Category Archives: Blog

The Overhead Wire Daily | March 19th, 2024 | Carbon Trading for Transit

March 19, 2024

As the announcement goes out that the Bay Area could have a ballot measure in 2026 to support transit improvements and provide $750M in funding, I’m sometimes struck by the funding options we don’t quite have yet nationally including transit agencies selling credits in carbon trading markets.

One of the things that was interesting to me from my interview with Paula DiPerna (audio | transcript) last year on her book Pricing the Priceless is her admission that her visit to China to help set up a carbon market like the one she started in Chicago led to proliferation of carbon markets in cities all over the country. All the young students in the room when she visited to share her experience are now running markets in different cities. Now most cities are benefiting from that experience including Chongqing.

So I wasn’t surprised to see that the Chongqing carbon market certified that sale of the local transit agencies emissions reductions (167K tons) for about $850,000. It was the first transit related transaction in the country and I would expect more to follow.

Some states have created markets and California does give some of its cap and trade money to transit and high speed rail, but there are likely lots of mechanisms for funding good transit service that are just sitting on the sidelines. As Paula mentioned on the show, the turning point between the two countries really was the Waxman/Markey bill which passed the House in 2009 but didn’t get a vote in the Senate that year. That climate bill included a cap and trade provision which could have created a national market for transit agencies to sell credits.

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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 474: Thinking Differently About Vehicle Design

March 14, 2024

This week we’re joined by vehicle designer Dan Sturges to talk about his book Near to Far: A Design for a new and Equitable Transportation System. We talk about new ways of thinking about vehicle design, mobility for low density areas, as well as pop culture perceptions of small vehicles.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript for the episode:

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The Overhead Wire Daily | March 13th, 2024 | Stranger in a Strange Place

March 13, 2024

I think when people come back from a trip to a wonderful place they often compare the cities they live to the city they visited and spent a little time in. Of course visiting is never quite the same as living somewhere so the little imperfections might not be so apparent. So far I’m really enjoying my time here in China and have been watching from the windows of buses and taxis to see what might be the same or different from the US. There are things I like (multi-use pathways on most streets, lots of bus riders, and commerce everywhere) but also things I don’t (pollution and smell of diesel vehicles), but overall the experience has just been refreshing because it’s so different than home.

One thing I have noticed here is that I’m not burdened by the weight of politics, of everyday fights over infrastructure or planning, or general sadness over the state of the planet and its ecosystems. I get it in glimpses on my home social media feeds but I’m sure I’ll get back to those life dragging things in due time. I just don’t know enough about the politics here to comment or have an opinion and for the most part I’m interacting with people who are just living their lives or doing their work, whether that’s someone driving a cab or working at a restaurant or even my in-laws, who have asked me if what I’ve been experiencing is what I expected.

I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect as the media on China is often negative because its so focused on geopolitical issues. But really it feels similar to home except everything is in a different language, there’s a lot more people, and the buildings are tall everywhere. I do also notice that as a foreigner you get looks from many people you pass. None of them seem negative, but the eyes do linger more than I’m used to.

Those are minor things really when walking through neighborhoods that might as well be in any international oriented US city. The food is great, the people I see including children and young people want to say hello in English if they see me. A cab driver even tried to use a translation app as I was trying to get my internet to work. And I think this is something everyone should experience. It’s definitely not Europe which is where a lot of Americans will get their international experiences, but it’s definitely a place to take lessons from and just experience for themselves. Though I do recommend a translator and I thank my wife for that help and perhaps burden on her.

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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 473: Public Sentiment and Public Transit

March 6, 2024

This week we’re featuring a 1 to 1 conversation between Adelee Le Grand of Intellectual Concepts and Scott Wilkinson of AlphaVu. They chat about how transit agencies can get a better handle on how riders and non-riders alike feel about their service.

This episode was produced in partnership with Mpact. Find out more at http://mpactmobility.org

Listen in first at Streetsblog USA or find the audio in our archive.

Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript of this episode:

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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 472: Streets for Skateboards

February 29, 2024

This week we’re joined by skateboard advocate Aaron Breetwor, brand manager for Comet Skateboards. Aaron chats about using skateboards for transportation, designing streets for safer skateboarding, and this last years incident at the Dolores Street hill bomb.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or our archive site.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 471: Yonah Freemark Part 2

February 21, 2024

Prediction Time! This week on part 2 of our chat with Yonah Freemark, we score our transportation predictions from last year and make new ones for 2025. We talk about the Roosevelt Subway, Transit agency bailouts, open gangway trains, and coming transit elections and extensions.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

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The Overhead Wire Daily | February 21st, 2024 | Withholding Transportation Funds

After being threatened with losing federal transportation funding, Louisiana changed the state’s drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1986. Ever since, pulling transportation funding to induce different policy outcomes has been discussed for a number of topics including traffic safety with the Louisiana example as a precedent.

Now that idea of withholding transportation funding is being discussed as a way to fix the housing shortage. In Colorado, Democratic state legislators have introduced a bill that would limit transportation funding in 30 communities inside of MPO boundaries if they don’t take steps to reach certain housing goals laid out by the state. Cities could meet those goals in a number of different ways giving each city it’s own pathway to keeping transportation funding. As with all legislation that changes the status quo, this one is coming up against opposition, though advocates believe they have a path forward.

Along those lines, the Federation of American Scientists along with other groups including the National Zoning Atlas has issued a housing ideas challenge which resulted in two scholars writing up a similar but more narrow plan for federal housing as the one released in Colorado. In this proposal, federal highway funding would be conditioned on the adoption of zoning reform. The withholding of highway funds would occur in Metropolitan Statistical Areas with median incomes above the national average where more than 30% of the population are rent burdened.

What’s interesting about these bills and suggested policy is that they are tying together urban policy that should have been connected more closely a long time ago. The disconnection of transportation and housing policy has really made our climate challenge even harder considering all the infrastructure we’ve built for vehicle travel and it won’t be easily fixed by an electric vehicle changeover.

But it’s not just our housing policy but industrial policy as well that suffers from this short shortsightedness. As our friend Scott Bernstein points out in a recent piece written with Bruce Katz, manufacturing, warehousing, and supply chains are impacted by this disconnect as well. Instead of building wealth and siting investments appropriately based on transportation infrastructure, everything costs more than it should. Perhaps it’s time to change that.

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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 470: Yonah Freemark Part 1

February 15, 2024

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined once again by transportation and housing expert Yonah Freemark. In part 1 we talk about the equitable distribution of transportation grants, potential for flex funding for transit, and our annual transit openings discussion.

You can find Transit Explorer through the Transport Politic.

You can listen to this show at Streetsblog USA or find it at our hosting archive.

Below is an AI generated unedited full transcript of the episode:

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The Overhead Wire Daily | February 14th, 2024 | State Road Diet Preemption

February 14, 2024

I hope everyone has a great Valentine’s Day however you celebrate.

Over the last few years articles about state pre-emption of cities have been increasing a lot. (There are 44 links specifically on the topic in our premium link archive) As more and more cities go to left leaning elected officials, conservative states try to gain back lost leverage and control over legislative priorities. But lately culture war politics have been spilling into policy disputes such as when the Texas Republican Party Platform decided road diets were a plot and needed to “protect drivers”. San Antonio was the target of the governor specifically on this front. A single Indiana legislator has also been trying to kill approved bus lanes for several years.

The most recent of these is a bill in the Arizona legislature which would approve a continuation in funding for the Arizona State DOT. But the tagged amendments are quite ridiculous and read off like someone watched too many 15 minute conspiracy theories on TikTok. The primary objective is to kill intercity rail between Phoenix and Tucson by restricting funding from federal sources. That specific fight is an old saw, but the other added items in my opinion are more damaging longer term. The bill would restrict the State DOT from doing any lane reductions, building or maintaining electric charging stations, planning for emissions reductions or reducing VMT.

My favorite response to the bill was from State Senator Teresa Hatathlie who said “If you want to go suck on somebody’s tailpipe, be my guest.”

I would expect the governor to veto this specific bill over these additions, but my guess is that some state legislatures around the country will only get worse when it comes to transportation and climate policy bill restrictions when cities try something different.

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Mondays 148: Happy in Cities

February 12, 2024

This week on Mondays at The Overhead Wire we’re Han Solo.  The news continues and so do we.  We chat about productive transit subsidies, transportation flex funding, and a coming connection between trees and health!

Join us below for the show notes:

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The Overhead Wire Daily | February 8th, 2024 | The Pipes Aren’t Big Enough

February 9, 2024

One of the things we emphasize on the podcast and here at the newsletter is how everything is connected. One of my favorite targets for this connection are our roads. They mean so much to everyone and I don’t think many people understand how much they carry. It’s not just cars as many would have you believe, but people, drainage and water supply, gas and electric energy, connectivity through the internet, and commerce to name just a few main items.

