B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

09-24 * 13:00 - Toolkit for Weaving (Bea)

09-17 * 14:00 - Energy and Alternative Thematic Group (Bea)

09-16 * 11:30 - GARDA Webinar series preparation (Bea)

Solidarity Economy (TG) Members Anchors: Melanie Bush, Halwest Karim Description The Global of Alternative Solidarity Economy Thematic Group aims to: * Share experiences of alternative economy projects around the world; * Consider our commonalities and specificities; GTA

Declaração sobre Autonomia, Democracia Radical e Autodeterminação [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] Emitida na “Confluência Global sobre Democracia Radical, Autonomia e Autodeterminação”, Port Edward, África do Sul, 2-6 de fevereiro de 2025. Organizada pela Global of AlternativesGTA

Déclaration sur l'autonomie, la démocratie radicale et l'autodétermination [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] Publiée lors de la « Conférence mondiale sur la démocratie radicale, l'autonomie et l'autodétermination », Port Edward, Afrique du Sud, 2-6 février 2025. Organisée par Global TapestryAlternativesalternativesAlternativesMASSAGTA

Declaración sobre Autonomía, Democracia Radical y autodeterminación [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] Redactado en la “Confluencia Global sobre Democracia Radical, Autonomía y Autodeterminación”, Port Edward, Sudáfrica, del 2 al 6 de febrero de 2025. Organizado por el Tejido Global de Alternativas, la Academia de Modernidad Democrática, WoMIN y el Comité de Crisis de Amadiba. Ver AlternativesMASSAAlternativesAlternativesGTA

Declaration on Autonomy, Radical Democracy and Self Determination [ English ] [ Español ] [ Français ] [ Português] Issued at ‘Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self-determination’, Port Edward, South Africa, 2-6 February 2025. Organised by Global of , Academy of Democratic Modernity, WoMIN, Jineology and the Amadiba Crisis Committee. See alternativesalternativesAlternativesAlternativesAlternativesGTA

• President Trump may inadvertently gotten Americans out of the cars by starting a war with Iran. Gas prices have risen by $100 billion, costing motorists an average of almost $800 each (Jalopnik).
• Meanwhile, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright admitted that the best way to drive down gas prices right now is to drive less (Business Insider). But without the transit and bike lanes the administration is defunding, how else are people supposed to get where they need to go?
• The places that will be hurt the most by the Trump administration’s transit cuts are the major cities that provide half the country’s economic output, Howard Chernick writes.
• Even a guy who doesn’t know how to ride a bike things deriding bike lanes as “DEI” is dumb. (The Guardian)
• Members have been arrested, but a Los Angeles group that paints crosswalks where the city won’t is still at it. (NBC Los Angeles)
• San Francisco residents are arguing over whether it’s OK that cyclists get stuck in streetcar tracks and run over by cars. (Standard)
• Baltimore has a plan to reconnect neighborhoods separated by a “highway to nowhere.” (WMAR)
• Democrat Keisha Lance Bottoms says she’ll fund Georgia transit for the first time if elected governor. (11Alive)
• The Minnesota Star-Tribune published a guest column in favor of finding the $224 million to continue the Blue Line project.
• The City of Omaha settled with the owner of a building that partially collapsed during streetcar construction. (Nebraska Public Media)
• An SUV driver hit and killed a man in a wheelchair on a stretch of road in Fort Wayne, Indiana that has no sidewalks. (WPTA)
• Common Edge details the mistakes made during Urban Renewal in New Haven — a common tale in many American cities.
• Runners used to be able to beat Seattle’s “Late 8” bus, but not since it got its own bus lane. (The Urbanist)
• The “cab car” revolutionized rail travel by allowing trains to easily reverse directions at the end of a track. (The Autopian)

Microplastics are a scourge on the environment, accumulating in farm soils and wriggling their way into the food supply—reducing harvests and harming human health. But what if discarded plastics could be used instead, to improve crop yields and make farming more sustainable?

