Table of contents:
Essays (Foundational essays)
Articles (Climate • Technoableism)
Research (Miscellaneous • Policing • Infrastructure [Transportation • Traffic safety])

Essays

Foundational essays to what I believe in

these essays inform my worldview and politics for various reasons; notable excerpts are provided from each.

• Shade: An Urban Design Mandate (Sam Bloch | Places Journal, Spring 2019):

  Shade is often understood as a luxury amenity, lending calm to courtyards and tree-lined boulevards, cooling and obscuring jewel boxes and glass cubes. But as deadly, hundred-degree heatwaves become commonplace, we have to learn to see shade as a civic resource that is shared by all. In the shade, overheated bodies return to equilibrium. Blood circulation improves. People think clearly. They see better. In a physiological sense, they are themselves again. For people vulnerable to heat stress and exhaustion — outdoor workers, the elderly, the homeless — that can be the difference between life and death. Shade is thus an index of inequality, a requirement for public health, and a mandate for urban planners and designers.

• The social ideology of the motorcar (André Gorz | Le Sauvage, September 1973):

  The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and frustrated in return.

Articles

Climate articles

• How Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels (Grist, September 26, 2024)

  Weyland is one of hundreds of thousands of people across Germany who have embraced balkonkraftwerk, or balcony solar. Unlike rooftop photovoltaics, the technology doesn’t require users to own their home, and anyone capable of plugging in an appliance can set it up. Most people buy the simple hardware online or at the supermarket for about $550 (500 euros.) [...] More than 550,000 of them dot cities and towns nationwide, half of which were installed in 2023. During the first half of this year, Germany added 200 megawatts of balcony solar. Regulations limit each system to just 800 watts, enough to power a small fridge or charge a laptop, but the cumulative effect is nudging the country toward its clean energy goals while giving apartment dwellers, who make up more than half of the population, an easy way to save money and address the climate crisis.

Technoableism

• Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported: Second Sight left users of its retinal implants in the dark (Eliza Strickland and Mark Harris | IEEE Spectrum, February 2022):

  [...]more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget. One technical hiccup, one broken wire, and they lose their artificial vision, possibly forever. To add injury to insult: A defunct Argus system in the eye could cause medical complications or interfere with procedures such as MRI scans, and it could be painful or expensive to remove.

• Abandoned: The human cost of neurotechnology failure. When the makers of electronic implants abandon their projects, people who rely on the devices have everything to lose. (Liam Drew | Nature, December 2022):

  When the makers of implanted devices go under, the implants themselves are typically left in place — surgery to remove them is often too expensive or risky, or simply deemed unnecessary. But without ongoing technical support from the manufacturer, it is only a matter of time before the programming needs to be adjusted or a snagged wire or depleted battery renders the implant unusable. People are then left searching for another way to manage their condition, but with the added difficulty of a non-functional implant that can be an obstacle both to medical imaging and future implants. For some people, including Möllmann-Bohle, no clear alternative exists.

• Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability to Walk After Manufacturer Refuses to Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton / Paralyzed Man Unable to Walk After Maker of His Powered Exoskeleton Tells Him It's Now Obsolete (Jason Koebler / Frank Landymore | 404media / Futurism, September 2024)

  A former jockey who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a horse riding accident was able to walk again thanks to a cutting-edge piece of robotic tech: a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton. When one of its small parts malfunctioned, however, the entire device stopped working. Desperate to gain his mobility back, he reached out to the manufacturer, Lifeward, for repairs. But it turned him away, claiming his exoskeleton was too old, 404 media reports.

Research

Miscellaneous

• Christina Xiao et al., Children’s Health in London and Luton (CHILL) cohort: a 12-month natural experimental study of the effects of the Ultra Low Emission Zone on children’s travel to school, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, Volume 21, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-024-01621-7.
  [see also the Grist article London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids from September 17, 2024]
  

  Among children who took inactive modes (private vehicle or taxi) at baseline, 42% of children in London and 20% of children in Luton switched to active modes (those that involved walking, cycling, or scootering during any part of the route or modes which included public transport). For children taking active modes at baseline, 5% of children in London and 21% of children in Luton switched to inactive modes. Relative to the children in Luton, children in London were more likely to have switched from inactive to active modes. [...] Implementation of clean air zones can increase uptake of active travel to school and was particularly associated with more sustainable and active travel in children living further from school.

Policing

• Wenfei Xu et al., The racial composition of road users, traffic citations, and police stops, PNAS, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402547121
  [see also the Conversation article Police stop more Black drivers, while speed cameras issue unbiased tickets − new study from Chicago from September 27, 2024]
  

  We show that moving violations, as measured by camera enforcement, are higher for Black drivers after accounting for roadway racial composition. However, citations are roughly proportional to racial composition of the roads on which the cameras are located. Our results also show that, while the composition of the road network is correlated with the composition of traffic stops, stops are nevertheless disproportionately of Black drivers, both relative to the roadway composition and relative to automated ticket shares.

