Cincinnati tried to do something about it. A citizens’ committee spent 1922 gathering signatures to put an ordinance on the ballot requiring every automobile operating inside the city to carry a mechanical governor physically limiting it to 25 miles per hour. Car dealers and the auto clubs organized against it. The measure lost 92,427 to 14,012 (87%-13%). Cincinnati recorded 103 traffic deaths the year of the vote, 157 by 1929, and 201 by 1934.

Nationally, 17,870 people died on the roads in 1923, at 21 deaths per 100 million miles driven. The 2024 rate was 1.19 per 100 million miles driven, against 39,254 people killed.

Connecticut took a different route in 1925, requiring drivers to prove after a crash that they could pay for the damages they had caused. Massachusetts went further in 1927, requiring proof of insurance as a prerequisite to registration. The required minimum coverage was $5,000 for the death or injury of one person, and $10,000 for everyone hurt in a single crash. A speed governor restricts how a car gets driven. A financial responsibility law restricts nothing and asks only that a driver be able to pay for what they break.

That is the version that stuck. Every state except New Hampshire now requires some form of it, and it is the oldest surviving answer American law gave to the automobile. It has also been allowed to rot. The $5,000 that Massachusetts required in 1927 would be ~$96,000 in today’s money. Massachusetts requires $25,000 today, raised from $20,000 in July 2025 after ~40 years at the lower figure.

California set its minimum at $15,000 per person and $30,000 per crash in 1967. That $15,000 is worth ~$150,000 now, but it remained unchanged for 58 years. Senate Bill 1107, effective January 1, 2025, raised it to $30,000 per person, and writes in a further increase to $50,000 on January 1, 2035. While ~2.5 million people died on American roads between 1967 and 2024, California did not touch the number once. The increase that finally arrived, celebrated as the first in more than half a century, landed at 1/5th of the 1967 value.

What a road death costs is not a matter of opinion. NHTSA published the accounting in The Economic and Societal Impact of Motor Vehicle Crashes: the average traffic fatality carries $1.6 million in discounted lifetime economic cost in 2019 dollars, ~$2 million today. That figure is lost market and household productivity, medical care, emergency services, legal and court costs, and property damage. It is not a philosophical valuation of a human being, it is a bill. Crashes in total cost $340 billion in 2019, 1.6% of GDP.

The same report tracks who pays it. People not directly involved in the crash cover roughly 3/4 of all crash costs, $261 billion in 2019, through their own insurance premiums, their taxes, and congestion. Public revenues alone cover ~9%, $30 billion, which NHTSA converts to $230 in added taxes per American household per year. Every household in the country is paying an annual bill for crashes it had nothing to do with.

The gap does not get collected later. A driver who kills someone owes the whole judgment, and the policy limit binds only the insurer, but past the policy limit there is usually nothing left to take. Home equity, retirement accounts, and wages are either untouchable or capped by state exemption law. An ordinary negligent driving judgment then discharges in bankruptcy, with a carve-out at 11 U.S.C. §523(a)(9) for death or injury caused by drunk driving. In practice the insurer pays $30,000, the lawyer runs an asset check, and the case ends. A person can take a life, settle for 2% of the economic damage, keep the house, and walk.

It gets worse below the minimum. The Insurance Research Council put 15.4% of US drivers uninsured in 2023 and another 18% underinsured, 33.4% combined. One in three US drivers cannot pay for the harm they are statistically likely to do. What they cannot pay lands on the victim’s own uninsured motorist coverage, which is sold only as part of an auto policy. A pedestrian or cyclist who does not own a car cannot buy it at any price, and is left with health insurance, which pays for the hospital and nothing else. Even the ambulance ride from the crash site is an out-of-network charge 51% of the time.

The reason the number stays low is that once the state requires buying insurance, the minimum it picks determines two things:

1. who can afford to drive at all
2. how many drivers carry insurance, since some share of drivers priced out of a policy keep driving uninsured and unregistered instead

So the floor gets set by affordability politics rather than by the size of the bill, and once set it is left alone, because raising it means raising insurance prices.

California’s 2035 minimum coverage hike has already been priced. Quadrant Information Services rate filings, published by CarInsurance.com in March 2026, put a California liability-only policy at today’s minimum at $1,019 a year, and the same policy raised to $50,000 per injured person at $1,120. The higher quote also carries more property damage coverage than California requires, so it prices the generous version of the change. The difference is $101 a year. Going from $30,000 to $50,000 per person is the increase the Legislature already voted for and scheduled 10 years out, and it costs ~$8 a month to all (insured) California drivers.

Europe treats the same question as settled. The EU motor insurance directive requires every member state to mandate at least €1,300,000 of coverage per injured person, ~$1.5 million, or €6,450,000 per crash regardless of how many people were hurt, ~$7.4 million, revised every 5 years against the European consumer price index automatically. The United Kingdom requires unlimited coverage for personal injury. California requires 2% of the European per-person floor, Pennsylvania 1%, and Florida nothing at all.

California came close to fixing the drift. SB 1107 as introduced in 2022 would have raised the limits 4% every 5 years starting in 2028. That clause did not survive negotiations with the Personal Insurance Federation of California. What passed was a fixed step-up to $50,000 in 2035, which guarantees the same erosion starts again the day it takes effect.

The strongest technical objection to inflation-indexing is expiring. Until recently an insurer could not observe how riskily any given driver actually drove, so a higher mandate raised every California premium without sorting dangerous drivers from safe ones. In-car dongles that track jerky driving, crash event recorders, and driver monitoring systems now let an insurer observe behavior directly and price it.

What actually gets priced by insurers is the open question. An insurer will use new per-person driving data to reduce its own losses, and nothing in the current arrangement makes them price the risk that a heavy, fast vehicle poses to people outside it, because the loss the insurer faces is capped at a figure the Legislature picked. Any member of the California Legislature can introduce a bill to tie the mandatory coverage minimum to inflation before 2035. If they fail to do so then it restarts the same 58-year slide over again, and the households paying $230 a year for other people’s crashes keep paying it.

