here to there shouldn’t require a lot of thought.”

💊 A cure for sidewalk clutter

Even diehard micromobility enthusiasts can’t deny, when you’re trying to walk somewhere and a big heap of knocked-over scooters is blocking sidewalk, it’s pretty annoying. In a new op-ed in Urban Tech News, coinciding with the anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, AI entrepreneur Alex Nesic argues that a lack of effective parking solutions has held back shared micromobility’s growth and engendered hostility against scooters in the communities where they operate. The solution, he believes, lies in new sensor, computer vision, and machine learning technologies that can help manage the public right of way and enforce local parking rules.