Infrastructure

Transportation

• Erick Guerra, Gilles Duranton & Xinyu Ma, Urban Roadway in America: The Amount, Extent, and Value, Journal of the American Planning Association, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2024.2368260
  

  [...]the amount and value of urban land dedicated to roadway was substantial, at more than $4 trillion on the land area the size of West Virginia. Roadway in suburban areas tended to consume both a high share and high total amount of land and land value. Downtown roads generally used the most expensive land but tended to have higher densities and thus lower land consumption per capita. [...] Second, the United States almost certainly dedicates too much land, money, and effort to building roadways. Even with generally optimistic assumptions, the costs of adding urban road capacity substantially outweigh the benefits, especially when incorporating the land costs of roadways.

Traffic safety

traffic safety is strongly correlated with a number of things: fewer cars; better protections and accommodations for alternative transportation; traffic calming measures (especially those facilitated by the design needs of alternative transit); and shorter crossing distances for pedestrians. in general, streets that better accommodate alternative transit are ones that are both calmer for everyone that uses them and safer for everyone that uses them. by calming streets and making infrastructure more amenable to non-car transit, we also make travel more accessible for children; car-centric infrastructure is a major impediment to children's freedom of movement.

• Nicholas N. Ferenchak and Wesley E. Marshall, Traffic safety for all road users: A paired comparison study of small & mid-sized U.S. cities with high/low bicycling rates, Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research, Volume 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcmr.2024.100010
  

  Findings confirm that higher-bicycling cities are significantly associated with better overall road safety outcomes. In terms of mode choice differences, pedestrian ‘safety in numbers’ as well as reduced driving activity had a positive impact on pedestrian safety. Results from hierarchical negative binomial regressions also suggest that more compact cities were significantly associated with better road safety outcomes for all road users.

• Hannah Younes et al., The Traffic Calming Effect of Delineated Bicycle Lanes, Journal of Urban Mobility, Volume 5, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urbmob.2024.100071
  

  After controlling for direction, hourly traffic flow, and the behavior of the vehicle (i.e., free-flowing or stopped at a red light), we found that the effect of the delineator-protected bicycle lane (marked with traffic cones and plastic delineators) was associated with a 28 % reduction in average maximum speeds and a 21 % decrease in average speeds for vehicles turning right. For those going straight, a smaller reduction of up to 8 % was observed. Traffic moving perpendicular to the bicycle lane experienced no decrease in speeds. Painted-only bike lanes were also associated with a small speed reduction of 11–15 %, but solely for vehicles turning right. These findings suggest an important secondary benefit of bicycle lanes: by having a traffic calming effect, delineated bicycle lanes may decrease the risk and severity of crashes for pedestrians and other road users.

• Marcel Moran and Debra Laefer, Multiscale Analysis of Pedestrian Crossing Distance, Journal of the American Planning Association, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2024.2394610
  

  This [article's] granular approach—covering roughly 49,000 total crossings—identified inter- and intraurban spatial patterns in the distribution of pedestrian crossing distance, including clusters of long crossings that likely deter walking and increase its risk. By overlaying recent pedestrian–vehicle collisions on these novel data sets we found that longer crossing distance correlated with increased likelihood of collisions, raising the salience of traffic-calming interventions. [...] Specifically, for every 1-ft increase in crossing distance, the probability that a collision has occurred increased by 0.8% in Paris, 2.11% in San Francisco, and 1.8% in Irvine. [...]the relationship between crossing distance and probability of a collision was not uniform; instead, in all three cities, each additional foot of crossing increased the probability of a collision to a greater extent. Put another way, the collision probability increase when a crossing distance was extended from 60 ft to 61 ft was greater than the collision probability increase when a crossing distance was extended from 9 ft to 10 ft in all three cities.

• Zahra Tavakoli et al., Traffic danger’s potential impact on children’s accessibility, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, Volume 135, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2024.104370
  

  The results find that due to traffic danger, children’s walking accessibility is estimated to be reduced by at least 75 %. When traffic danger is accounted for, the median value for access to public transport is 0 and social destinations is 1. Children’s accessibility is likely considerably reduced by the danger imposed on them by adult-exclusive modes, motor vehicles, highlighting an environmental injustice. [...] Only neighborhoods in the downtown retain with high levels of accessibility. These central boroughs are the areas where the land-use is mixed resulting in many more opportunities for children, such as local stores, parks, and green spaces, pedestrian streets, and public squares. This is in line with a prior study that greater walkability and mobility combined with greater affordances (the variety of opportunities that exist for the child in the environment) could support children’s accessibility (Desjardins et al., 2022).