B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

Where the dreams of our ancestors meet the memories of our descendants: Reflections on commoning, abolition and reparations By Alison Chopel Introduction There are two currents in the US-based racial justice movement that I am committed to which seem, at surface, to stretch their attention in different temporal directions: reparations or reparative justice and abolitionism. Reparations activists and scholars observe that to move toward a less violent society that can truly break from the ho…

WEAVING ALTERNATIVES #21: A periodical of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives Weaving Economies for Life Solidarity Economy, Commons, Care and Pluriversal Futures November 2026 Editorial Note Solidarity Economy: A Historical Overview Melanie E L Bush and Nokuthula HlabanganeAlternativesAlternativesWeavers

Who Tends the Fire? and The Arithmetic of Fire By Dr Lebohang Liepollo Pheko Cooling the Flames Without Extinguishing the Fire Who Tends the Fire? I. The economies that consume us They told us to cool the flames while they were still setting the world alight.

Food accounts for a third of humanity’s greenhouse emissions. And sure enough, the most carbon-gushing foods are also the ones that tend to be the worst for our health, such as meats and dairy. So what if we tried taxing that carbon, to nudge people toward higher-plant diets that are healthier for people and planet alike?

A new study in Nature Food explores how these food emissions taxes could be applied to countries around the world with different levels of wealth and greenhouse emissions. It shows how they could be tweaked to manage the delicate interplay between food prices, poverty, hunger, and health—while still cutting billions of tons of annual emissions.

Economists have estimated that growing populations and increasing meat consumption worldwide could cause the environmental footprint of our food—including greenhouse emissions—to balloon by 50 to 90 percent by 2050. This has spurred recommendations that humanity shift its diet, toward fewer animals and more plants.

Emissions taxes paid by consumers buying foods are one way to encourage a shift away from meats, dairy, eggs, and sugars. But questions remain about how those taxes can be applied fairly to countries around the world—given that wealthier nations have more ability to pay them, and that many of these same nations also contributed disproportionately to rising greenhouse gases in the first place.

In the new study, researchers used economic, trade, and public health models to predict how well different types of taxes would curb greenhouse emissions—and also, how they would impact food prices and human health around the world.

 

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They compared two tax scenarios. In one, emissions are priced the same worldwide, at a constant cost of USD$ 185 per metric ton of CO2 equivalent (tCO2eq). In this system, wealthy countries would still pay more taxes, because their food systems emit more tons of CO2. In the other system, the cost-per-ton of emissions is scaled up or down, based on each country’s wealth—thereby further increasing the taxes paid by consumers in wealthy countries (to as much as $969 per tCO2eq), while reducing those paid by lower-wealth countries (to as little as $21 per tCO2eq). The researchers compared these two scenarios both with and without a second provision, in which governments would also subsidize fruits and vegetables to further lower the prices that consumers pay for these low-carbon foods.

Their results suggest that taxes based on a fixed-price-per-ton would reduce food-related emissions most sharply—by up to 18.7 percent, or about 2.6 billion tCO2eq worldwide each year. But such taxes would likely worsen overall health in some countries such as India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam—even after accounting for reductions in heart disease and diabetes—because they might make food less affordable to some people, compromising nutrition.

The authors found that adjusting the price-per-ton of emissions based on national wealth would lessen this problem. And subsidizing the cost of fruits and vegetables would further decrease it. Together these two tweaks slightly reduced the emissions that were prevented—but they were still predicted to cut worldwide food emissions by 17 percent, or about 2.3 billion tCO2eq per year.

The authors recommended that these efforts to reduce the negative impacts on the poor could be further explored, with detailed studies of poverty in individual countries, and potentially by excluding some critical sustenance foods such as fish or rice from the taxes in some countries.

Bouyssou, et al. “Food emissions taxes can deliver health and environmental benefits with limited leakage.” Nature Food, 2026.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

    Isobel Fletcher I have a confession: I genuinely like using AI, and that makes me feel deeply conflicted. On a day-to-day level, it is incredibly helpful. When I am staring into the fridge on a busy evening, it gives me a quick recipe from leftovers. When a family member faced a health scare, it […]

I took a really long walk this summer. Along the way, I learned lessons that seemed applicable to how we can cultivate personal and community resilience during the Great Unraveling.

Moments of rupture arrive the way storms do, not as isolated events, but as expressions of deeper atmospheric conditions.