Researchers are trying to do just that. They’re working to develop a new generation of polymers that can be converted into farm fertilizers at the end of their life—rather than shoved into landfills.

A new study, published August 18 in Scientific Reports, documents an important new step in this effort: engineers have found a way to make plant-based polymers whose stiffness can be tuned for different uses such as shopping bags or fidget toys. These new plastics aren’t themselves biodegradable—so no one has to worry about sandwich bags rotting in the kitchen drawer. But when they’re discarded they can chemically converted into fertilizers.

People have spent years using isosorbide, a chemical building block produced from plant-derived glucose, to create experimental plastics that could do this. A study published by the same team in 2021 produced isosorbide-based polymers that could be recycled into fertilizers. But these plastics were too hard and brittle most uses.

Chemists who developed conventional plastics faced similar problems. So they tuned the mechanical properties of their polymers by incorporating other agents to either soften or harden them. But the chemicals that they used often turned out to be harmful to humans—like the now-infamous bisphenol-A (BPA).

In the new study, scientists created a novel derivative of isosorbide that functions as a softening agent—allowing them to concoct isosorbide-based plastics that were softer and stretchier. They could then recycle these bioplastics by treating them with ammonia—releasing the original isosorbide building blocks as well as urea—a chemical frequently used for industrial nitrogen fertilizers.

 

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These recycled mixtures improved the growth yield of Arabidopsis thaliana, a plant belonging to the mustard family, and komatsu, a Japanese mustard spinach that is cultivated as food in Asia, by 5-fold and 2.5-fold respectively, compared to no fertilizer at all.

In the experiments with Arabidopsis, the recycled mixture of urea and isosorbide also improved the yield by about 1.3-fold compared to standard urea fertilizer alone.

Based on experiments published by the same team in 2025, isosorbide appears to stimulate plant growth independently of urea, by increasing tolerance to nitrogen deficiency and salt stress.

More research will be needed to explore the usefulness of these plastics. For example, the plastics produced in this study were deemed appropriate for use in plastic bags or clear plastic wrapping—but not for other uses, such as book shelves or bike parts that require greater strength. The authors also cite the need to conduct a ‘lifecycle analysis’ of these plastics—to quantify their overall water usage, energy consumption, and greenhouse emissions and compare these to standard plastics, and standard fertilizers. They’ll also need to show that bioplastic-derived fertilizers don’t add to microplastic pollution. But at least these new plastics are designed to avoid that problem.

Fujimata, et al. “Plastics to fertilizer: A polymer system based on isosorbide as a monomer, plasticizer, and fertilizer.” Scientific Reports. 2026.

Agrahari, et al. “Novel role of isosorbide as a biostimulant in enhancing plant growth and development in Arabidopsis thaliana.” BMC Plant Biology. 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Forget Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee; it’s time for Urbanists on Bakfiets Talking Cities.

We love this new YouTube series from Urban Mobility Explained and host Lior Steinberg, which is, well, exactly what it sounds like: short interviews-on-wheels with some of the most interesting people in the movement to make cities better … with the subject riding shotgun in the bucket of an Urban Arrow cargo bike.

The first episode doubles as a rolling travelogue through Ljubljana, Slovenia, and it features none other than one of the godfathers of tactical urbanism, Mike Lydon — and they even ride by a temporary “school street” that his famous methodology may have influenced. Come for the e-bike and vacation envy, stay for the fascinating insights into how inexpensive, reversible design interventions can help transform your streets.

Watch this video on YouTube here.