A study published this week in Transportation Research Part A puts a price on un-priced driving costs: crashes, air pollution, climate damage, noise, and the land taken up by roads and parking.²

Academic papers like this rarely punch through to a mainstream audience without their findings being re-stated for a wider audience, so I have done so through 3 visualizations below.

Private vs. public costs

Averaged across the world’s cars, those public costs come to $0.89/mile. Road construction is part of that figure, and fuel taxes and registration fees already cover about half of state and local road spending,³ so if those are excluded then what remains is $0.76/mile.

Crash costs dominate

While drivers pay for their cars, the “socialized” costs of driving are dominated by the costs from crashes. The study values road deaths and injuries worldwide at $3.98 trillion/year, which is twice the paper’s estimated driving costs from air pollution, climate damage, and noise altogether.⁴

Or visualized another way:

The authors of the paper argue for shifting these costs that the public are forced to pay back onto the driver’s bill through congestion pricing, road use charges based on distance and vehicle weight, and an end to subsidized parking.

Feel free to share these data visualizations as you see fit.

A note on “land costs”: the paper massively undervalues the land under American roads.

It takes its road-land figure from a US study by Guerra, Duranton, and Ma, then scales it down to the world’s average income. That US study puts the land under urban roads alone at $206-$370 billion a year, 5-9x what this study’s method assigns to every road in the country.

Correcting that one line adds $150 billion to $300 billion to the US total above, before counting parking, rural roads, or any rise in land prices since 2016.

What that land is worth is a subject for a separate post.

Footnotes:

I still remember using an electric scooter for the first time and feeling a strong sense of guilt and physical laziness as I effortlessly glided over the concrete.

With a few hours of distance from that first scooter ride it dawned on me that I was feeling a guilt and laziness that I didn’t feel when driving a car.

Specifically, it felt like I was violating several norms at once:

• “the roadway is for cars”
• “the bikelane is for bikes”
• “effortlessly transporting yourself outside of a car is lazy”

These norms are both self-imposed and societally imposed.

Societally: drivers find a small, twitchy and fast e-scooter rider to violate their norms of understanding around what to expect in the roadway. It also may offend their norm at having to share roadway space with non-cars that are smaller and slower than they are used to traveling.

My own mind associated the sensation of being outside in public on the open roadway–air flowing through my (helmeted) hair–with a bicycle ride. A key difference being that a bicycle ride involves my leg muscles and exertion powering me to my destination. As bicycling was my reference experience, I could not help but judge e-scootering as physically lazy.

Feeling guilt is entirely self-imposed though! Nobody was standing next to me saying “you’re cheating”. In fact I encountered very few people on that first scooter ride at all!

And ultimately: why is riding a 2-wheel motorized device to your destination any more lazy than driving a 4-wheel motorized vehicle to your destination?

The Cargo Bike

With time I set aside e-scootering as a transportation choice for me.

I found the small wheels and standing position to be too physically dangerous for my tastes, and I also found the trips I would use an e-scooter for were eliminating the desirable physical exercise I would got from walking or bicycling to the same destination.

However I did not sit idly on walking and biking as I used to: I picked up a cargo bike, loaned to me by a friend.

Taking the cargo bike out for rides introduced another norm violation:

It is so big! But in spacial terms it is maybe 1/4 the footprint of the average of a car.

It is so heavy! But in terms of weight is maybe 100 pounds vs. a 4,000 pound average weight of a car.

I felt self-conscious as I navigated the streets a little less nimbly in the wide canoe than I would ordinarily with my “ordinary” bicycle.

I feared being a “space hog” on the road and that drivers would be more likely to menace me as I competed with them for more roadway space.

I also competed with them for parking space.

The Car

Both the e-scooter and the cargo bike triggered in me a feeling of discomfort based on a deviation from a norm–but it was not based on the vehicles’ absolute size, speed, or impact.

That seems backwards: operating actually big and dangerous vehicles is the invisible norm, and the stuff that’s small and safe is uncomfortable because it’s rare.

What would it take to make driving feel out-of-the-norm?

• Have drivers regularly walk or bike the same corridors they drive.

• Chalk or cone off one car-parking-space area and show how many bikes, or how many square feet of café seating, fit in it

• Surface the alternative at the moment of driving: “this would be a 9-minute walk”. Quantifying converts breaks the norm.
• Price what’s currently free or flat-rate: metered parking, congestion pricing. Buffet pricing gets ignored; the same way an open bar produces more drinking vs. a per-drink tab.
• Narrow lanes, elevate crosswalks, add street trees close to the curb–change the physical environment so the vehicle stops matching its surroundings. Driver behavior “improves” because the street no longer signals a car here is prioritized.
• Name the norm violation: “crash” not “accident”, “subsidized parking” not “free parking”, “car storage” instead of “parking.” “Manspreading” succeeded at naming a spatial behavior and course-correcting through shaming.

The exercise for me is very real, it isn’t a drivers’ training program, it’s my own commute.

From an absolute time perspective, the bike ride to the train station is faster than the drive.

At stake in these fights is an inherited premise: that a car is how an American arrives at adulthood, independence, and economic mobility. Yet fewer people are claiming it: in 1983 nearly half of 16-year-olds held a license, but by 2022 it was about a quarter. 18-year-olds holding licenses fell from 80% to 60% over the same span.

The vehicles have kept growing anyway. The federal government has weighed and measured every new car, SUV, and pickup sold in America, model year by model year, since 1975.¹ The first 6 years are the only stretch in the last 50 when American vehicles got smaller.

The average new vehicle sold in the United States now weighs 4,441 pounds — the heaviest figure in the 50-year record.

Horsepower traces the same shape:²

An average new vehicle sold in the USA today makes 264 horsepower, nearly double the 1975 figure and 159% above the 1981 trough. The average new vehicle reaches 60 mph in 7.3 seconds, down from 15.6 in 1980.³ On this chart, falling is the bad direction if you care about pedestrian or bicyclist safety:

A faster car is a car whose driver has less time to humanize others they may or may not see beyond their windshield.