Whether to grow your own food or simply lessen your impact on the world, we can take initial steps toward self-sufficiency. I began by planting a tree.

Few U.S. neighborhoods are living up to their full Halloween potential — but they could with a few long-term urban planning tricks and short-term community activation treats.

Check out the latest from City Beautiful, which breaks down how to make communities not just more walkable for spooky season, but more connected and neighborly year-round. And it’s not just about giant Home Depot skeletons and full-sized candy bars … though that certainly doesn’t hurt.

It’s essential viewing as we enter into the one night of the year that transforms everyone into a pedestrian.

• Halloween is one of the most dangerous nights for pedestrians. In the absence of safe streets for walking, Quartz has tips for reducing the odds that your child will be run over, or that you kill a child while behind the wheel.
• The World Cup showed that ramping up transit for major events can have positive lasting effects for residents when the surge is over. (Smart Cities Dive)
• Housing and transportation policy must be mixed to make each more affordable, according to Yonah Freemark. (Urban Institute)
• A Florida referendum on reducing property taxes would cost Miami-Dade transit $29 million in revenue, forcing cuts to routes and hours. (CBS News)
• Caltrain’s ridership grew by more than 50 percent last year, thanks to electrification. (Metro Magazine)
• Future California Gov. Xavier Becerra is likely to fire the head of California’s high-speed rail project, and is open to vehicle-miles-driven tax. (KCRA)
• Chicago passed an ordinance banning car-centric businesses like drive-throughs and gas stations near transit-oriented developments. (CNU Public Square)
• Utah is adopting the Michigan left, where drivers turn right and then make a U-turn. (Salt Lake Tribune)
• The South Carolina DOT is spending $300 million to make sure Columbia drivers don’t have to wait on trains. (WLTX)
• The Dallas city council approved $2.8 million in streetcar funding while still questioning the return on investment. (Observer)
• Omaha has spent more than $400 million acquiring downtown parking garages, about the same amount as it’s spending to build a streetcar. (Flatwater Free Press)
• Boise chip manufacturer Micron promises that a $50 billion investment will benefit transit and housing. (Boise Dev)
• There is some vague reason behind Detroit bikeshare MoGo suspending service, other than not socializing. (Axios)
• A high-speed train collision in Spain killed almost 70 people. (ABC News)
• If the Canadian province of Alberta forces Edmonton to rip out bike lanes, it would cost at least $150 million. (CBC)

Look out! L.A. City turned on its new automated speed enforcement cameras this week. Learn all about the program at the L.A. City Transportation Department (LADOT) program website, earlier Streetsblog coverage, or at KTLA, NBC4, LA Times, Reddit or LAist.

Click here to donate to Streetsblog, or just scroll down for how to hack city speed cameras.

1 – Only Speed up to 10 Miles Over the Posted Limit

The cameras don’t really ticket all speeders. They only ticket you if you drive 11 miles or more over the posted speed limit. So, as long as you want to wherever you want to, but keep within ten miles of the speed limit.

Even if you get a ticket, the less you speed the cheaper the ticket is. If you go 11 to 15 miles over the limit, it’s only a $50 ticket. It’s way more if you go like 150 miles over the speed limit!

Hack: if you speed just a little, you can’t get a ticket! And you’ll never get a $500 ticket if you don’t go 100 mph over the limit. 2 – Only Speed Now, But Not in 2027

Even though the city wants you to believe that the cameras are live right now, they’re not! Well, sort of. For the first 60 days, the automated cameras only give warnings, which the city mails to you, then you can just throw away.

Speed all you like for the next 60 days – get it out of your system! – and then, make a new year’s resolution to not speed in 2027, and stick to it, and you’ll be just fine.

3 – Only Speed Once

Even after the first 60 day warning period, there’s a simple get-out-of-speed-jail card you can play. The city speed camera program never tickets first-offenders!

Even if you go 100 miles per hour (not recommended), the first automatic ticket that the city sends you is just one of those silly warnings, that we already told you you can throw away.

4 – Only Speed in Certain Cities

According to state law, automated speed camera programs are only permitted in certain cities. As long as you don’t speed in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Glendale, or Malibu (and Oakland, San Francisco, and San Jose – but really who drives there?) you’ll never get an automated speeding ticket!

Look for the PHOTO ENFORCED sign – they only ticket you after you pass this sign!

