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Advising, educating, and advocating for mobility innovation, automated driving, and AI

Progress is good but our information ecosystem suggests otherwise. The headline from this Bloomberg article almost sounds like good news: "US Driving and Congestion Rates Are Higher Than Ever: After a reprieve from car traffic in 2020, vehicle miles traveled have now surpassed pre-pandemic levels in almost every metro area." Cities are back! People are traveling downtown again, more than they were pre-pandemic! And that's a bad thing, apparently. The article describes this as "a worrying trend for advocates working to reform transportation, the largest contributor to US carbon emissions". Further, the study that shows this increase "does not give us the data we need to validate whether VMT and VMT per capita is correlated with metropolitan economic growth". This story is only the latest example of how, in a clickbait economy, everything must be framed as bad news. During the pandemic, we talked incessantly about the urban doom loop: no one would come to cities anymore! Businesses would close and property values decline, spurring even less travel, and so on. It seems we avoided that danger! And if people are choosing to come downtown by car, well then, we need to get to work to make them WANT to come by other means: better transit, more bike lanes, the works. But at least now we know they DO want what we're selling, namely urban life! Next week's issue of my newsletter, Changing Lanes (https://lnkd.in/g-wVHyRJ) will be about progress, and why it's important. You might think that's so obvious as to not be worth saying... but articles like this one from Bloomberg help to illustrate why progress needs defenders.

US Driving and Congestion Rates Are Higher Than Ever

US Driving and Congestion Rates Are Higher Than Ever

bloomberg.com

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