While most of the world’s population doesn’t drive, cars have an outsized negative impact on public health, the environment, and land use.
A wide-ranging new analysis of “automobility” reveals the many ways that car-dependent design harms people and neighborhoods, writes Kea Wilson in Streetsblog USA. “Just taking into account car crashes and fatalities linked directly to car-related air pollution and lead exposure, automobility kills at least 1.67 million people around the world every year — a total of 60 to 80 million since the advent of the automobile.”
Beyond road deaths, the analysis shows how cars also contribute to pollution, worsening health, inefficient land use, and more. The analysis seeks to move away from a cost-benefit analysis that puts a price on human lives and environmental health and evaluates the broader harms that a car-centric culture causes. “From car crashes to pollution, virtually every item on this list disproportionately impacts socially and racially marginalized people — not least people who don’t drive, which the study authors point out constitutes ‘most people on the planet.’”
FULL STORY: All The Ways That Car Domination Harm Communities (Well, Almost All…)
Despite Stay-at-Home Orders, U.S. Traffic Deaths Rose in 2020
Dangerous behaviors picked up during the early, low-traffic days of the pandemic are partly to blame.
L.A. Metro Plans for an Equitable Recovery
The pandemic has forced difficult confrontations with inequities that existed long before the novel coronavirus. L.A. Metro planners are responding by charting a path toward a transportation system that reverses and improves those previous realities.
Watch: The Car-Centric Legal System, Explained
So many subsidies ensure the dominance of the automobile in the daily live of the United States, it's hard to keep track of them all. Law Professor Greg Shill is keeping track, however.
The state-sanctioned urbicide of Austin
People don’t kill cities. Freeways do.
US to reduce Colorado River water deliveries to Mexico
A new Colorado Treaty amendment reduces Mexico’s Colorado River water allocation by 250,000 acre feet.
New Jersey’s second-largest city bans standalone data centers
Jersey City will continue to allow co-location facilities, such as those meant for research institutions that store their own data.
Amtrak not solely to blame for New Jersey commuter rail's unreliability, report finds
A new study from the Garden State Initiative found that NJ Transit’s budget grew 20% across a 4 year period, but reliability declined significantly over the same period.
EPA erases limits on planet-warming pollution from power plants
Under Monday’s plan, power plants would still have some limits on how much mercury, arsenic and other contaminants they can emit.
Phoenix announces new on-demand transit service, more frequent RAPID buses
Both new services will launch in October, and are part of Phoenix's Project Effective Access Solutions for Easing Congestion.
FREE Course: Walkable City 1: Why Walkability?
After describing his path towards focusing on walkability as the essence of good planning, Jeff Speck marches through his five principal reasons for making more walkable places.
Reinventing Malls: Planning Alchemy—Turning Gray Fields Into Gold
The course focuses on the opportunities and imperatives that shape reinvention of mall sites.
Eagle County Government
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Nashville Planning Department
The Architects Foundation
University of Cincinnati Online
The Pocatello Development Authority
The Urban Renewal Agency of the City of Pocatello
Journal of the American Planning Association