• A review of more than 100 studies found that increasing access to bicycles, particularly e-bikes, is the best way to get people to ride one. “Access” can mean a lot of things, though, from promoting safe biking routes to cash to buy a bike. Addressing these practical concerns is more effective than education or PR campaigns. (Momentum)
• Subway construction in English-speaking countries is even more expensive than previously thought, compared to the rest of the world. (The Transit Brief)
• Here’s how to turn an aging strip mall into a walkable neighborhood. (Building Better Places)
• The only reason Sean Duffy is secretary of transportation is that Donald Trump had already given out all the other jobs in his administration. (Jalopnik)
• If you’re a rising star athlete like the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Oneil Cruz, you can kill three people with your car and hire a fixer to make it go away. (Propublica)
• San Francisco, New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Miami, Oakland, Philadelphia, Seattle and Long Beach have the highest walk scores in the U.S. (Quartz)
• Why is it so hard to build transit in Austin but so easy to widen a freeway? (Planetizen)
• A business community that favors suburban sprawl is keeping Charlotte from realizing its full potential. (Ledger)
• Upstate New York cities like Buffalo, Albany, Rochester and Syracuse are investing in better bike infrastructure. (Focus)
• An Amazon-backed driverless car company called Zoox is challenging Waymo’s supremacy in San Francisco. (New York Times)
• Minneapolis is considering a law requiring human drivers in autonomous vehicles. (Minnesota Public Radio)
• Michigan is testing a road usage charge to fund transportation. (WILX)
• Phoenix has installed 200 miles of “cool pavement” that reduces the urban heat island effect. (Smart Cities World)
• Seattle will install speed cameras on four high-risk corridors. (Capitol Hill Seattle Blog)
• Pittsburgh bikeshare POGOH is searching for a new sponsor. (WESA)
• The mayor of Mobile is obsessed with streetcars. (AL.com)
• Time Out ranked the 20 best cities for biking in the world.
• Japan cut speed limits in half on narrow city streets, from 60 kilometers per hour, or 37 mph, to 30 kph. (The Guardian)

A version of this article originally appeared on Urbanism Speakeasy and is republished with permission.

Corporate media outlets have found a new click-bait genre: the terrifying e-bike. A teenager on a sidewalk or a delivery rider weaving through a crosswalk on a machine that blasts through city streets like a rocket. Social media warriors and neighborhood busybodies are all in a tizzy.

In the US, the standard e-bike is a pedal-assist bicycle that tops out around 20 mph. These have become wildly popular because they have just enough juice to flatten hills and make it easier to carry heavy bags (or kids) without breaking a sweat.

A large share of the panic is a labeling problem. The machines doing the most alarming things on sidewalks and in intersections are electric motorcycles. Without moving your feet, you can soar up to 60 mph.

Even though there is a percentage of the population doing dumb things on e-motos, the traffic safety moment is wasted if we let the fearmongers frame e-bikes as something that deserves immediate political intervention. Instead, we have a chance to put the hierarchy of safety controls back on the table.

Learn how to rank hazards if you really want to prevent the most injuries

The hierarchy of safety controls is a ranked list of ways to deal with a hazard. You start at the top and only move down when a stronger option is not available. The most effective are at the top, and the least effective at the bottom. (Since humans are feeling creatures who sometimes think, it’s not surprising that the least effective safety treatments are the ones that get the most attention.)

• Elimination. Get rid of the hazard. The dangerous thing is no longer there, so it can’t hurt anyone. Unplug and remove a machine, stop using a toxic chemical, etc.
• Substitution. Change the source of harm. Use a safer chemical instead of a toxic one, use a lower-voltage tool, replace a process that can crush a hand with one that can’t, etc.
• Engineering controls. Leave the hazard in place, but build something that keeps people away from it or limits how bad contact can be. Guards, ventilation, barriers, etc.
• Administrative controls. Change how people work. Training, procedures, warning signs, schedules that limit exposure, “only trained staff may enter,” checklists. These help, but they also fail when someone is rushed, tired, untrained, or unsupervised.
• PPE (personal protective equipment). Put protection on the person who is still exposed. Gloves, goggles, helmets, respirators, earplugs. This is last because it does not remove the hazard and does not separate people from it. It only reduces harm if the gear is the right kind, worn correctly, and still working when something goes wrong.