And that’s why what’s happening with sea level rise in places like Charleston and all the rainfall and atmospheric rivers drenching places like California are so important in a transportation sense. Streets and the drainage below them aren’t designed for the rain events that are going to become more commonplace with climate change. Engineers agree that we just can’t retrofit all the pipes under all the streets that are designed for five to ten year flood events that will become even more frequent.

As the New Republic article cited above notes, we need to be focusing on ways to not allow the water to get into the pipes as fast through green infrastructure like retaining ponds, creating space for rivers to overflow, and bioswales on streets. We could even fix up our lawns and yards to do a better job of collecting excess runoff and support biodiversity at the same time.

Perhaps this is where the highway widening money could go that the trades are worried would disappear when we stop building highways. Street level water management. Maybe we could also create some transportation changes that make us safer as well. Changing large systems like roads is hard, but it is necessary unless we want to get swept away.

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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 469: On the Bus in Boise

February 8, 2024

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Elaine Clegg, CEO of Valley Regional Transit in Boise Idaho. We chat about how the Boise bus system is changing, the impact of fast regional growth, energy infrastructure and favorite transportation board games.

To listen to this episode you can find it at Streetsblog USA or in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

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The Overhead Wire Daily | February 7th, 2024 | Railway Electrification

February 7, 2024

On January 1st 94% of India’s trains have been electrified. In 2015 just 45% of the system had overhead wires, but a dependence on foreign oil imports to power diesel locomotives led the country to move towards 100% electric trains which will happen soon, and a goal of becoming net zero by 2030 is closer to reality.

I would love to see this happen here, but we’re distracted by plans for hydrogen train sets, freight rail companies set in their ways, and a deep dislike of overhead wires. I’m looking forward to seeing what Caltrain’s success looks like after electrification and wonder if that will change minds around the country on reducing emissions without having to carry energy on board.

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The Overhead Wire Daily | February 6th, 2024 | Climate Seriousness

February 6, 2024

The EPA is preparing to reject an air quality plan for the Los Angeles region put together by the South Coast Air Quality Management District because it won’t do enough to reduce smog. The District plan calls for the Federal Government to reduce 67 tons of emissions a day through the things it can control such as shipping, trains, and aircraft. The EPA then says states can’t tell the Federal Government what to do under the Clean Air Act or the Constitution, and it seems to have degraded into a Spider-Man meme where everyone is pointing at each other as if to find the imposter.

None of these agencies or the state of California seems to really want to deal with the true cause of the problem which is transportation emissions that we continue to make worse with highway expansion after highway expansion while we also slow walk solutions that can reduce the federally regulated airport emissions such as high speed rail. The port of Long Beach is already spending $1.5B to reduce truck trips with trains, why not electrify them? Even CARB, the California agency responsible for reductions in pollutants has said reducing VMT is important, but has punted to other agencies to enforce their mandates that ignore climate impacts of driving expansion.

Punting doesn’t seem to be going well. So maybe this is what the EPA is working towards since the region won’t get federal highway funding if this ends up at an impasse. And the Clean Air Act says that federally funded projects shouldn’t be increasing pollution in already polluted areas. Any other request to reduce driving is politically charged as a recent California Transportation Commission meeting showed. So this might just be the only way to get California to stop expanding highways since no one else will.

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(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 468: Organizing and Data that Create Wins

January 31, 2024

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re joined by Dr. Kathryn Howell, Director of the National Center for Smart Growth at the University of Maryland. We talk about her daily e-bike commute, organizing around the Purple Line, the importance of eviction data, and commercial displacement.

This episode was produced in partnership with Mpact.

To listen to this episode, head to Streetsblog USA or find it in the hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

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The Overhead Wire Daily | January 31st, 2024 | Communal Living

Many times in my daily search on items related to housing I come across pieces that share stories about communes or ecovillages, co-housing and co-living. Many of these ideas born out of high housing costs and a disconnect from modern life also lead to higher level health discussions, like the idea of blue zones or health care design such as the French neighborhood created for people with Alzheimer’s. Most of these items are optimistic and share a way of living that creates a sense of community for those that choose it as well as a basic level of care that’s expected as long as we’re living.

