Thursday’s Headlines Are Electric
Big smoke-spewing tractor-trailers are bad. Bike-shares and e-scooters are ... also bad? High-speed rail and fixing sidewalks, however, are good.
By
Blake Aued
12:00 AM EST on January 13, 2022
- Emissions from heavy-duty trucks have an outsized impact on the climate and human health. Electrifying those fleets will pay big dividends. (New York Times)
- Renting e-bikes and scooters may not be as climate-friendly as you thought, because most of the time you’d be walking or taking transit instead. (Anthropocene Magazine)
- Donald Shoup has an easy way to improve sidewalks: require property owners to fix them when they sell. (City Lab)
- Smaller cities in poorer regions may have a hard time crafting the eye-catching proposals needed to get a competitive grant from the federal infrastructure bill. (Governing)
- Hate flying? High-speed rail is the answer. (The Urbanist)
- Too much parking is contributing to deadly heat waves that have killed hundreds of people in Pacific Northwest cities. (Sightline)
- MinnPost praises Minneapolis for recognizing that Hennepin Avenue has too much parking and proposing to remove it for bike and bus lanes and wider sidewalks.
- The Washington state senate’s new transportation chair says he’s too busy to bike or take or transit, but he is a fan of high-speed rail and Vision Zero. (The Stranger)
- This California DOT official envisions an integrated statewide transit system with contactless payment and better information to plan your trip. (Intelligent Transport)
- The executive director of the Atlanta BeltLine says the 22-mile bike and pedestrian loop is making tremendous progress. (Saporta Report)
- Two-thirds of parking tickets given to city employees in Houston go to police officers. Yet despite parking in bike lanes all the time, none of them have ever been cited for it. (Chronicle)
- Charleston has chosen Lime to be its new bike-share vendor. (WCSC)
- Drive-throughs in Baton Rouge are now required to serve not just drivers, but people on foot, on bikes and in wheelchairs, too. (The Advocate)
- London Mayor Sadiq Khan is warning of the health risks of driving as car use returns to nearly pre-pandemic levels while walking, biking and especially transit use lag behind. (The Guardian)
- Three-fourths of Australians want to bike but are intimidated by the lack of safe paths. (The Conversation)
- Milan, one of the most congested cities on the planet and most polluted in Italy, is building 750 kilometers of bike lanes by 2035. (Momentum)
Blake Aued has been doing Streetsblog's daily national news digest for years. He's also an Atlanta Braves fan, which enrages his editor in New York.
Read More:
More from Streetsblog USA
How to Fight a Freeway 101
A new guide gives advocates the basics to building a campaign against harmful infrastructure in their neighborhoods — and the best time to start is now.
November 9, 2026
Monday’s Headlines Come Heavy or Not at All
The Transport Workers Union takes aim at Amtrak's new policy allowing guns onboard trains.
November 9, 2026
The California DMV’s Culture of Obstruction
California’s DMV is responsible for managing some of the biggest risks on the state’s roads, but researchers say a culture of secrecy and obstruction makes it nearly impossible for the public to access basic information about dangerous drivers and disabled parking placard fraud.
November 6, 2026
Opinion: I (Almost) Killed a Pedestrian With My Car
Every driver has a story or two about a near-miss traffic crash, even when they were doing everything right. Can we get those numbers down with safer systems?
November 6, 2026