The further down the pyramid you go, the more you’re asking of people when the system itself should have done more.

The public conversation about e-bikes and e-motos lives almost entirely at the bottom two rungs. Meanwhile, the hazard that actually fills trauma centers and morgues is motor vehicle crashes.

Recommended What If Drivers Had to Follow Scooter Laws? Kea Wilson August 31, 2021

In 2023, the United States recorded about 6.14 million police-reported traffic crashes. Of those, 71.7 percent were property-damage-only, 27.6 percent involved injury, and 0.6 percent were fatal. That same year, 40,901 people were killed and an estimated 2.44 million were injured. The CDC separately counted about 2.8 million ER visits for car crash injuries.

Medical expenses from car crashes cost a whopping $31 billion in 2019. CDC put the 2023 cost of crash deaths alone at more than $457 billion, counting medical care and the value of lives lost. The public pays a share of that bill whether or not it wants to. Taxpayers subsidize about 9% of all economic crash costs.

Cars are associated with roughly 40,000 deaths and 2.4 to 2.8 million injured or ER-treated people every year. E-bike deaths were 91 in 2023 and 97 in 2024, with a total of 310 from 2017 through 2024. Rising e-bike injuries are real. That’s because, thankfully, so many more people are now using e-bikes for many of the short trips that used to be car trips.

If we took the top of the pyramid seriously, we would direct policy energy and advocacy resources at the hazard that has such a high share of the blame for traffic violence.

Recommended Why ‘Safe Systems’ Are Not Enough to End Road Violence Kea Wilson February 26, 2024

None of this requires pretending e-motos are harmless. High-power machines on sidewalks are a genuine nuisance and, in some cities, a genuine injury problem. What is not worth doing is treating every battery-assisted bicycle like it’s anywhere near the threat of motor vehicles.

Should we focus at all on e-bikes? Sure. On the topic of traffic safety, I propose 0.2% of our attention focus on e-bikes and 99.8% of our attention focus on cars. That aligns nicely with the real world situation we’re currently faced with.

This week, we’re joined by Sofia Navas and James Nix of the NGO Transport & Environment to talk about their recent report, “Ever Bigger? Car Size at a Crossroads.” Why, why why are car sizes continuing to grow? It’s so clear that safety is directly linked to vehicle size — not to mention the toll big cars take on traffic and public space.

They literally bloat our lives, but you can find out more with the normal Talking Headways lineup:

• Read an excerpt of our exhilarating conversation below.
• Read the entire text (with some transcription typos) here.
• Put on some headphones and click “play” in the player below:

Here’s the excerpt:

Jeff Wood: We talk about “geometry” all the time when it comes to the space in cities — like how much space vehicles take up, how much space people as individuals, bikes take up, especially in terms of street design. But the fact that you guys came up with the numbers that show that larger cars mean less parking. Yes, we all want to move that direction where cities have less parking, but we don’t want it to be because the cars get bigger because that means there’s less space for every other use that you would want to have on a street, including bike lanes, public space, whatever else it might be.

Sofia Navas: Yeah, we basically looked at the parking situation in Berlin as one example city. Right now, the width, the bonnet [hood] height and length has been increasing over the past 25 years at a steady rate across Europe.

And so we extrapolated this trend to 2040 and asked what happens with our public space in the scenario where we just continue with this linear trend in all of these dimensions? We found that compared to the parking situation today, European cities are set to lose 8.5 to 14 percent of car parking space.

City planners are constantly fighting if they want to, as Paris, make a city more livable with planting more greenery or making just more space for pedestrians and the people that live in the city. It’s always a huge fight.

But then if we look at the loss of public space that we’re currently seeing, the car fleet is quietly eating our public space away. Decisions about our public space are not being made at City Hall, but in car showrooms around the world. We believe should stop this by going back to dimensions that we call reasonable, and this is our right-sizing scenario which we advocate for.

