Extremely cool article. Only one point I disagree wih with

Many people assume that handcarts go on the road, with the cars, or on the cycling path. That’s not the case: you use it on the sidewalk.

Jean Merrill documented The Pushcart War about this exact allocation of road space. Push carts belong on the road, don’t let car propaganda tell you otherwise.

Caveat: i say this from a systems perspective that cart SHOULD be on the road. Not a personal safety perspective where one might want to take the sidewalk.

I mean the one in the field.

Why is weed trimming around the supports necessary?

It sure is. And the alternative is dying.

For some more applicable advice, time bound you commitment to this cause. 10 minutes a day? 2 hours a week? 10 hours a month? Doesn’t matter. Get it a set amount of time, and dont let it bleed into your other priorities often.

Thinking about something advocacy sized and slow moving all the time will burn you out. I’ve learned this through my cycling route advocacy. It gets the time I dedicate to it. No more, but no less.

Neat.

Doesn’t solve the massive infrastructure bill, land use requirements, and safety issues of cars though.

Removing the 57% of transportation emissions from individualized transit is more important than the <2% from public transit.

Not that we can’t do both, just where priorities and performance measures should lie.

I would personally argue changing modes of transit are very much a local leader problem. Since they decide land use policies, transportation priorities, and many other things that can improve or degrade the transportation options available to people.

I’m obviously biased with my own political reality, but a city council can do more for modal share than a federal decree. And it’s obviously not a zero sum game. We can replace fleets woth electric busses AND build bike lanes.

I’m not saying electrifying busses isn’t good. It definitely is. Especially for local air quality. But as a priority, it’s pretty low down.

Yes. But even better for the kids would be to not breath the fumes from the 20% emissions coming from passenger vehicles and the 37% from non-passenger work vehicle family passenger vehicles (credit to Rollie Williams for that term)

I think we’re saying the same thing with a different strategy.

Such to say, I’d prioritize eliminating all the non-passenger work vehicle passenger family vehicles than reduce bus fuel emissions. That might mean pumping out more “dirty” busses for an overall net positive in the short term.

With transportation accounting for roughly 28 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, transit agencies…

28% of emissions are in the transportation sector, but busses are part of the 2% of the transportation sector that doesn’t get it’s own category. Or <0.5% overall.

emissions in 2022 were light-duty trucks, which include sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks, and minivans (37%); medium- and heavy-duty trucks (23%); passenger cars (20%); commercial aircraft (7%); other aircraft (2%); pipelines (4%); ships and boats (3%); and rail (2%).

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/transportation-sector-emissions

I’m not saying electrifying busses isn’t good. It definitely is. Especially for local air quality. But as a priority, it’s pretty low down.

Land value tax wouldn’t totally fix this, but it would help a lot.