“Footprint” is the rectangle you’d get by drawing lines between the four spots where a car’s tires touch the pavement: front tire to back tire, left tire to right tire. The EPA sets fuel economy standards against that rectangle, and a bigger one means more permissible gas guzzling. Growing the car size is a strategy for American car companies to remain compliant with a backwards policy:

The average American vehicle footprint is up 6% since the EPA started tracking it in 2008.⁴ Between 2003 and 2023 the average new vehicle grew about 5% longer and 6% wider, and the space displacement has spread across every parking stall, turning radius, and sightline in the country.

The footprint increase has directly escalated parking congestion in my city of residence (San Mateo, CA).

Drivers struck and killed 7,080 people walking in the United States in 2024, 72% more than in 2009, when pedestrian deaths were at their lowest.

Fifty years of federal data show a fleet that has gained mass, power, and land use. While drivers have gained acceleration they have also lost critical seconds they need to react to pedestrians and bicyclists in the roadway, i.e. their neighbors.

I have critically left out vehicle miles traveled: how far is all this metal actually moving and how much per capita? I will revisit that in a subsequent blogpost.

In the meantime, people trying to walk, bicycle, or ride the bus in America have never been more outgunned in the “war on cars” since the consumer automobile revolution in the 1920s.

The contested territory in the war is a bike lane here, a bus lane there, and a few parking spaces.

Where things are headed is up in the air: is there any reform on the horizon that will curb these metrics? Is their a ceiling to vehicle size?

These questions are playing out at local, state and federal levels of government–and your voice is needed: as a voter and a consumer.

We of course took the bus over the water, to maximize leisure and 360 views!

Miami’s 26 bus route ranges in frequency from every 10 minutes at peak to hourly late at night.

In Key Biscayne we walked through affluent neighborhoods–here is a snapshot of the Zillow Zestimate map:

This snapshot is a bit exaggerated, as available condos in Key Biscayne bring the median home price down a bit lower to a cool $1.6M.

Walking meant no sidewalks:

Proof-of-life: a parent & child bike ride–something I had not seen in Miami before:

Tragically, we saw this bench with flowers and knew something was off:

This bench marks the site of a fatal collison between a 12-year old e-bike rider and a 66-year old bicycle rider.

The two riders collided: while the 12-year old was wearing a helmet the 66-year old was not, and the 66-year old died from the crash.

I learned from reading about the crash that Key Biscayne (the municipality) pushed through an e-bike ban and attempted but failed to push through a state-wide ban.

A few personal learnings (or reminders, rather):

• motorized mobility is fatally dangerous
• practice safe-riding practices that are within your control:
  • wear a helmet
  • ride a manageable speed
  • improve visibility with reflective clothing and lights
• adolescent motor vehicle access is fatally dangerous to others, and enforcement has failed to eliminate this danger

The visual experience of walking around Key Biscayne’s neighborhoods (besides the humidity experience–which was very high) meant a ton of golfcarts:

You can tell that these golfcarts do not enable car free living, but perhaps they replace one of a household’s car portfolio:

Golfcarts are so embraced by the community that infrastructure & signage accommodates the motorized vehicles:

Some illustrative golfcart parking photos:

And quite a few households had visibly more than one golfcart:

Parking etiquette is all over the place, but it does mean less of the key is paved over:

You know it is an exclusive (exclusionary?) community when they call their municipality a “village”–more folksy-sounding than than “town” or “city”!

Aspirational naming:

Before we wrapped up our visit we picked up some baked goods before timing the bus pickup perfectly:

The bus stop was crowded:

Return ride:

Enjoy your own transit-enabled adventures!

Beginning at the train station, trying out the Burley Travoy trailer as camping gear portage:

It was not such a long bike ride from the train station to meet up my friends at the southern span of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Our destination was Kirby Cove, a park located just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

Hit some congestion:

I took a break before reaching the Golden Gate visitor center where us bike campers were congregating, before making our way over the bridge:

After a little waiting (I was the first to reach the meeting point) we headed out across the bridge:

Beginning the descent down to the campground:

Campground before bedtime:

And the next morning, my final photos captured before my mad rush to make an early train home before the Monday workday began:

Forever grateful for beautiful experiences like this.

If you are considering giving bicycle-enabled camping a go, take this as a sign to give it a try!

I have done so a number of times to visit with family.

The city’s population is ~7,000 according to the 2020 census.

Notably, the population balloons by 77% to ~12,000 during the daytime, due to an absence of housing inventory and a migratory workforce.

These facts and figures matter to me as I am fascinated at the functioning of an extremely wealthy community as it manages a labor force via transportation infrastructure in the absence of housing infrastructure.

This toxic pattern is familiar to me from my native San Francisco Bay Area!

We flew with our son for the first time. It went shockingly easily, helped along by a nearly empty direct flight:

We landed the morning of the 4th of July. The free in-town buses were swamped and hard to board with our luggage. This is the same bus network that carries the workforce, but on a holiday it chokes on tourists.

We made the parade, and watched an immense number of people arrive by bicycle:

I noted a Bafang-motor fat-tire e-bike for sale, with no price and no phone number posted:

On my way to work remotely at the library, I passed a book for sale at the pharmacy cash register:

It’s called Escape Home, about an Austrian Jew who fled the Nazis and, like my family, started over after the war, though this one settled in Aspen. He escaped occupied France on foot and bicycle, reunited with his children after eight years apart, and became a high school language teacher in the young ski town. I didn’t expect to find a version of my own family’s history for sale in Aspen.

At the library the wifi turned out too flaky to work on, so I abandoned the laptop and browsed the stacks instead.

I picked up a book on the transcontinental railroad build-out, focused on the rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago. I hadn’t known the build-out ran straight through the slavery fight, or that it decided which of the two cities won:

The dollars required to build a railroad line west from Saint Louis or Chicago came in large measure from New England money lenders, all of whom were certain that slavery was wrong… Many of the same affluent families had provided money to build early railroads across the Midwest, but after the Kansas-Nebraska firestorm in 1854, they redirected their investments from slaveholding Missouri and metropolitan Saint Louis to Chicago in the slavery-free state of Illinois.