James Nix: It’s not really discussed, but this is probably one of the greatest privatizations of public space that we’ve ever seen. And just because it’s incremental, that doesn’t mean it’s inconsequential.

Each new year is 1.2 centimeters longer than the previous year. And again, the average width also increasing, and that’s increasing by half a centimeter, so each new year of sales is on average half a centimeter wider than the previous year of sales.

Other times, the next generation model is six or seven centimeters wider than the previous generation.

I just wanted to emphasize the privatization-of-public-space point because we would never allow, you know, millions of football pitches that we never talk about.

There are many ways to cut the carbon emissions of concrete. One is to mix conventional Portland cement with limestone or other similar materials. Another route is to blend cements with cementitious binding materials such as fly ash from coal-fired power plants and granulated blast furnace slag from iron and steel production. Yet other ways include using microorganisms orenzymes in concrete that soak up carbon dioxide.

The problem is what these formulas do to durability. Low-carbon concrete absorbs more carbon dioxide from the air than conventional concrete, a process that lowers its internal alkalinity and leaves the steel reinforcement inside more vulnerable to rust. Because today’s building codes are written to prevent exactly that kind of corrosion, they effectively discourage engineers from using greener concrete in the first place—even though it’s better for the climate.

A new study out of ETH Zurich, published in Nature Communications, offers a way past that impasse. Rather than treating corrosion as a fixed property of a given concrete mix, the researchers modeled how it actually unfolds in the real world. They tested three concrete formulations in four cities with very different climates—Zurich, Bergen, Manaus, and Huailai—feeding detailed local weather data into a model that tracks how moisture moves through concrete over time and how that moisture drives corrosion.

 

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The finding reframes the problem: climate, not chemistry, is the main variable. Wet concrete can corrode up to 100 times faster than dry concrete, while differences between concrete mixes had a comparatively minor effect. In other words, the same low-carbon concrete that might degrade quickly in a humid, rain-soaked city could hold up fine in a dry one.

That points to a fix that’s more about policy than materials science: building standards that account for local climate, rather than applying identical rules everywhere. As lead researcher Ueli Angst put it, engineers need “a better understanding of how environmentally-friendly types of concrete behave over the long term under different weather conditions.” If codes were calibrated to a structure’s actual location, low-carbon concrete could be deployed far more widely in the climates where it holds up—without waiting for a new chemistry breakthrough first.

Source: Christhiana Albert et al. Rethinking concrete durability for low-carbon concretes through climate-informed corrosion modelling, Nature Communications, 2026.

Image: valentinplugarug/magnific.com

Waymo’s rollout of driverless taxis in Nevada must be halted because the company has violated state law by not lining up alternatives for disabled passengers, an emergency petition to state authorities claims.

Kelsey Maurine Brickl, who uses a powered wheelchair, filed her appeal in August, just days after the Nevada Transportation Agency permitted the autonomous taxi company to deploy 1,000 driverless vehicles in the Las Vegas area.

Kelsey Maurine Brickl

“We can’t [allow] this shiny new piece of convenient tech … to chip away at the rights of disabled people,” said Brickl, who initially founded Ghostlight Access to promote disability rights in theater. She is also a stockholder in Waymo’s parent company Google.

Nevada law requires driverless car companies to provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles for passengers upon request, but few companies have such capacity, so most merely contract with human-driven taxi companies, such as Uber and Lyft, to fulfill trip requests.

But for now, Waymo has no such contract in Nevada, likely because it has not had time to finalize such an arrangements, which one source told Streetsblog, is complicated. For now, all that Waymo would say on the record is that it intends to follow state law to provide wheelchair-accessible trips.

“We will comply with applicable Nevada accessibility requirements,” said Ethan Teicher, a spokesperson for Waymo. “We are committed to working with manufacturers, researchers, and the accessibility community toward a future where our fully autonomous vehicles can accommodate the diverse needs of all riders.”

