Micromobility For Tomorrow and Today

Why Shared Bikes, Scooters, and E-Bikes Are the Future of Cities

A Partner Post from our friends at Spin

The case for micromobility is made every day in cities across America by countless people choosing to ride scooters, bikes, and e-bikes. It is high-time for city streets to evolve to support the demand for more diverse mobility options.

At the turn of the 20th Century, as cars became a more intrinsic part of convenience and capitalism, streets were taken over by larger and larger vehicles — not the communal spaces for people they once were.

Today, we’re seeing the beginning of a reversal. In recent years, shared micromobility has seen explosive growth. According to NACTO, people in the United States took 136 million trips on shared bikes, e-bikes, and scooters in 2019 — that’s 60 percent more than 2018. Micromobility has been especially important during the pandemic, offering an open air, socially distanced solution for getting around a city. …

We are at the end of an unprecedented and impossibly trying year. As we cope with all those we have lost and prepare for an unstable future in New York City, at Transportation Alternatives, we wanted to try and add some optimism to this year’s end. Even in the darkness, we see a few reasons for hope on our streets.

Chief among our reasons for hope is what the coronavirus pandemic has revealed — both in the fragility of our transportation network and in the creativity we can muster to support our neighbors and our recovery.

It is not all good news — far from it. But, there is much we can learn from this challenging year to help inspire and advance our work in the year to come. Moving forward, we must fight harder for what matters most and put our resources where they will go furthest. Here is what 2020 taught us. …

Families for Safe Streets is an advocacy organization made up of crash survivors and loved ones of people killed in traffic, founded in New York City. Six years ago today, with the help of activists and organizers from Transportation Alternatives, Families for Safe Streets convinced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to sign into law a bill that would reduce the New York City speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour. Backed by research that proves the fatality rate of crashes directly corresponds to vehicle speeds, their campaign was as sensible as it was arduous.

To commemorate the sixth anniversary of the campaign, and the official reduction of the speed limit in America’s most populous city to a safer pace, Transportation Alternatives sat down with Dana Lerner, a member of Families for Safe Streets, to hear what it was like to be a part of this historic activist undertaking. …

By Dave Braunstein

Safer cities are often associated with crime rates, but this fails to include an integral aspect of public health and safety: our roads. Transportation is an overlooked but important determinant of how safe a city is. Road safety is not just limited to car crashes and aggressive driving but includes near-misses, as well as motorcycle, bicyclist, and pedestrian collisions that cost life and limb and billions of dollars in medical care, property damage, and lawsuits each year. In the United States alone, traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in people aged 54 and below. To put it into perspective, that is 40,000 deaths annually and 4.4 …

By Tom Flood

For many years, I worked in the automotive sector of the advertising industry. Then, I started riding a bike with my kids to school and finally stopped drinking the car culture Kool-Aid.

But what I learned making and selling car ads has value. The Vision Zero movement could learn a lot from the marketing practices of the auto industry. As we seek to transform streets and drive traffic deaths down to zero, we can take cues from how cars are sold.

Car Ads Are Targeted

Car ads arrive on our screens in a non-stop onslaught. These messages are impossible to avoid, appearing year-round in every possible media space and high visibility location with an almost unmatched reach and frequency. Now, obviously, the Vision Zero movement doesn’t have the same marketing machine supporting their goals, but at its core, car ads are telling stories, and storytelling can work at any scale. If advocates can adopt the storytelling techniques of the car industry, we can possibly provide effective counter-messaging to the automotive industry onslaught. …

By Emiko Atherton and Beth Osborne

In the past decade, the number of people killed inside cars has plummeted, while the number of people struck and killed while walking increased by 35 percent. Though overall roadway fatalities decreased slightly in 2017, the last two years on record (2016 and 2017) were the most deadly years for people killed by drivers while walking since 1990. Between 2008 and 2017, 49,340 people — 13 people per day, or one person every hour and 46 minutes — were killed while just walking on streets all across the United States. It’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of people crashing — with no survivors — every single month. …

By Terje Elvaas

Putting people first makes cities work better for everyone. It is not an easy task, but Oslo, the capital of Norway, has done important work to show that it is possible. In 2019, Oslo achieved Vision Zero. Reaching that goal was bigger than just saving lives — Oslo had to build a happy, healthy, attractive city. While disagreement and conflict are a part of the story, there is also a lot of common ground to be found. Working together is the only way to make that a Vision Zero a reality.

Make The Streets Where You Meet People

“Our main objective is to give the streets back to the people,” Hanna Marcussen, Oslo’s Vice Mayor for Urban Development told BBC Future in 2019, explaining the radical changes the city was making to local streets. …

By Charles Marohn

In the early months of witnessing COVID-19 spread across North America, our cultural debate has been about whether or not the virus is an urgent threat or a chronic killer. How this debate resolves will tell us a lot about what our actions will be — and, perhaps, how many people might die.

An urgent threat is something humans are wired to respond to. Our bodies have a natural fight or flight mechanism that kicks in — an instinctive response we also seem capable of engaging with as groups. When terrorists flew planes into buildings in September 2001, we responded collectively with sustained focus and a committed sense of urgency. …