In most cities in the United States, streets are for cars, not for people, but that may be changing. In California, Sacramento’s R Street restaurant strip is open for business, but closed to vehicle traffic to allow for more room to breathe for outdoor diners. In the city of Davis, shade tents are popping up throughout the downtown area on weekends, to make outdoor dining more comfortable in the summer sun. This is a part of an international trend, as evidenced by the list of more than 50 U.S. cities with street closures on the Covid Mobility Works website and in the open catalogue of street changes inspired by the pandemic. These street closures, also called “slow streets” or (our preferred term) “open streets,” reflect a worldwide movement to reclaim city streets from cars for people to sit, dine, or travel on foot and bicycle. It is unclear whether these open streets experiments are a passing fad or whether they offer a window into the urbanist dream of a future without cars.

These changes are new and growing organically, so it takes some work to understand the total scope so far. As more data is assembled we can piece together whether open streets benefit (or challenge) community resilience.

In some ways, these open streets emulate the short-term repurposing of roadways common for marathons, musical events, art walks, and, ironically, even for car shows. But the pandemic-induced open streets movement has energized supporters of more permanent car-free areas while also stoking resentment from critics who point to a lack of community engagement in the decision-making process. This hurried strategy is unsurprising, given the circumstances, but if the streets stay open, efforts to ensure community buy-in will mean more successful progress towards an urban space that serves everyone.

Open streets can be found in major cities around the world. They are a permanent fixture in Paris’ downtown pedestrian-only district. Bogatá opens streets every Sunday for Ciclovia, which is a community celebration of biking. Seattle has made their street closures permanent, and other cities, like New York City, are considering following. More permanent open streets can be an opportunity for community building. While encouraging biking and walking in downtown areas, they can also affect attitudes on car reliance. Research from our UC Davis colleague Susan Handy shows that reducing car dependence can save money, save time spent in traffic, reduce emissions, and increase health-promoting activities like walking and biking.

However, as with many efforts at reducing car traffic, there have been moments of trial and error in the pandemic-related open streets efforts. The Untokening Project questioned whether city planners considered the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), people with disabilities, and the unhoused in developing open streets. Some community members called into question who can capture the benefits of open streets. New York City was criticized for its police presence, ostensibly to enforce social distancing rules, when they opened streets to pedestrians and bikes. This reportedly made many people of color feel like they couldn’t appreciate the open streets, given the long history of racially biased harassment from police in that city. Closures that were not well planned have reportedly also cut-off routes for essential workers, who tend to be disproportionately low-income, while providing more space for wealthy people who can work from home.

Additional concerns have been raised that pandemic street closures were offering an opportunity to expedite planners’ wish lists, without engaging with residents to get buy-in. Changes to streetscapes should be led by residents and business owners working with planners, but this community empowerment-model of planning is difficult to accomplish during a pandemic. We remain optimistic, as many permanent positive changes have begun with a temporary change–putting up cones to test out a pedestrian only zone, for example.

Yet as the lockdowns linger, cities may need to work harder to reach community members. They might consider building in clear sunset periods for these experiments. These sunsets can always be revisited if the changes work for the full community of residents and users. Aaron Paley is president and co-founder of Community Arts Resources (CARS), a group that canvasses neighborhoods and talks with each business owner before closing streets for the annual CicLAvia in Los Angeles, which he founded. Paley emphasized the need for choosing sites where there are businesses that can benefit from open streets, such as small shops and restaurants.

Community engagement is essential for ensuring that open streets are inclusive, and that they avoid being created by and for predominantly white and wealthy people. Cities should also evaluate the results of these projects and ensure that they are delivering solutions that community members want. This could include engaging community members on each block opened and assessing how it is working across various groups. Cities will also need to better identify criteria for deciding if streets should be returned to car use, and when this transition should occur. This process needs to be clearly communicated to people on the closed streets and to the broader public.

Current social-distancing efforts allow for the possibility to experiment with how we use our public spaces. Car-free streets offer exciting opportunities for fun, safe, and efficient reuse of our public right-of-ways, but cities need to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past and ensure these spaces are truly for everyone.

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Mollie Cohen D’Agostino is Policy Director for the 3 Revolutions Future Mobility Program at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis

Kelly Fleming is Energy and Transportation Policy Analyst at the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment, and the Economy at UC Davis

Austin Brown is Executive Director of the Policy Institute for Energy, Environment, and the Economy at UC Davis

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UPDATED: September 4, 2020

Bicycling Justice

A few weeks ago, in this blog, I wrote about the sense of freedom that bicycling evokes as one of the reasons why bicycling has grown in popularity since the COVID pandemic. But bicycling does not equate to freedom for everyone, as events in Los Angeles tragically brought home this week.

Dijon Kizee, a young Black man, was riding his bicycle when he was stopped by deputies of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for “violations of the vehicle code.” The events that ensued ended with Kizee dead of multiple gunshots in his back.

That an act as trivially illegal as bicycling against rather than with traffic—an act that I observe in my own community on a daily basis—can lead to death at the hands of law enforcement is unfathomable to me. But the events of this summer demonstrate that it is indeed all too possible for those whose skin is darker than mine.