…As late as 1850, Saint Louis still handled twice as much wheat and flour as Chicago. But within five years, Chicago had surpassed Saint Louis.

This is the pattern that interests me. The railroad came first and the growth followed it–Chicago grew because it got the tracks, not the other way around. Aspen has the transportation but won’t build the housing to match, so that growth never arrives.

The book was good on how expensive surveying and planning a route could be:

One passage tied Chicago back to my own San Francisco, along the route that’s now Amtrak’s California Zephyr:

My wife and I had talked about taking the Zephyr out here instead of flying. It’s about 24 hours from Oakland to Glenwood Springs, then an hour by bus to Aspen. We decided against it, for the time and the unknowns of doing it with a baby.

We did, though, take the bus from Aspen to Glenwood Springs, and caught a glimpse of their Amtrak station:

The ride runs from mountains to plains to river:

It wasn’t free, but it was comfortable and cost $3.75 for an adult.

The free in-town buses that choke on tourists and the smooth $3.75 regional coach are two halves of a whole: the thing that lets Aspen work without housing its workers.

The town controls the rest of its space just as tightly. Parking is heavily regulated, monitored, and enforced:

Golf carts get no quarter:

I noticed some street sleeping, which is technically illegal and happens anyway:

A town that meters its curbs this precisely has been far less precise about housing the people who fill its jobs.

Downtown has placemaking touches. Some resourceful lounge benches:

And some decorative, movable bollards:

I got out running on the trails, only to encounter a black bear:

And once I got my hands on a bicycle, a little riding:

Heading home, I liked seeing the barely-secured bikes parked right in front of the departures entrance:

I recognized most of Aspen from home: the imported workforce, the buses carrying it in and out, the housing that never gets built.

The mountains were the unfamiliar part.

Until next time, Aspen!

This has opened my eyes in many ways, but I want to jot down some thoughts about family mobility while they are fresh.

Moving around as a parent with a child is a form of physical disability.

I did encounter this fantastic YouTube video a month or so before our baby was born, and it was inspiring:

You can of course forego a car ride home from wherever your baby delivered (I was born in my parents’ home!).

I had heard that it is illegal to leave the hospital without a carseat, but it turns out that is not correct.

In fact a Minnesota state legislator & her newborn were biked home by their husband recently in a cargo bike (Instagram video).

But fast forwarding from the moment of delivery to being back home with infant, wife and myself–I endeavored to discover all the ways to avoid driving:

• Walking is key
  • with stroller or carrier (of which there are quite a few variants).
  • strollers are incredible shopping carts: they can carry your required diaper-changing gear, bottled milk/formula, toys, and groceries.
  • a big caveat for post-partum mothers, whether they deliver vaginally or via C-section, mobility is impaired and you don’t want to push things too fast.
  • I actually run when it is just me and my son–this roughly doubles my walking time and I have gone on 10+ mile runs with him.
• Public transit is a much more difficult space to navigate:
  • your newborn will not be fully vaccinated for a wide range of diseases until the 2-6 month mark–and in the first 2 months your infant is at acute risk of respiratory diseases that would cause hospitalization. This is a reasonable risk to mitigate by not using public transit until respiratory immunizations are done at the 2-month mark.
  • most buses and many trains have (1) no at-grade boarding and (2) appropriate space for a stroller, so most parents are understandably deterred from utilizing them. This can of course be avoided by using a carrier, but learning to use a carrier with a newborn who has poor neck strength can be easily overwhelming
  • “What will you do if their diaper is soiled?” – this fear turned out to be totally overblown. In the absolute worst case you can de-board the bus, change the diaper at the bus stop, and board the next bus! Turns out that infants’ feces are not smelly either.
• Bicycling is do-able, but traffic risks take on a whole new level of stakes:
  • I tested out the Urban Arrow bucket bike with a carseat adapter, but didn’t have quite the budget to buy the bike–I would recommend it though!
  • much more accessible in the US is a bicycle trailer (Burley, Thule, etc.)–while their product descriptions deter usage below 12 months, this is for legal liability purposes and concerns about neck strength–but realistically these trailers have great suspension + inflated tires so they are a real option and parents of infants in Europe use them.
• Driving is the default for the 95% of North Americans
  • This is just reality – it is what most North American communities are built for, and depressingly it translates to a highly asocial and lonely experience for new parents–something that my household’s lifestyles miraculously is innoculated from, though it takes real sacrifice to make it logistically possible (e.g. be more selective about where you choose to reside and what services/businesses you patronize). This is a sacrifice that most North American new parents cannot hold space for making.

Some illustrative photos from these first happy months of parenthood–enjoy! I’d love to hear from you about your experiences/advice.

The fundamentals–walking with a carrier:

Running! Get a stroller with pneumatic tires:

One of many bus rides with a carrier:

Napping on the bus is no problem:

My wife or I can comfortably bring the stroller on our local bus at off-peak hours:

Train rides (with stroller):

Train rides via Amtrak (inter-city rail):

Stroller as shopping cart:

The first bike ride, with the Urban Arrow + carseat:

Here is an improvised setup I saw at the local mall:

Hope you enjoyed! I expect to share more parenting thoughts as they come…!

Lately I have tended towards staying & investing.

A few years ago I reclaimed citizenship in Austria, the country my Jewish grandparents fled. A second citizenship made me stop and ask what I was signing up for.

A citizen doesn’t only draw protection from a state; a citizen pays into it. Austria has compulsory military service for men 18-35 years old. Where you hold citizenship decides whose roads and schools and pensions your life’s work funds.

A country’s immigration law dictates whether it wants more feet. An aging economy with a shrinking tax base looks for people to bring in. Letting people in is how a place stays financially solvent.

The national version of “voting with your feet” is abstract to most Americans. ~5,000 Americans renounced their citizenship in 2025. With a population of ~320,000,000 citizens that is an effective annual rate of ~0.0016%.

Most taxes I pay as an American are income taxes, and they go to the federal government. But learning about municipal finance made the concept of loyalty more concrete for me: sales tax, property tax, permit fees. That money goes somewhere, and the somewhere includes institutions a few miles from my house. Where I shop, who I hire, whether I rent or buy are small recurring votes for somebody down the street.