If you drive outside these city limits – like say in Santa Monica or Pasadena or Palmdale – they won’t be using fancy AI gizmos to ticket you for speeding!

And, pro-tip, even if you’re driving in those speed-trap cities, they only automatically issue tickets in locations where there’s a sign that shows the speed limit, and says “PHOTO ENFORCED.” If you have quick reflexes, you can speed in places like L.A., then when you see that sign, slam on the brakes before you pass the sign, and you won’t get the automatic citation.

5 – Carpool, Bike, Walk, or Take Transit

And, yes, you’re reading this at a pro-bike/walk/transit website, so it’s all pretty tongue-in-cheek, no?

You know you won’t get a speeding ticket ever when you walk, carpool, or ride the bus or the train. And you have to bike really fast, usually downhill, to get a bike speeding ticket.

Speed cameras save lives. Slow down so everyone can get where they’re going safely.

High above downtown Hazard, Mother of Good Counsel Catholic Church sits on a hillside overlooking the community it has served for more than a century. The church’s location tells a story of resilience. After the catastrophic flood of 1927 devastated much of the city below, Catholic leaders chose high ground, establishing a home for the parish dedicated to serving Eastern Kentucky. 

This summer, the church made another decision to further its resiliency into the future. 

A rooftop covered in 142 new solar panels is dramatically lowering energy costs at Mother of Good Counsel, to the tune of $12,500 per year. These savings will support its community partnerships and outreach programs largely centered around food ministry, whether it’s stocking their weekly emergency food pantry, providing fresh food deliveries for local families, or sustaining Christmas gifts for children in need. 

The project reflects the same spirit that has guided the parish for generations: caring wisely for both people and resources so that its mission can endure for years to come.  

A History of Service in Hazard 

In 1913, there was no Catholic church in Perry County. A small number of Catholic families, many of them stone masons who had come to the mountains to build coal mines, gathered in homes for Mass when Father James Massa traveled from Letcher County once a month to minister to them.  

After the historic flood of 1927, Bishop Francis Howard purchased a small five-room cottage on a hill overlooking downtown Hazard. The cottage became Saint Mary Chapel, serving as both a church and a priest’s residence. In the years that followed, parishioners purchased additional land and, despite the economic hardships of the Great Depression, worked toward building a permanent church. In 1939, Mother of Good Counsel was dedicated, named for Mary under the title Mater Boni Consilii, or “Mother of Good Counsel.”  

Benedictine Sisters who arrived in Hazard in 1947 helped establish Mount Mary Hospital on the campus, improving access to healthcare across the region. They also launched a kindergarten program that eventually became Mother of Good Counsel School. The parish later supported religious education programs, hospice care, community outreach efforts, and the Little Flower Free Clinic, which continues serving residents today and has spun off outside of the church. 

In 2000, Mother of Good Counsel began hosting a popular annual International Dinner and in 2019 a beloved pig roast fundraiser that draws people from across the region. Today, volunteers operate an emergency food pantry on Thursdays and Fridays, sponsor Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) shares through North Fork Local Food, and partner with other nonprofits to expand assistance efforts. They also provide Christmas gifts for about 35 children through the Ready to Work program. 

Stewardship for the Next Generation 

For Mother of Good Counsel, stewardship is woven into the parish’s history and in the wider Catholic practice in the region. As the Appalachian bishops wrote in their landmark 1975 pastoral letter, “The land is the Appalachian people’s basic resource and should be held in trust for future generations.” 

Just as earlier generations invested in hospitals, schools, healthcare ministries, and social outreach programs, today’s parish leaders are investing in the long-term sustainability of the region’s small Catholic churches. Following Pope Francis’ 2015 call in Laudato Si’ to care for our earth, together, the Diocese of Lexington and churches across the region began looking for ways to reduce energy use in the churches.

“Throughout his papacy, Pope Francis called the Church to respond to the environmental crisis with urgent and decisive action,” said Josh Van Cleef, Director of the Office of Peace and Justice for the Diocese of Lexington. “His encyclical letter on caring for God’s creation, Laudato Si’, states ‘technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels needs to be progressively replaced without delay.’ Reinforcing the call of his predecessor, more recently Pope Leo XIV has stated, ‘Now is the time to follow words with deeds.’ Catholic communities across the diocese, like Mother of Good Counsel, are responding to this call with concrete, faith-filled action. “

Mountain Association’s Role

Through a partnership with the Mountain Association’s Energy and Lending Teams, we are working with the Diocese and churches across Eastern Kentucky help identify opportunities to lower operating expenses and provide low-interest financing as needed through our solar loans. 