The discriminatory policing of Black people on our streets, whether they are walking, bicycling, or driving, denies them the freedom of movement that we white people take for granted as our right. My colleagues Sarah McCullough and Jesus Barajas are doing important work in support of mobility justice. Please take a look at recent examples of Sarah’s work here, here, and here, and at Jesus’s website. Stay tuned for perspectives from them in this space in the future.

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One small silver lining in the world of transportation amidst this tragic COVID pandemic is a resurgence in bicycling. News outlets are reporting booming sales of bicycles, with bike shops scrambling to keep up with demand. “They’re buying bikes like toilet paper,” one industry expert was quoted. My husband experienced this problem firsthand last week in Davis, California, when he decided he had to have a new mountain bike. The local shop still had some inventory, but they had 40 bikes to prepare for pick-up before they could get to his! Demand has not looked like this since the bike boom of the early 1970s.

The current pedal-powered resurgence is taking two forms.

The first form is recreational. Bicycling is a good source of exercise at a time when gyms are closed. Research shows that bicycling is good for mental health as well as physical health. It is also a good form of recreation–a socially distanced way to get out of the house. A recent paper of mine identifies the various aspects that people enjoy about bicycling, from the feeling of freedom, to a means of escape, to a sense of movement–all things which are perhaps more important in these times than ever before.

The second form is utilitarian. The earliest reports of an increase in bicycling came in the first days of the pandemic, when people were still traveling to work but were reluctant to use transit systems. New York saw a 52% increase in bicycle counts on bridges into Manhattan in early March compared to a year ago, and ridership has continued to grow. Persistent health concerns with traveling via transit systems coupled with significant cutbacks in transit service mean that bicycling will remain an important option as more of us return to work.

These two forms are interdependent. The resurgence in recreational bicycling could help to fuel a more widespread and long-lasting increase in utilitarian bicycling as a substitute for transit and potentially for driving. Recreational bicycling builds comfort with and confidence in bicycling, as well as liking of biking. Our research shows that these factors are key predictors of bicycling as a mode of transportation.

Better bicycling infrastructure would further encourage this welcome trend. As our studies as well as those done by other researchers have found, most bicyclists feel substantially more comfortable when they are protected from traffic through either a separate bike path or a buffered bike lane. And that’s another silver lining of this pandemic: Cities across the U.S. and throughout the world have been repurposing their street space to provide a safer and more appealing environment for bicyclists and pedestrians. Oakland, California, for one, announced in April that it would close 74 miles of streets to through traffic; actual closures total a much-lower-but-still-impressive 21 miles as of mid-July.

A sustained increase in utilitarian bicycling will require a sustained commitment to funding bicycle-friendly infrastructure. California’s State Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan, adopted in 2017, set an ambitious goal to double bicycling by 2020. To achieve this goal, the state allocates $110 million each year to the Active Transportation Program, which funds local bicycle and pedestrian projects. But this amount is dwarfed by state budget allocations of $5 billion per year for building highway projects, plus $2.2 billion for designing these projects, and an additional $2.1 billion for maintaining existing highways. Compare California’s commitment to Ireland’s recently announced commitment to spend 20% of its transportation budget on walking and bicycling. Just imagine what our cities could do with a doubling of funding for bicycle infrastructure.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the big new development in bicycling was bike-share systems, which have proliferated in cities around the world in the last decade and attracted people who would not otherwise have been bicycling. Our study in Sacramento shows that these systems can help normalize bicycling as a mode of transportation across the population. Although the pandemic and the industry retrenchment it triggered have hit some systems hard, many are now rebounding. Parisians, for example, are now using the city’s Velib system in record numbers. Portland is planning to triple its bike-share fleet in September. Supporting these bike-sharing systems–financially and/or institutionally–is another way that cities can promote bicycle use.

The resurgence of bicycling during the pandemic is just one example of how this flexible, self-propelled mode of transportation has the potential to contribute to the resiliency of our cities. Time and time again following natural disasters, bicycling and walking have remained viable when other modes of transportation have proved risky or unreliable. During the Camp Fire in Northern California in November 2018, for example, several residents of Paradise got on bicycles to bypass traffic jams to escape the flames, according to a UC Davis survey. Bicycles are also economically resilient, in that they cost a tiny fraction of what it takes to own and operate a car. A newly established “transportation library” in upstate New York will be loaning out bikes salvaged from defunct JUMP bike-share systems–for free! Programs like this can help to get bikes into the hands of those who can benefit from them the most.

The bicycle has sometimes been called “the world’s greatest invention.” In recent months, we have perhaps come to appreciate its value more than ever. Now is the perfect time to put in place the policies and programs that will enable us to take full advantage of its potential as an essential component of our transportation systems, past, present, and future.

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Susan Handy is the Director of the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at UC Davis. Her research focuses on the relationships between transportation and land use, particularly the impact of land use on travel behavior, and on strategies for reducing automobile dependence.

