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Thursday’s Headlines Are Electric

Big smoke-spewing tractor-trailers are bad. Bike-shares and e-scooters are ... also bad? High-speed rail and fixing sidewalks, however, are good.

By Blake Aued

12:00 AM EST on January 13, 2022

A MACK Granite truck has some of the worst blind-spot radii of any vehicle in U.S. cities today. A direct vision standard could change how it’s designed forever. Image Surgenor Truck

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Emissions from heavy-duty trucks have an outsized impact on the climate and human health. Electrifying those fleets will pay big dividends. (New York Times)
Renting e-bikes and scooters may not be as climate-friendly as you thought, because most of the time you’d be walking or taking transit instead. (Anthropocene Magazine)
Donald Shoup has an easy way to improve sidewalks: require property owners to fix them when they sell. (City Lab)
Smaller cities in poorer regions may have a hard time crafting the eye-catching proposals needed to get a competitive grant from the federal infrastructure bill. (Governing)
Hate flying? High-speed rail is the answer. (The Urbanist)
Too much parking is contributing to deadly heat waves that have killed hundreds of people in Pacific Northwest cities. (Sightline)
MinnPost praises Minneapolis for recognizing that Hennepin Avenue has too much parking and proposing to remove it for bike and bus lanes and wider sidewalks.
The Washington state senate’s new transportation chair says he’s too busy to bike or take or transit, but he is a fan of high-speed rail and Vision Zero. (The Stranger)
This California DOT official envisions an integrated statewide transit system with contactless payment and better information to plan your trip. (Intelligent Transport)
The executive director of the Atlanta BeltLine says the 22-mile bike and pedestrian loop is making tremendous progress. (Saporta Report)
Two-thirds of parking tickets given to city employees in Houston go to police officers. Yet despite parking in bike lanes all the time, none of them have ever been cited for it. (Chronicle)
Charleston has chosen Lime to be its new bike-share vendor. (WCSC)
Drive-throughs in Baton Rouge are now required to serve not just drivers, but people on foot, on bikes and in wheelchairs, too. (The Advocate)
London Mayor Sadiq Khan is warning of the health risks of driving as car use returns to nearly pre-pandemic levels while walking, biking and especially transit use lag behind. (The Guardian)
Three-fourths of Australians want to bike but are intimidated by the lack of safe paths. (The Conversation)
Milan, one of the most congested cities on the planet and most polluted in Italy, is building 750 kilometers of bike lanes by 2035. (Momentum)

Blake Aued

Blake Aued has been doing Streetsblog's daily national news digest for years. He's also an Atlanta Braves fan, which enrages his editor in New York.

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