California makes this weirder than it needs to be. Under Prop 13, two neighbors in identical houses can owe wildly different property taxes based on nothing but who bought longer ago – which quietly rewards sitting still.

The smallest version of this is the household. You pool your money and your hours and keep choosing to pay into it. My wife and I picked each other, and picked this city, and then a baby arrived who got no vote in any of it. Most days staying in our current residence presents as the best option. But pricing childcare in our area is easily $3,000 a month and that is a sobering amount. Notably, every local childcare provider we’ve met is a first-generation immigrant. The people who would allow us to keep working and still raise this kid are the same people a louder version of our country spends its energy trying to keep out. Letting people in isn’t limited to new feet arriving from abroad; those new feet are a big part of why anyone here gets to grow a family at all.

Being somewhere on purpose is a kind of loyalty too, and loyalty does add value to a place. Much of Melody Warnick’s This Is Where You Belong touches on how to add value, and that where you land matters far less than what you do once you’re there.

But Prop 13 is also a preview of where this goes wrong. The people who’ve been present longest tend to feel they’ve earned disproportionate say, and a lot of them spend it on keeping new feet out. That’s the Homevoter Hypothesis: local politics run by people safeguarding what’s been built against the people who’d like to stay too.

Which sends me back to the passport, and to the half of the phrase I skipped. Voting with your feet usually means leaving, and my grandparents did leave: they fled Austria on the cusp of the Holocaust. I’m here three generations later making a wordy case for staying put.

But my grandparents didn’t run to America. The United States said no. Bolivia, however, said yes. And so my father was born in Bolivia, a poorer country that had every excuse to call itself full and didn’t. My grandmother and father reached the US only years later, after my grandfather died and my grandmother re-married an American. My grandmother and father were let in as a wife and stepson, not as refugees. Our country likes to tell this kind of story as though it were the hero of it. For my family, the USA was a closed door.

This wasn’t bad luck or lost paperwork. In July 1938, a few months after Austria was annexed by the Nazis and its Jews were suddenly stripped of everything, 32 countries sent delegates to Évian, France, to decide what to do about the people trying to get out. One after another they gave sympathetic speeches and then explained why they couldn’t take anyone; the United States, which had called the conference, was among them. Only the Dominican Republic agreed to take more refugees in. The Nazi government read the outcome out loud and correctly: the world had just admitted it didn’t want these people either.

So I know what the closed door looks like. Presence is a vote; so is deciding who gets to be present at all. None of this was ever only about showing up and adding what you can. It’s about not being the one standing in the door – the way this country stood in it once, against the people it now says it would have saved.

But it was a really great read–and I read it cover-to-cover, which is very rare for me in my adulthood.

The book is called “This is Where You Belong” by Melody Warnick, and its contents fiercely resonated with me as I read it when my then-girlfriend and I were entering COVID-19 lockdown together.

COVID triggered a lot of lifestyle changes globally, and for our household it triggered deep reflections on where we should live. It seems like back then we would turn to each other every day and discuss where we should move to in this new era of work-from-anywhere.

I read this book as its title seemed to hit on the root question of our COVID-era conversations:

“Freed of labor market requirements, what makes a place somewhere where the two of us would choose to set roots together as a family?”

Let me give a brief run down of the book’s contents, and then I’ll leap to the conclusions I derived from reading it:

The introduction shares that Americans move more times in their lives than any other country in the world, and this physical mobility and willingness to uproot social ties to go rebuild new ones is a cultural strength and weakness.

Each chapter prescribes a specific exercise to the reader about how to explore a place and to develop a feeling of “belonging” in that place.

While I had picked up the book to help triage the list of cities that we could move to I came to realize that these exercises are not limited to picking a permanent residence. These are activities to help you fully embrace a place that you are visiting at any stage of life. I’ve practiced these exercises in small towns I’ve visited for weddings, far flung work trips, and visiting family members where they live around the US and world.

Some of these exercises:

• Walk more – moving at the speed of a human opens you to immensely more social opportunities than driving.
• Share a meal with a neighbor – you’d be shocked at how happily willing your neighbors are to do this, whether potluck, picnic or dining out.
• Patronize local businesses - even if you don’t like their inventory or prices at first glance, spending money locally pays staggering dividends for your community’s wellbeing. This includes employing workers who live near you and generating local tax revenues that directly fund your community’s public amenities. Alongside driving less, this is arguably this single greatest power you have as an individual to improve your community.
• Volunteer – it’s a great way to meet your neighbors and deepen shared values, while also being an informal opportunity to get to know other people’s lives.
• Get involved with politics – this one can be very toxic, but familiarizing yourself with the political challenges your community faces deepens your connection with the place’s social fabric.
• Read the local news – new business openings/closures, local sports, crime blotter, it all serves to educate you about things that impact your life more than national or international news might. You can read my own letters to the local editor here.
• Learn local history – this shared context about history helps you understand why things are the way they are, what’s been tried before, and what might be possible!

I am entirely reciting these from memory, so I may have missed a few or even gotten them wrong.

Reading the book did not result in a radical relocation for us. My then-girlfriend/now-wife and I did move but it was about 3 miles away, and we have stayed put for 5 yearssince then, putting us near a decade in the same city.

While I picked the book to help choose where to live it is not about that at all. It does not matter where you are, these exercises will deepen your connection with a place no matter your relationship with it or how much time you have spent there.

Some videos I recorded with my neighbors, inspired by the book:

How to Meet Your Neighbor

A neighbor on my street handed a flyer to the house next door. It was a one-page printout, calling for neighbors to write down details of speeding vehicles on our street (make, model, time, direction), which she planned to compile and bring to the city.

I appreciated the intent.

I called the number on the flyer and invited her over. I expected to talk strategy with her about how to persuade the city to make our street safer.

She stayed for an hour at my home. We spent less than 10 minutes talking traffic. I offered her coffee and tea. She declined both. She had not really come to talk about cars on the street.

She came to tell me three things.