At Mother of Good Counsel, our team provided technical assistance and facilitated the solar energy installation this summer, completed by Appalachian EnergyWorks based out of the Red River Gorge. 

“When organizations lower their energy costs, they create more room in their budgets for the work that matters most: serving their community,” said Josh Bills, Mountain Association Senior Energy Analyst. 

Before the solar installation, the church’s electric bill had risen to approximately $1,600 a month. After the system was installed, the parish’s first bill dropped to about $70. The solar array is expected to save approximately $12,500 annually.

Energy use at Mother of Good Counsel before and after solar

“Solar takes some of the burden off local parishes to raise money,” said Lori Helfrich, the Mother of Good Counsel parish life director. “There’s always something that needs attention, whether it’s maintenance projects, building repairs, or supporting ministries. These savings make it much easier to keep up with those needs while continuing to serve the community.” 

For more than 100 years, Mother of Good Counsel has adapted while remaining rooted in its founding values. From worship services in living rooms to healthcare initiatives, educational programs, food ministries, and now renewable energy, the parish continues to find new ways to serve. 

The post Stewardship in the Mountains: How Solar Savings Support Mother of Good Counsel’s Mission  appeared first on Mountain Association.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Naama Blonder to talk about the book she wrote (with Misha Bereznyak), “Building Charm: A Hyper Practical Guide to Developing Outstanding New Neighborhoods.” We chat about the book’s focus on human scale and how it radically rethinks street design.

This is not for the faint of heart.

Now, you know the Talking Headways drill:

• Listen to the podcast by clicking on the player below.
• Read the full transcript by clicking here.
• Or read an edited excerpt below the player to get the gist.

Edited segment:

Jeff Wood: This is a transportation book, and this is a radical book, and you guys buried the lede with the book cover and the title being about “charm.”

But really it’s about rethinking the functional classification system of roads and basically the street hierarchies to form a place that is more people-oriented. And this blew my mind because I’ve been in this space for 20 years. I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about transit-oriented development over many, many years. And I’ve just never quite put my finger on, like you have, why the neighborhoods that we are building now can’t quite match up to the places that everybody loves. And your thinking about buildings and stuff is great.

But it comes down to the basic foundations of the street, and I found that fascinating. I was kinda yelling at the book, “This is amazing. This is something different. This is something we don’t hear about a lot.”

Naama Blonder: OK, here’s the truth. First of all, it’s our first book. Not a day goes by with me not thinking, “Was it the right title?” …. We wanted to make this book bigger and greater and we wanted the title of the book to be the prize.

What is the prize of the book? We first named the book, “Dense and Charming.” I did English as my second language, and I didn’t know that “dense” means an idiot or stupid. And then someone told us, “Uh, I don’t think that’s a good title.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? That’s a great title, ‘Dense and Charming.'” And he’s like, “No, ‘dense’ means ‘stupid.'” And I was like, “Oh, OK. So maybe I do need to change the title.” We wanted the title to be the prize with it, with this, like the outcome, a, a positive result.

And when you say it’s about streets, I agree with you, because at the end of the day, I also need to translate this to clients. What does it actually mean? And it means that I need to go to your municipal team and tell them that their engineering standards need to be revised. And today’s standards are that the most intimate residential street is 20 meters wide. That’s very wide. We don’t need that width for our most-intimate residential streets.

So a lot of it comes down to that. It’s not just about streets, but it is how we overly accommodated car convenience over people. And I think we have five decades that we need to correct now because we inherited that, and we have not questioned the status quo.

Jeff Wood: I didn’t mean to like rag on the book because I do think there is something to be said about the wording that you can get into more people’s heads. But if you’re thinking at it from my perspective — deep in the weeds — there’s something to be said about how this is a radical transportation book. Ultimately what you’re doing is breaking down what “human scale” means in a building format, and putting that into a plan.

But it is going to be hard because of all the things that you mentioned: Service access, car access, the size of streets, etc. One of the interesting things that you talked about in here is, like, trying to get pedestrian-oriented streets, and then saying, “Well, maybe you don’t have to have them on all streets. You could just say that they’re the open space, and then make them the walkable street that you want them to be because then you don’t have to deal with all the standards.”