To a certain extent I think I personally connect all these dots because I feel many in society are looking for community, or more specifically, the group they can relate to. Not only that, they want to feel like someone has their back. We’ve designed cities for a lot of individualism with cars and single family homes, but the inertia of that decision has taken us away from some of the natural connections that can be made in a more compact community. Not sure how we fix it, but the connected city brings all these issues together and sometimes gets us to think more seriously about it.

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If you’re in the Bay Area this Thursday, we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!

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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.


The Overhead Wire Daily | January 30, 2024 | Trees and Health

January 30, 2024

One of the premises of Des Fitzgerald’s book The Living City (Ep 456) is that he’s not quite been sold on the benefits of trees to cities or human health. He’s not saying there isn’t a connection, but he also believes the research is not quite as solid as people make it out to be from a number of observational health studies. Many of those trees and green spaces are also in rich neighborhoods and absent in poor neighborhoods, where there are possible other issues related to a number of socioeconomic factors.

Tree politics can also be confounded he says by people’s feelings about what makes ‘the good city’, and “that kind of sense that you govern the trees, you govern the city.”

Enter Aruni Bhatnagar, a cardiology researcher whose “Green Heart Louisville” project featured in yesterday’s Washington Post is seeking to show a real clinical connection between greenness and human health such as reduced stress and less hardening of arteries from transportation pollution.

Bhatnagar’s project has planted 8,000 trees and shrubs and has gotten super detailed health data from 500 residents including blood, urine, and hair samples and set up the study from a baseline of unhealthy air next to a major highway in a neighborhood with little existing greenery.

He cautions, rightly so, about expectations, but also believes he’s starting to see some results including higher pollution near fast food restaurants and better sleep near greenery. Soon Des might not be able to be as skeptical about health connections, but he’s also not wrong about the politics of trees and by proxy the cities in which they live. In the future it may just be, if you govern the trees (and reduce transportation pollution), you can save the planet and the humans that reside on it.

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If you’re in the Bay Area this Thursday, we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!

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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.


Mondays 147: Nobody Said There Would be Math

January 29, 2024

This week on the podcast we’re Han Solo but we’ve got some great news and information for you including items on Beverly Hills residents being denied permits for underground pools, we’ve got money for transit operations in a house bill, and we’re noticing the Introvert Economy is in full swing.  Come join us, we were told there would be no math in podcasting, but it turns out that’s just not true.

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Join our February Happy Hour!

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Below the fold are more show notes…

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The Overhead Wire Daily | January 25th, 2024 | Limiting Speed

January 25, 2024

CA State Senator Scott Wiener will introduce two traffic safety bills to reduce traffic deaths. He detailed them both in a thread on Twitter. The first would require auto manufacturers to add a speed limiter to vehicles that only allows ten miles above a speed limit. The second would require Caltrans to upgrade safety features on roads when doing capital work.

I don’t recommend going to Twitter to see the replies, but I will say it was an amazing show of (mostly) men tweeting about the ability to break the speed limit as if it were a god given right. For that reason, the bill which I believe is necessary to stem the traffic safety epidemic, will be hard to pass. People will be very angry and let legislators know. But Senator Wiener has picked up hard issues before and got them through. Just look at his record on housing.

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If you’re in the Bay Area we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!

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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.



The Overhead Wire Daily | January 24th, 2024 | Loneliness

There’s been a lot of discussion about loneliness after it was declared to be an epidemic by the US Surgeon General. Yesterday we shared an item by Alan Ehrenhalt on the subject but we’re also seeing the idea splinter off into what I believe are related sub-discussions.

There are a couple of items that connect for me on this subject today. First is an opinion item in Bloomberg discussing the Introvert Economy. Allison Scharger notes that younger generations just aren’t going out as much and staying in to be online, even with friends. Many of us got sucked into that world by the pandemic and lockdowns and perhaps just stayed there. But as an introvert myself, even I couldn’t take that much time away from larger groups of friends and family and I’m really feeling a need to get back out again, though everyone has their own pace.

Others seem to need more human connection as well. I read a few years ago that grocery stores in the Netherlands would keep a lane open that was slower and allowed for more human connection that some of the patrons craved. And today’s item in CNN that discussed how self checkout lines are actually dampening customer loyalty because the stores are shifting the work of checkout from employees to customers. And although it doesn’t mention it, there’s something emotional missing as well when you aren’t connecting with a cashier.

