🏗 Infrastructure Week Is Finally Here

After months of negotiations, US President Joe Biden signed a nearly $1.2T infrastructure bill last week. So what’s in the final package? Sadly the lion’s share of the spending will go toward highway repairs, new bridges, EV chargers, and other car-enabling infrastructure. But the deal contained some policy victories for urbanists too. Kea Wilson from Streetsblog recaps the biggest wins for active transportation advocates, including $39B for mass transit, $11B for road safety, $1B for highway removal, and higher safety standards for motor vehicles. 

🚳 Total COP Out

Micromobility was inexplicably absent from the agenda at the COP26 summit in Glasgow this month, despite the fact that bikes and scooters are some of the best options we have for rapidly decarbonizing the highest-emitting sector of the economy, transportation. Forbes mobility expert Carlton Reid makes the case that world leaders should take cycling as seriously as they do electric cars: “For clean-air reasons, the electrification of the global car fleet is undoubtedly welcome, but it will take many decades to make the switch, while massively boosting bicycle use (and walking and public transport) can lead to far deeper and quicker wins.”

🔮 The E-biking Decade

Even with next to no institutional support, the electric bike is on its way to becoming one of the most popular and defining technologies of the 2020s, routinely outselling EVs year after year. Writing in The New York Times, John Surico notes: “Modern life is peppered with moments of discovery around mobility: the first car drive as a teenager, the first trip on a train, plane or bus, watching the world from a window seat. In this decade, that moment is increasingly likely to be an inaugural ride on an e-bike, often said to spark a childlike joy, thrilling and freeing.”

💨 Fast and Furious

As e-bikes go mainstream, some manufacturers are experimenting with faster and faster speed limits. But how will regulators respond to the emergence of these ultra-fast e-bikes, like VanMoof’s forthcoming 37mph “hyperbike” for example? Urban policy wonk David Zipper offers a prediction in Bloomberg: “The longer they fall into a regulatory no man’s land, the higher the risk of a popular backlash that leads to regulatory overreactions or misidentification of the safety issues at stake.”

🇸🇮 OG Car-Free

As Paris strives to get more people to walk or bike instead of drive, Alexis Ferenczi of Vice looks to Europe’s original car-free capital, Ljubljana, for lessons. The idyllic Slovenian city began banning privately owned vehicles from its downtown core in 2007 and never looked back, he writes: “Central to Ljubljana’s proposal for creating an environmentally responsible metropolis was turning the city centre into a car-free zone. The pedestrianisation was bolstered by improvements to both cycling networks and public transport. Noise pollution and gas emissions dropped in the area in question, and in 2016, the European Commission crowned Ljubljana the continent’s green capital.”