So you’re pushing back against something that’s very deeply ingrained, but it needs to be pushed back against because we can’t just focus on these two-ton vehicles that take up 250 square feet of space for one person. A people-orientation is what makes these neighborhoods charming. It’s what makes you love going to old parts of a city. I live in San Francisco in the center part of the city. My house was built in 1892. It was before cars even existed. And I love it. It’s amazing, and it creates those social ties that you talk about in the book.

I know my shopkeepers. I know the people around me. I know all of my neighbors. I know goes on on my street, and I think that’s kind of the thing that we, as a profession, are missing out of our designs is, like, creating that people-oriented center, and it starts with the street grid or the street network as you all have imagined it.

Naama Blonder: Thank you. Was there a question?

Jeff Wood: This is a conversation

Naama Blonder: I’m kidding, but, you know, I did receive one email that says, “Your book is wonderful, each and every part of it, but the transportation part of it where you are not radical enough.” Listen, we call this hyper-practical — not practical, but the hyper-practical. We wanted this to be something implementable. We’re not talking about the day when we live car-free or self-driving cars will be around. No, we want you to have a tool to design with it.

In the book, we are proposing a system of streets, the service streets and the people streets, and we’re saying right now we’re treating a new development. There’s this term complete streets, which is another term for let’s have everything under one street, the car, and the parking, and the bike lane, and the transit, and the sidewalk.

And here, you end up with just something between 38 and 45 meter right of way, which is again 135 feet, right? Let’s just put or load everything that we need on every street. And let’s have a hierarchy of streets. In our plans, we use the through street, the mews or the car-light street, and the pedestrian street.

And even the car-light street we design it much narrower than most standards require. And yes, I have only positive experience with municipalities when I approach them. Did I work with every municipality in North America? No, but the ones that I have worked with were very positively accepting what we are trying to do, and agree to work with us, because the standards are a recommendation.

They’re a starting point. They’re not the zoning necessarily that you need to change. With that, we are trying to offer a menu of streets. Yes, we accommodating the car. Yes, there are services. Yes, you need an Amazon delivery. Yes, you need fire safety, and you need emergency, and you need, here, not in San Francisco, you need snowplowing machines and we, we accommodate all of that.

But right now, we are overly accommodating that with, a lot of asphalt. And, uh, going back to why focusing on charm, when we are spending so much land on asphalt, we’re not using the land for the things that we need, which is more housing right now.

Compostable plastics are touted as a greener alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastics that can linger in the environment for centuries. But there’s a catch. Degradable plastics only break down in the right conditions typically found in a composting facility. The tons of compostable plastic that ends up in oceans can still float around for decades and threaten marine life and ecosystems.

Researchers have found a way for plastics to break down much faster in the ocean. They embedded tiny amounts of plastic-degrading enzymes in compostable polyester plastics. The enzyme-containing polyesters completely degraded in a relatively short time period even in microbe-scarce environments.

The method works at all depths from coastal waters to the deep open sea, the researchers report in the journal Nature.

There are many types of biodegradable plastics in commercial use today. These plastics are designed to decompose completely by microorganisms at certain temperatures and humidities. Those conditions are found in industrial composting facilities and with more care in backyard compost settings. But out in cold ocean water, biodegradable plastics can persist for a long time.

The research team from Japan took four types of compostable plastic—PBS, PBSA, PCL, and PBAT—and melted them. The heat of the melt would destroy plastic-degrading enzymes. So the researchers made freeze-dried forms of Candida antarctica lipase B and Humicola insolens cutinase enzymes. They added the enzymes to the melts at very low concentrations ranging from 0.1–3% by weight.

 

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Then the researchers shaped the materials into films and microbeads. After sealing the samples in a polyethylene meshes, they placed the meshes at various locations off the coast of Tokyo, ranging in water depths from 2–6 m to 5,503 m. They monitored the samples over periods ranging from one month to 18 months.

At 757 m, PBS, PBSA and PCL films containing 3% cutinase nearly completely disappeared within five months. Films of those three plastics containing only 0.1 wt% cutinase lost 27.4%, 100% and 85.5% of their mass, respectively, in 1 month. But PBAT was more resistant, losing just over 12% under the same conditions.