One: people my age want her to die so her house comes onto the market and frees up housing supply.

Two: her taxes keep going up.

Three: city services — street cleaning, storm drain vacuuming, sewer lateral coverage — have steadily disappeared.

She is in her seventies. She lives with her husband in a 3,700 square foot residence. The Zestimate on the house is $2.2 million. Prop 13, California’s 1978 law capping assessments, has her assessed at $740,000 — she is paying property taxes on a basis that has not meaningfully moved since the Carter administration.

The traffic survey was not about traffic.

Each thing she told me is wrong, in a direction.

I do not know a single person under forty who wants her dead. I know dozens who would like to be able to live within walking distance of their aging parents and cannot financially make it work. She fears the inverse of what’s happening.

Her taxes have, by law, gone up no more than 2% a year for as long as she has owned this house. Everyone in San Mateo who has bought a home since the 1980s pays a larger share of their property’s actual value in tax than she does. She is in the privileged tax bracket. The system she is complaining about is the one protecting her.

City services have in fact eroded. She is half-right about this one — she is wrong about why. Cities have shed services in large part because their property tax base is choked by the same 1978 law that locks her assessment at $740,000. The missing street cleaning is downstream of the missing tax revenue from her own house. The services she remembers were funded by the tax structure Prop 13 dismantled — the dismantling she has spent decades defending.

She is not lying. She believes all three things. They are wrong in different directions, but they point the same way. Each identifies people like me, or change, or the future, as the threat. Each absolves the regulatory and tax regime she has been defending for forty years of any responsibility for what she is feeling.

But she is not wrong that something is wrong.

The street outside her house has cars going faster than she can safely walk across. The walk to the grocery store requires crossing some long crosswalks in the path of speeding cars. The neighborhood is mostly empty during the day. The corner store closed over a decade ago. Her friends are dying. The people who would visit her live somewhere else, because the somewhere else is what they could afford.

Each of these has a fix. Slower streets. Denser zoning so a corner store could survive. Missing-middle housing so people who would visit her could afford to live nearby. Frequent transit. Safe bike infrastructure. Reduced parking minimums. Every fix is on the agenda at the planning commission. Every fix is opposed by people like her. Sometimes by her specifically.

Homeowners in her position have spent decades opposing the changes that would have made life in their 70s easier. She inherited Prop 13; she has spent forty years defending it. Lower density meant no corner store. Single-family-only zoning meant the next generation could not afford to stay. Wide streets meant fast cars. Free parking meant transit could never compete. Each fight sounded reasonable, in isolation. Stacked up together they built the cell she is now alone inside.

I think she has been handed the wrong story about why her life feels diminished, and the people handing her that story — neighbors, Nextdoor, local media — are unanimous in the wrong direction. The young people she is afraid of want her to thrive in her house for another twenty years. They would also like to be allowed to live nearby.

She killed an hour of my afternoon. She did not want coffee. She wanted to tell me three things, and what she actually told me was the worldview of some — not all, but enough — of my older neighbors. It is a worldview in which the people next door are the threat, the tax system is rigged against them, and the city is failing them. None of it is true. All of it is felt.

They vote.

She thinks we want her dead. We want her to have neighbors.

I get around by walking, biking, taking the train & bus.

It’s been long enough that the change has stopped being a “transition”, and it’s now an opportunity to inventory what actually changed.

Health

Driving to work was literally killing me, in 2 ways.

The first was the absence of exercise. 2 hours a day in a seated, motionless box, eating into the same hours I might otherwise have spent moving. Walking and biking didn’t replace exercise as a separate hobby; they were the trip. The errand became the workout.

The second was more direct. I was a danger to myself and to other people. I drove on highways and arterial streets where most of the drivers around me were looking at addictive phones, and where I was doing the same in my worst moments. The American driver knows, somewhere underneath the radio and the climate control, that the situation in our roadways is not under control.

5 years out, my resting heart rate is lower. I sleep better. I wake up looking forward to the bike ride to a meeting rather than dreading the drive to it. My whole mental health floor moved up — not because anything specific got better, but because the low-grade dread was removed.

Wealth

I’ve written about the financial side before. The short version: it costs a lot to drive a car, and the savings get larger the more attention you’ve paid to the line items most drivers stop noticing.

The smaller thing I’ll add here: I haven’t paid for parking in 5 years.

Reconnecting with nature

I knew the seasons in an abstract way before — daylight savings, holidays, pumpkin spice latte on the menu.

Walking and biking gives seasons back to you. You have to know what clothing to wear. You know when the rain is about to start because I can read the sky again — a skill I had no idea I’d lost until I needed it.

I notice which trees in my neighborhood are flowering, which streets the deer come out on, where the coyotes literally prowl.

This is not nature in some grand wilderness sense. It is just the actual living world that was always around me that I had been driving past.

Reconnecting with community

When I drove, I knew my neighbors the way you know coworkers at another company: by face, by car, by the brief eye contact at the driveway.

“Hello” from a shouting distance and then both of us back into our respective domiciles or cars.

The car is a small acoustic and visual box. You can’t hear anyone outside it; they can’t really see you through the reflective glass; the vehicle does most of the social work of refusing interaction for you.

I had not understood how much “windshield bias” is a real thing — how much harder it is to think of the person you pass as a full human when you are physically sealed off from them and moving at 4x their speed.

The costs

I am not going to pretend the tradeoff is one-sided.

Moving as a family is much, much harder. Carrying my infant son on and off the bus or train comes with serious challenges–and we consume more space with a stroller. Visiting grandparents who live far away, or coordinating an outing with relatives who can’t bike — cars solve for this in a way that my political advocacy for better transit and bike lanes cannot (today).

The disability question is the one I think about most. My body walks and bikes well right now, but none of us are guaranteed that for life. Accident, illness, age will all take it away eventually.

A car-free life works for me because I am able to opt out of cars–for now.

A note on what isn’t “driving”

5 years without driving doesn’t mean 5 years without a motor.