Waymo is far from the only company that has been accused of failing disabled riders. Two other companies — Tesla and Uber’s Aviari — were permitted for driverless passenger service in Nevada in August, but it is unclear if either is providing wheelchair-accessible rides.

Recommended Report: Waymo Surpasses The Way-Too-Low Human Driver Safety Bar Ren Zaro Fitzgerald July 24, 2026

Brickl says that she directed her petition at Waymo because of Tesla’s recent announcement that it is developing compliant vehicles, and Uber’s relatively small share of the driverless car market. She says she has contacted Tesla for a timeline on the release of its new vehicles, but has not heard back.

Waymo is Brickl’s immediate target, but the problem of this basic civil rights violation is industry-wide, Brickl said, citing loopholes in Nevada, other states’, and federal law that allow taxi companies to provide alternative services instead of making fleets accessible. Even if providers do contract out an accessible operator, these rides can cost more and come with a longer-than-average wait, she added.

Truly equal access, in which fleets are accessible by default, is several years away at minimum. Currently, no cars meet Waymo’s specifications and are wheelchair accessible. Other brands face similar challenges, particularly as companies switch to fully electric vehicles, whose bulky, floor-stored batteries interfere with necessary loading ramps. For its Zoox fleet, Amazon opted to manufacture a bespoke car model – but it cannot accommodate wheelchairs.

The proliferation of driverless cars has threatened more-accessible forms of transportation. Multiple independent studies have confirmed that taxi companies, such as Waymo and Uber, are replacing sustainable modes in about half of trips. And many of those trips would have been on public transit, which is accessible. Those lost public transit trips mean that fare revenue is being shifted away from cash-strapped agencies, which will be less able to provide fully accessible service (not to mention that the added congestion of more cars on the road slows down the service).

“[Driverless cars are] taking something away, potentially damaging something that’s already there,” Brickl said.

The Nevada Transportation Authority claimed in an email to Streetsblog that it is not required to respond to petitions after a decision is made, but Nevada state law clearly allows petitions for a reversal within 15 days of decision — in this case, a clock that began ticking on Aug. 20. Brickl filed on Aug. 26, well within the appeal window. The Authority did not clarify why it considers itself exempt from state law.

In Brickl’s view, Waymo must be compelled to follow the law, or see its expansion put on hold.

“Disabled people already have civil rights, we just need them enforced,” she said. “If the rollout of Waymo is going to take those existing civil rights away, then it needs to be halted.”

I am a 12-year-old cyclist in New York City. I’m constantly wondering if I’ll make it to 13.

My mom and I ride all the time, but even though I’m allowed by law to ride on the sidewalk (well, maybe I am — more on that later), I ride on the same streets as she does. So every time we go anywhere on my bike, I review my hand signals, especially the ones I use to go around a car parked in a painted bike lane, and take a deep breath.

Nine times out of 10, there is a car or truck parked in a painted bike lane. Trucks are the worst because they have huge blind spots. Typically, my mom and I have a strategy discussion about going around these scofflaws, though sometimes we just pull over when we don’t feel safe. That’s not cycling. That’s walking with a bike between your legs.

Car-filled unprotected bike lanes are a problem for all cyclists, but especially for someone my age. In theory, I should just be riding on the sidewalk, as riders under 14 are allowed to do) — except that I’ve also seen rules that say that I must bike in the roadway because my wheels are 26 inches in diameter. That rule (that 12-year-olds and under can only bike on the sidewalk if their wheels are less than 26 inches) is quoted a lot in all sorts of places — summaries of bike rules, legal code — but the city Administrative code says that as a 12-year-old, I can bike on the sidewalk. So it may just depend on the cop — which then may subject the biker to police bias.

Even the cops are confused.

In any event, many kids stop biking once they graduate to an adult-sized frame. After all, the streets are a mess, and pedestrians frankly resent seeing middle-schoolers biking on the sidewalk. (As Streetsblog once reported, roads with schools are much more dangerous than roads without, so students have an especially unsafe biking experience.)