Enzyme-free samples barely degraded. And enzyme-containing plastics also showed moderate biodegradation on the cold floor of the deepest test site. Meanwhile, microbeads embedded with 0.1 wt% cutinase formed visible pores and cracks within 2 weeks in coastal seawater.

“These results demonstrate enzyme embedding as a material-level strategy to enhance the environmental degradability of the compostable polyesters…across diverse marine environments without compromising their mechanical properties,” the researchers write.

Source: QiuYuan Huang et al. Enzyme-embedded polyesters for accelerated biodegradation in the deep sea. Nature, 2026.

©Anthropocene Magazine

AI offers far fewer benefits than the industry touts, leaning on what AI supposedly will do rather than what it can do now.

Dubbed the “implementation COP,” COP31 will center on moving the global climate agenda from pledges to real-world progress. But will it become just another hollow chapter in global climate diplomacy?

A constitution for the Earth doesn't require an entirely new institutional principle; we already know the decisive building blocks.

• President Trump announced that the EPA is “terminating” the Biden administration’s limits on methane produced by oil and gas drilling — the largest source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. (Associated Press)
• From makeup and appliances to highways and subdivisions, the fossil fuel industry in the mid-20th century used advertising and PR campaigns to create demand for its products. It’s an outdated vision of the American Dream that the Trump administration still shares today. (Grist)
• Noah Kaufmann says that economists are being shortsighted by recommending policies that cut greenhouse gas emissions the most cheaply. Such incremental changes achieve diminishing returns, even when added up, and ignore long-term effects. (The Argument)
• Billy Cooney dismantles Randal O’Toole’s argument that public transit should not be subsidized because people prefer to drive by pointing out that people probably wouldn’t prefer to drive if driving weren’t so massively subsidized. (Flaneurbanist)
• ClimatePlan put together a playbook for California’s next governor to boost funding for transit and encourage more walkable, bikeable communities.
• The Detroit city council’s Green Task Force is advocating for complete streets. (Bridge Detroit)
• The Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority started construction on its first “arterial rapid transit” line, which the agency is touting as being faster and cheaper to build than bus rapid transit, utilizing signal priority rather than dedicated lanes. (Urbanize Atlanta)
• Seattle’s Sound Transit is considering allowing dogs on buses and trains. (KING)
• New interactive kiosks at Philadelphia bikeshare docks will help users navigate the city. (NBC 10)
• Before the advent of automobiles, Houston prioritized sidewalks over carriageways. (What Are Streets For?)
• Bloomberg Originals produced a video explaining how Hong Kong transit turns a profit using land-value capture.

A proposed federal surveillance ban may threaten speed and red light camera programs across the country, which some advocates say would force cities to pick between privacy and street safety.

Following months of rumors, The Flock-Off Act was officially introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) in September, with promises to withdraw all federal funds from any municipality that contracts with a surveillance camera operator. And that’s not just limited to the notorious technology company for which the bill is named, which has deployed an estimated 116,000 motion-triggered cameras in neighborhoods across the US.

Massie claims that his bill prohibits the surveillance of “law-abiding citizens”, not drivers running red lights or speeding. But some advocates fear that the bill’s wide-reaching language about automatic cameras intended to facilitate the “recording of a motor vehicle” would effectively ban all automated traffic enforcement nationwide.

I’ll soon be sponsoring a bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock (and other style) cameras to surveil law abiding citizens. pic.twitter.com/FGzE69psxS

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) July 25, 2026

Of course, many street safety advocates do want lawmakers to do more to confront Flock — even if they don’t agree with sweeping bans on other, less-intrusive camera technology.

Since its founding in 2017, the company has faced criticism for offering a near-constant stream of motion-activated footage to law enforcement, tracking every car it sees using the vehicle’s license plate, model, and even characteristics like paint scratches or dents. And people outside cars aren’t immune from its gaze, either.

“A pedestrian, bicyclist, or animal who happens to be caught in the frame of a Flock camera can be swept up in the vast and unregulated Flock surveillance network,” wrote the Oregon ACLU.

Speed and red light cameras, by contrast, are only triggered to record when drivers speed, run red lights, or otherwise break roadway laws. In San Francisco, excessive speeding is down 84 percent where cameras are installed.

Even where collisions do still occur, those lower speeds translate into much better outcomes for victims. Pedestrians struck at 40 miles per hour have an 85 percent chance of dying, but at 20 miles per hour, the probability decreases to five percent.