I ride the bus and the train. These are fundamentally different from a car — not because of the engine, but because they are communal. You share the space with strangers, you negotiate it together, and you are not the one steering a 4,000-pound object through a crowd. This is also why I don’t put Uber, Lyft, or Waymo in the same category as transit. A private vehicle that happens to have a stranger driving it — or no one driving it — reproduces all the externalities of car ownership: traffic, road wear, the demand for parking, the spatial logic of car-first streets. Not being the one behind the wheel doesn’t change the system.

I also ride electrically-assisted bikes. My rough line for “humane” micromobility is: under 500 pounds, speed-limited near bicycle speeds, no enclosure.

Weight because the kinetic energy a vehicle delivers in a crash scales with its mass.

Speed because it scales with velocity squared, and because higher speeds shorten the time you and the people around you have to react.

No enclosure because the acoustic and visual seal of a windshield is most of what produces the bias I described above.

Once you’re inside one, you’re driving — whatever the motor.

Moving at human speed

The phrase I keep coming back to is human speed.

There is no sharp line between traveling at a humane and inhumane speed. Ivan Illich claims it’s 15 miles per hour.

I trust you to know which one you’re doing.

5 years of moving at human speed has not made me healthier and happier because bicycling is virtuous or whatever. It has made me healthier and happier because at this speed I am still in the world. I am subject to its weather, its neighbors, its seasons, its small obstacles. The car promises to lift you above all of that. But the problem with that is that it delivers on that promise.

Earlier writing on this theme:

• Why I Don’t Drive
• What I Stopped Thinking About When I Went Car-Free
• Why I Bicycle

While that’s true, there’s a category it doesn’t fully solve which is transporting the awkward and large object.

For most people, those trips that require transporting an odd-shaped object remain “car-shaped” trips.

I call it “the trailer gap”.

I found my bike trailer through a YouTube rabbit hole. A German YouTuber filmed himself bike-camping on a Kwiggle — a tiny folding bike I also own — with a Burley Travoy hitched to the back. It looked absurd yet practical. The next day I bought one off Facebook Marketplace for $75.

The Kwiggle has a non-standard seat post, so the Travoy didn’t attach cleanly. I had other bikes, so I shrugged it off and moved on by hitching it to my e-bike. I realized towing wasn’t especially fatiguing so I mounted it to my regular bike.

The Burley Travoy is a purpose-built for cargo: folding metal frame, bag mounts, and 2 wheels that let it stand like a shopping cart or dolly. My wife uses it that way to haul yoga supplies on foot.

It hooks to the rear seatpost, and it feels more stable than you’d expect even with uneven loads.

The free bench

I was riding past a neighbor’s house and spotted a wooden outdoor bench on the sidewalk with a cardboard “FREE” sign taped to it.

Normally this is a car problem: you note the address, you come back later, the bench is gone. Instead I stopped, unfolded the Travoy, strapped the bench to the frame with a bungee cord, and rode home.

The errand wasn’t planned or requiring an extra trip–and thanks to the trailer I have a new bench at my residence!

Bike trailers convert “I’d need a car for that” to “I wonder if that fits.” And when it does fit it’s a joyous celebration!

Some other illustrative errands with the trailer:

Bags of soil from the Home Depot garden section — the kind that normally require a flatbed cart and a trunk.

Paint cans.

Two furniture boxes from a local furniture store, stacked and bungeed into a precarious but functional arrangement.

A vacuum cleaner, held by a green bungee doing exactly as much work as it looked like it was doing.

“Safe Streets for Everyone” yard signs and an acrylic display stand for a bike advocacy tabling event.

Bringing a kickscooter to help out a friend.

Pizzas for my birthday celebration.

I have even used it as my overnight backpacking rig – with cooking & sleep gear.

The honest limits

The Travoy is not a cargo bike. Its rated capacity is around 60 lbs — which is a lot, but I cannot carry my child to daycare. For that, you want a longtail or a box bike.

Used Travoys show up on Facebook Marketplace regularly, usually in the $75–150 range. New they’re $200-250 – depending on where you live you might try the used market first.

Enjoy!

That speculator was Charles Polhemus.

Polhemus joined the San Francisco–San Jose railroad board in 1860. He had already purchased a tract of San Mateo land anticipating the railroad would have to come through it. In 1862, with Polhemus running railroad construction, he commissioned a surveyor to plat the town of San Mateo at the exact point where the right-of-way crossed the creek. Conveniently, that point was the middle of his own holdings.

The first building near the new tracks was the train station; downtown coalesced around it, precisely where a railroad director happened to own land.

Transit is a real estate business

Transit produces value but doesn’t capture it. A train station turns nearby parcels into front-row seats on the most expensive amenity a city can offer: convenient access to a regional labor market. That value accrues most directly to whoever owns the dirt within walking distance — in the US that’s typically not the transit agency, not the riders, and not the taxpayers who paid for it. Just the landowners.

Once you see this, patterns snap into focus:

• Transit alignment decisions turn into knife fights because the alignment determines who gets rich.
• Stations end up at locations suboptimal for service quality because the people deciding the locations own land.
• Freeways are politically easier to build than rail because they spread their value across millions of car owners, while a transit project concentrates value on a handful of parcels — and concentrated benefits attract concentrated lobbying.

The Polhemus episode is the unvarnished version: one board member capturing the entire uplift because the rules hadn’t yet figured out he shouldn’t. Modern transit planning has procedural guardrails — environmental review, public hearings, competing engineering criteria — but the underlying dynamic is unchanged. Transportation is a real estate business with a transportation department attached.

Who actually benefits from Caltrain in 2026?

164 years later, Caltrain — the operational descendant of the SF&SJ — is staring at a projected $75M annual operating deficit starting in FY 2027. The state has loaned $590M to bridge the gap. The longer-term plan is SB 63, the Connect Bay Area Act, which puts a 14-year sales tax on the November 2026 ballot across five counties to fund regional transit.

A sales tax is regressive. The cost falls disproportionately on households who spend most of their income on taxable goods, and it’s paid by everyone who shops in the affected counties — whether or not they ever ride the train.