Many more middle-schoolers would bike if they had safe routes to school. And that can’t merely mean painted, car-filled bike lanes because if we want more tweens biking, we have to make the roadway safe for people who are still just learning to bike in the city. 

Of course, politicians don’t care because people like me can’t vote until we’re 18. That means that for six more years, I don’t have much of a say in the policymaking that could determine whether I get killed or seriously injured by a car driver. And it’s not just the driver’s fault — it’s the fault of a system that allows cars to dominate all the streets; menace cyclists, pedestrians, and air quality; and push kids to the curb.

Recommended



‘ALWAYS SCARED’: Dangerous Streets Outside City Schools Threaten Children
Jesse Coburn

May 24, 2022

I once attended a “biking class” (about traffic patterns, signals, that sort of stuff), and everyone besides me was an adult. The class emphasized avoiding crashes while staying on the good side of the law — and treated illegal, crash-causing car behavior as a fact of life. Who decided that crashes are normal? Other forms of murder certainly aren’t.

Nonetheless, I’ve stuck with biking because, I suppose, I’m just a contrarian: I want to spite the cars. I want to defend the environment from today’s politicians. And biking is fun.

But it’s not so fun to navigate around wheeled boxes of death on a regular basis, thinking something along the lines of, “Am I going to die today?”

The Mamdani administration is implementing Sammy’s Law through a patchwork of short, disconnected stretches, some as short as about 100 feet.@NYC_SafeStreets is calling on the mayor to think bigger and lower speed limits across entire neighborhoods to save lives. pic.twitter.com/HZra34RRRm

— Transportation Alternatives (@TransAlt) September 8, 2026

• Cleaner air equals smarter children. That was the result of a Columbia University study that found that a reduction in tailpipe pollution, among other sources, in New York City improved toddlers’ cognitive development by 26 percent. Other studies have also shown respiratory benefits when measures like low-emissions zones are implemented. (NY Times)
• Jake Boyles provides hard proof that interstates are homogenizing the country, at least when it comes to the businesses that lie just beyond them. (Strong Towns)
• Robotaxis would be much more useful in rural areas that lack transit than in big cities. (Bloomberg CityLab; paywall)
• Human backup drivers in robotaxis might not be worth much if they lose their skills while observing most of the time. (The Conversation)
• Electrek lays out how it’s possible to replace a second car with an e-cargo bike.
• Lyft was able to convince California voters to classify rideshare drivers as independent contractors, and now CEO Logan Green wants to take Prop 22 nationwide. (Mashable)
• Chicago’s new regional transportation authority overseeing the CTA, Metra and Pace is up and running. (Eno Center for Transportation)
• How many bike-riding children have to die before Michigan stops designing roads solely for drivers? (WLNS)
• At least one Atlanta city council member is onboard with a new plan for light rail along the 22-mile Beltline. (CBS News)
• Cincinnati’s Connector streetcar has not quite lived up to early expectations, but it’s still carried 7.5 million riders in 10 years, and the numbers are trending up. (Axios)
• In addition to cutting bus routes and early morning service, Miami-Dade could start charging for the Metromover. (Miami Times)
• Japanese architects are going to great lengths to provide parking for single-family homes with limited space. (Design Boom)
• Clearly Ottawa mayoral candidate Alex Lawson hasn’t read “The High Cost of Free Parking.” (CBC)
• Montreal, too, is in danger of backsliding as Mayor Soraya Martinez Ferrada puts bike projects under renewed scrutiny. (Momentum)

Weaving Hope in Times of Crisis: A Report of the 2nd General Assembly of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives THIS IS NOT YET PUBLIC, FOR INTERNAL REVIEW Introduction The second in-person Assembly of the Global of () took place in Bandung, Indonesia, from 12–17 April 2026, hosted at weaverGTAweaversendorsersGTAGTAalternativesGTAalternatives