Automated red light enforcement has a similarly positive impact. Cameras are shown to decrease red-light running overall, and reduce injury crashes by 20 percent.

Advocates like McKenzie Ortiz, who creates content about street safety under the Instagram account @pedestrianpride, say it’d be a shame if Massie’s bill makes those types of programs illegal.

“I feel like the red light and speed cameras caught a stray,” she said.

Dr. Kelcie Ralph, a researcher at Rutgers University who studies traffic enforcement, was also disappointed by the bill’s conflation of two vastly different types of camera programs.

“It’s such a same,” she said. “[Automated traffic enforcement] is so … different than what’s happening with [Flock].”

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Some advocates suspect that the benefits of automated enforcement can extend even farther for Black Americans — and that Massie’s bill would be doubly harmful for their communities.

Police are more likely to use force against Black drivers during traffic stops. Ortiz, a Black woman herself, supports using speed and red light cameras as a substitute for road patrols.

“We already feel the effects of over-policing,” she said. “If it meant less police officers on our streets … but still the level of enforcement that could encourage people to drive more safely, that would be a sacrifice that I would be willing to make.”

Even Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Ca.), a co-sponsor of the Flock-Off Act, acknowledged how automated traffic enforcement differs from Flock.

“I’m for speed and red light cameras,” he said in an interview with Streetsblog. “You don’t have speed and red light cameras being abused by police officers.”

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Khanna did not clarify what, if any, steps he was taking to exempt street safety programs from the bill. He did suggest that he viewed the legislation as a temporary measure to address Flock in the immediate term.

“What we’re saying is to shut off that federal funding until we get some privacy regulation,” he added.

If the Flock-Off Act is indeed a pause, its sponsors are not alone in wanting one.

Kelsey Huse, is a Memphis, Tennessee-based organizer behind the Instagram account @MemphisUrbanism. She generally supports automated traffic enforcement, but feels that a moratorium on camera surveillance is necessary to address the Flock problem.

“It’s just a messy topic right now,” she said.

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Huse’s concerns aren’t limited to Flock, either, since speed and red light cameras have room to grow, too. For starters, cities must address the financial incentives driving how programs are managed.

Despite Rep. Khanna’s contention that police don’t “abuse” automated enforcement, reports show that some police departments do site cameras on speed-inducing roads specifically to raise the traffic fine revenues on which their budgets over-rely. A 2024 Fines and Fees Justice Center analysis even argued that “the expansion of automated traffic enforcement simply creates a new and more effective way to fine exponentially more people.”

Huse has the same concern.

“Is our goal to reduce traffic violence events, or is our goal to make money off of tickets?” she added.

Ralph, who led a 2022 study on improving automated enforcement programs, says that the concern is valid — and has implications for safety outcomes, too. Amongst them is a scenario in which a speed camera operator, receiving a share of the revenue of each ticket issued, places cameras where they are likely to catch a maximum number of violations, not where they are most needed.

“When a speed limit shifts from 35 to 25 [miles per hour], you post up there, you get a lot of drivers in the transition — but maybe there are no crashes there,” she said.

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Some advocates also cite the potential for racial discrimination as a key drawback of automated systems. A 2022 study found that automated enforcement cameras in Chicago issued a disproportionate number of tickets in the city’s majority-Black neighborhoods.

Though the study could not identify the race of the drivers themselves, the findings raise significant concerns about a technology touted as a fair alternative to traditional enforcement.

The Flock-Off Act, though, doesn’t attempt to address any of those concerns, instead banning them outright.

Ralph says that’s a shame, considering how many levers cities have available to them to ensure cameras are used fairly. For example cities could invest ticket money back into infrastructure to improve street safety — preferably close to the camera’s location, so no one gets hurt there again.

“How you spend the [revenue from tickets] matters a ton,” she said.

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Ralph also encouraged cities and towns to reconsider how they use monetary fines as a punishment.

“There’s a real concern that [automated traffic enforcement] is a tool for the … pipeline from poverty to prison,” she said. Rather than creating a flat-rate for fines, she suggests a smaller fee for a first infraction, to mitigate excessive punishment of drivers who are unlikely to be repeat offenders.

On the other hand, some drivers may not be dissuaded by a ticket at all.