The path to zero-carbon transportation may be cheaper than you think. It need not cost trillions nor even billions. And it could even be “free” to taxpayers.

Electric and fuel cell vehicles are the primary strategy for achieving near zero-carbon transportation. But these zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) will cost more than gasoline and diesel vehicles for a number of years, and also require extra costs for building charging and hydrogen stations. Eventually these vehicles will be cost competitive, but until then who pays for these additional costs: companies, consumers, or taxpayers?

Over the last few years, research teams at UC Davis—and others around the world—have modeled the costs of transitioning to a zero-carbon transportation system by 2050. While some studies project significant and at times prohibitive costs, our studies show that the overall costs are small. In fact, depending on circumstances (price of oil, cost of maintenance, etc.) and speed of innovation, this transition may cost taxpayers and consumers very little. How is this possible? The primary reason is that technology has advanced faster and costs have declined more rapidly than expected. For example, in 2010, battery costs were around $1,000/kWh, and as recently as 2014 the International Energy Agency used $500/kWh to project future battery costs. Now, battery costs are projected to drop to $100/kWh by 2025 or sooner. As time goes on, estimates of future cost tend to decline due to faster-than-expected technology innovations, faster learning, and scale economies. It is quite possible that with additional advances, costs could dip well below the $100/kWh mark.

Our own work reflects this trend. In 2016, we published a paper that estimated the additional cost for achieving high shares of zero emission light-duty vehicles—beyond the cost of owning and operating gasoline vehicles. In the United States, that additional cost, between 2020 and 2032, would be about $250 billion above a business-as-usual scenario (one without many ZEVs). Since California accounts for about 10% of the country’s population and travel, this translates to roughly a $25 billion transition cost for the state. After 2032, in that analysis, there would be no additional costs, since the cost of owning and operating electric vehicles would be about the same as conventional gasoline vehicles.

In 2019, our group published a paper that expanded the analysis from just light-duty vehicles to also include buses and trucks for California. We found that the additional costs would fall to zero beginning in 2030, two years earlier than previously expected. The total transition cost from 2020 through 2030 also decreased for California, from $25 to $14 billion. Our latest update of this analysis (conducted earlier this year and as yet unpublished) projects even lower transition costs—just $7 billion between 2020 and 2028, hitting zero another two years earlier. So, a 2016 estimate of an additional $25 billion for electrifying just light-duty vehicles in California fell to $14 billion for all cars, trucks, and buses in 2019, and is now projected to be only $7 billion. Equally important, after 2030, the costs of owning and operating ZEVs are projected to be lower than gasoline and diesel cars and trucks. The savings, from 2030 to 2045 could reach $100 billion. Note that all of these estimates were for an 80% reduction in CO2 from transportation by 2050; for a 100% CO2 reduction scenario, things will have to happen faster, and costs through 2030 could be significantly higher. We are investigating that question in our current work.­

These downward revised estimates are mostly due to steady reductions in the estimated cost of battery and fuel cell vehicles. These cost reductions are likely to be even greater, since we did not include the lower vehicle maintenance costs for ZEVs. Our future studies will incorporate maintenance costs.

These additional costs, even if now projected to be lower than before, may still seem significant. But in terms of overall spending on vehicles and fuels, they are not. The $7 billion incremental costs we currently estimate between 2020 and 2030 for California are less than 1% of the costs residents of the state will otherwise be paying over those 10 years for gasoline and diesel vehicles and fuels.

This $7 billion cost (roughly $70 billion for the US) need not fall on the back of taxpayers. The cost could be shouldered by those buying legacy gasoline and diesel vehicles—with either a tax or a feebate style program where buyers of new gas guzzlers pay a fee, and buyers of ZEVs get a rebate (as already exists in several European countries). Some cost could also be borne by those oil and automotive companies that lag in making investments, for instance if the government  imposes aggressive greenhouse gas performance standards on fuels and vehicles and allows those companies exceeding the standards to sell the credits to those that lag. Indeed, this is already the practice with national CAFE-style standards, and with ZEV sales requirements and low carbon fuel standards in California. Through these mechanisms, some car companies are subsidizing Tesla, and oil companies are subsidizing clean electricity.

These cost estimates and forecasts of electric vehicles might seem optimistic. But they apparently are not for Wall Street investors. Tesla is now more highly valued than Toyota, GM, Ford, and FiatChrysler combined, despite losing money and selling only about 1/50th as many vehicles. And Nikola, a new company hoping to sell fuel cell and battery electric trucks—is now valued greater than General Motors and Ford. It looks like an electric future is in our future—at little cost to society and perhaps none to taxpayers.

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Lew Fulton is Director of the Sustainable Freight Research Center and the Energy Futures Research Program at ITS-Davis. He helps lead a range of research activities around new vehicle technologies and new fuels, and how these can gain rapid acceptance in the market.

Dan Sperling is Founding Director of the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies, the world’s leading university center on sustainable transportation. He also serves on the California Air Resources Board, overseeing policies and regulations on climate change, low carbon fuels and vehicles, and sustainable cities.