I do think that idea of shifting the work on individuals is becoming an important marker. Social interaction was easier when you did it more often. But these frictionless solutions to commerce online and in person are making it easier to avoid connection, perhaps to our detriment.

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Speaking of getting together… if you’re in the Bay Area we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area, Streets for People, and Seamless Bay Area at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!

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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.


The Overhead Wire Daily | January 23rd, 2024 | Direct Pay

January 23, 2024

One of the things about the Inflation Reduction Act that’s really interesting is that it allows direct pay for cities and other tax-exempt entities. What this means is that tax credits can be treated like refundable tax payments and large utility projects like solar funded by cities or publicly owned utilities can get up to a 40% rebate (direct payment) by the Federal Government (EPA summary here).

In the past it was a tax credit scheme that only for profit companies but now many agencies and cities could apply to reduce their energy consumption and carbon footprint. I haven’t seen a lot of instances of transit agencies using these new tools yet but it might be something beneficial down the road, especially in the move towards electrification of fleets or other potential energy needs. As we know, transit agencies are climate agencies now.

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If you’re in the Bay Area we’re hosting a happy hour with Urban Environmentalists Bay Area and Streets for People at Elixir on Thursday February 1st at 6pm. It’s easy access to BART at 16th/Mission and I hope folks can join us!

~~~

For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.


The Overhead Wire Daily | January 18th, 2024

January 18, 2024

A new analysis shared by the Seattle environmental group Coltura and featured in the New York Times found that 10% of drivers go over 40,000 miles per year, but make up 1/3rd of gasoline use for the United States. In some states it’s seen as an imperative that these folks switch to electric vehicles as they have an outsized influence on climate emissions, so they are looking for ways to incentivize a transition based on miles driven. These folks are often in the trades driving from job to job or live on the periphery of a region.

But it also gets to a larger idea about local and non-local trips that friend of the newsletter Dan Sturges has been thinking about for a while and wrote up in his recent book Near to Far. Only 2% of trips are over 50 miles while 71% of trips are within an 8 mile radius. In the Coltura study, 21 million Americans make up 35% of gas usage because they drive larger than needed vehicles around and live further from destinations. Dan argues, as does a former Ferrari designer, that the vehicles themselves could change to fit the needs of people and destination distance. We also see evidence that larger vehicles and larger batteries are slowing the transition to electric because they make cars cost so much too. Perhaps our incentives need to be better targeted, like towards the longer distance drivers, but also towards switching to local sized electric vehicle types.

There’s a lot of path dependence, not only in how we design our vehicles, but our neighborhoods that could be changed to be more climate and energy efficient. Architects that designed a neighborhood in Arvada Colorado for example found that just changing the orientation of houses in a subdivision based on sun direction can save 30% in energy costs. Imagine if they were dense as well.

This idea of smaller vehicles for shorter trips might be the other side of the coin to incentivizing long distance based drivers to switch vehicles to electric. Just like the 15 minute city idea is the flip side of how we build neighborhoods now. There are many potential solutions for the problems we face from a climate and transportation standpoint, perhaps all we need is to flip our prior orientations ever so slightly.

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For this intro post and more news in your inbox every morning, sign up for a two week free trial of The Overhead Wire Daily, our popular newsletter established in 2006.


(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 466: Making DOTs Measure Emissions

January 17, 2024

This week we’re joined by Beth Osborne, Vice President for Transportation and Thriving Communities at Smart Growth America. We chat about the Greenhouse Gas Emissions Measure Rule that will make State DOTs and MPOs measure emissions on the federal highway system. We also talk about how Beth thinks we have things lining up for positive change, politics of implementing rules, and how the NTSB treats air travel and surface transportation so differently.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it in our hosting archive.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of the episode:

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The Overhead Wire Daily | January 17th, 2024

Seoul South Korea is piloting a ‘climate card’ that allows unlimited transit trips for $47 a month to boost ridership after pandemic drops. Another $2 gets you unlimited bike share trips as well. They hope to boost transit ridership with the card which is a pretty amazing deal when you think about it.

But it also reminds me of an item we shared at the end of last year from Seattle where a lot of local businesses were buying tickets for employees. With low cost multi-use cards and employer purchase programs that promote transit use, agencies can get low cost transportation options to residents. Of course we need good service to entice people too, but there are multiple angles to approach the current ridership challenges.


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