After repeat violations, Ralph suggests that governments consider non-monetary punishments like mandatory speed governors. One 2022 study from New Zealand found the devices to be incredibly effective at limiting recurring speeding, providing some hope for the strategy’s viability in the US.

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If nothing else, advocates say the architects of automated enforcement programs need to learn from Flock’s mistakes and warn communities that they’re about to installed – while offering education about their potential to save lives.

Shawn Joseph, a transit advocate and software engineer in Irvine, California, says Flock cameras cropped up in his neighborhood with minimal to no public input.

“People want the technology in their communities to be a choice,” Joseph said.

With proper enforcement, catching dangerous drivers in the act can deter the behavior in the future. But Joseph, Huse, Ortiz and Ralph all emphasized that designing streets for lower speeds can deter bad driving before it happens. Narrowing 10 to 13 foot travel lanes to nine feet, for instance, can reduce crashes on higher-speed roads.

“We should really start with how we’re designing our streets,” Ortiz said. “Make it uncomfortable to speed and uncomfortable to run red lights.”

Preventative design can even mitigate concerns of surveillance by taking punishment out of the equation altogether.

If you are worried about privacy, just drive the speed limit,” Ralph stated.

New York City residents are riding commuter trains at record rates thanks to cheaper tickets that let people pay less to ride between stations inside city limits, MTA officials said on Wednesday.

Ridership on the Long Island Rail Road and the Metro-North Railroad has nearly rebounded to pre-pandemic numbers — largely thanks to disproportionate ridership growth in New York City, whose residents have taken advantage of $5 off-peak and $7 peak “City Tickets” for intracity travel that the MTA expanded from a weekend-only deal in 2022.

Ridership at city stations has grown a flabbergasting 180 percent compared to just four years ago, according to figures revealed at Wednesday’s MTA board member.

Commuter rails have become a popular ride for New Yorkers in the last few years.

“Ridership at stations within New York City is outpacing ridership growth at at non-New York City stations,” said MTA Chief Customer Officer Shanifah Rieara. “That growth has exploded since the expansion of the weekday City Ticket back in 2022.”

LIRR President Rob Free said the agency’s move to attract more riders has paid off handsomely. This year, 29 percent of all ticket sales on the commuter railroads were City Tickets, and ridership has increased by 478 percent at the Laurelton station in Queens and 503 percent at the Melrose station in the Bronx.

“In looking at ways to increase ridership, address transit deserts and provide more affordable travel options for New York City residents, we uncovered a new market for commuter rail service,” Free said on Wednesday. “From 2022 to 2025 [City Ticket] ticket sales grew a whopping 361 percent for the commuter railroads.

The MTA introduced the City Ticket in 2003 as a $4.50 weekend-only discount ride for intracity travel on the LIRR and Metro-North. Advocates and elected officials spent the following years pushing the MTA to make even better use of its commuter rail stations inside the five boroughs, many of which are service neighborhoods with limited or zero subway service. In 2022, the agency began offering a $5 off-peak version of the ticket; in 2023, it introduced a $7 peak option, Gov. Kathy Hochul endorsed the idea as a way to encourage post-pandemic transit ridership.

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Advocates who pushed the MTA to open the city to more potential riders celebrated the good news as proof that giving people options can increase ridership.

“The success of the City Ticket shows that people want to be able to choose their mode of choice or whatever is easiest for them to make their trip shorter, and that riding the railroad is often that that way of travel,” said Lisa Daglian, the executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA. “We recommended this dozens of years ago, and are thrilled that it’s going stronger than ever.”

Daglian and the PCAC previously pushed the MTA to more widely adopt a different type of discount commuter rail ride that they called the Freedom Ticket. The proposed arrangement would have paired a weekly City Ticket with a seven-day MetroCard. While the MetroCard has gone the way of the Laserdisc, Daglian still hoped the MTA would explore more ways to take advantage of the clear interest in the City Ticket.

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“We continue to encourage the MTA to look at a City Ticket weekly, a City Ticket monthly, a City Ticket with some kind of transfer to transit. Give the people what they want. If it works, make it better. And it works, so we can make it even better. Let’s figure out how to do that, now’s the time,” she said.

MTA leadership wouldn’t commit to adding a subway transfer to the City Ticket, but said they were open to exploring ways to grow the program and introduce even more discounts.

“We will always consider them as part of our consideration of strategies to keep the system affordable,” said MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber. “We’re always looking at new ideas in the appropriate time frame.”