The people who benefit most from Caltrain’s continued existence are not the riders. They are the landowners within walking distance of every station. Their land is worth what it’s worth specifically because the train still runs. Killing Caltrain would cost a station-adjacent property owner more than it would cost the median rider. Riders can change modes; land can’t move.

So the proposal is: tax everyone, especially low-income residents, to preserve a service whose primary financial beneficiaries are owners of high-value land near stations.

If you wanted a funding instrument that captured value where the value actually goes, you’d tax land within each station’s catchment — a land value tax, a station-area assessment district, a vacancy tax on transit-adjacent parcels — with rates scaling by distance to the platform. Nobody is proposing this. Sales tax is what’s politically available.

Why I’ll vote yes on SB 63 anyway

I’ll vote yes in November. I ride Caltrain. My family lives within walking distance of a station, and the land we own is worth what it’s worth in part because the train still runs.

It is a small miracle that passenger rail in this form has continued to operate here for 164 years. Most American cities lost their equivalents to the highway era. Ours didn’t, and our community is better for it.

The argument above isn’t that transit shouldn’t be funded. It’s that this particular instrument doesn’t ask the right people. The deeper reason the right people can’t be asked is that the half-mile around every station has been knee-capped for decades by NIMBY land use politics — held to a density too low to justify the kind of station-area assessment district that would actually capture the value transit creates.

SB 79: value recapture through supply

One mechanism does something like value recapture, even if indirectly: letting more people benefit from station proximity by building more housing inside it.

SB 79, which Newsom signed last October and which takes effect July 1, 2026, upzones the half-mile radius around qualifying transit stops in eight urban transit counties — San Mateo among them. The half-mile around a Caltrain station has been worth a fortune for 164 years. SB 79 lets more housing exist inside that radius, so more people can pay to access the locational value of being near a station rather than concentrating it in whoever already holds title.

I built a map of every SB 79 upzoning zone around San Mateo’s train stations — the geography that, if the law functions as designed, will absorb a significant share of the next decade of housing growth on the Peninsula. It is a small geometric inheritance from Polhemus, drawn 164 years ago around the point where the tracks cross the creek.

Who benefits from supporting transit?

The honest answer is: the people who own the land near the stations.

They benefited in 1862 when Polhemus drew the plat around himself. They benefit in 2026 when sales tax revenue from minimum-wage workers props up the value of single-family lots near stations they may never use. They will benefit again in 2027 when SB 79 unlocks new construction in the half-mile around every stop — though at least in that case, some of the uplift gets shared with the people who move into the new housing.

The interesting question isn’t whether to keep transit running. Of course we should. The interesting question is whether we can finally adjust who pays for it and who lives near it, so that the value uplift transit produces accrues to more than just the heirs of Charles Polhemus.

It’s enough time for me to build small civic data projects with Claude Code.

All 3 of the projects below answer local political arguments I’ve heard at public meetings in San Mateo.

Each project lives at a public URL, each took a handful of hours across my naps, and each is meant to be cited/shared forward!

1. Permit Timeline Tracker

→ permit-timeline-tracker

A ranking of 22 Peninsula cities by construction permitting speed, California’s regional housing needs allocation (RHNA) progress, and ADU compliance, pulled from the CA Housing & Community Development office’s annual progress reports. Friction scores are per jurisdiction & sortable.

This is useful if you’re testifying at a public hearing and want to compare your council’s record to its neighbors’.

2. Enrollment Decline vs. Housing Production

→ peninsula-enrollment-decline

A scatter plot, basically. Every San Mateo County school district, plotted against housing permits issued 2021–2025 and enrollment change since 2018. The schools argument predicts a positive slope. The actual slope is flat to slightly negative — and every district sits below the zero line. Redwood City and South San Francisco, which permitted hundreds of units, show declines indistinguishable from Hillsborough and Portola Valley, which built almost nothing. Cost-driven family displacement has been emptying Peninsula classrooms since 2015. The predicted signal is simply absent.

3. SB 79 Capacity Analysis

→ sb79-analysis

A live, parcel-level map of what California’s transit-oriented zoning bill would permit within walking distance of every qualifying stop on the Peninsula: 160 du/acre within 200 feet, 120 within a quarter mile, 100 within a half mile, minus what’s already there. The aggregate net-new capacity is meaningfully larger than the discourse around the bill suggests.

Takeaways

The marginal cost of producing a small, well-sourced, embeddable civic data project has collapsed to basically nothing.

None of these projects required a journalist, grant funding, or a year of GIS expertise (I do not know any GIS).

It required publicly available data (discovered by Claude), a few evenings, and a coding agent.

If there’s a local fight happening near you (housing, transit, schools, parking) — anything where someone is making an empirical claim — there is now a reasonable chance you can answer them with a webpage hosted on GitHub Pages in a couple hours.

Pick the NIMBY claim that bothers you most, open Claude Code, and see how far you get before the baby wakes up (or you doze off!).

Most of what I’ve actually learned came from showing up: to public meetings, to bike rides, to city survey groups.

These lessons are written for the version of me who began this advocacy journey in 2020, and for anyone in that position now.

Slow streets > bike lanes

When I began advocating for safer streets it was after a radical lifestyle change brought about by COVID-19 and an abrupt and sustained work-from-home. This brought me into the bike coalition activism group, who had successfully advocated for a citywide “Bicycle Master Plan” network — building out the network segment-by-segment was the stated goal. Six years later I think I (we) had the wrong picture.

The thing that actually makes a street safe to walk on, bike on, sit next to, raise a kid near, and shop along is the speed of the cars. Not the presence of bike infrastructure, and not the width of the sidewalk. Not the trees, the benches, the wayfinding, or any of the other things planners reach for. The speed of the cars.

The relationship between vehicle speed and pedestrian fatality is one of the most replicated findings in road safety. A pedestrian struck at 20 mph has roughly a 90% chance of survival. At 40 mph, it inverts. Every other intervention is downstream of that curve. Build the most beautiful protected bike lane in the world next to a 45 mph stroad and you have built a pleasant place to die.

Slow streets build a bigger coalition than bike lane advocacy does:

• the parent worried about kids crossing to school
• the senior who can no longer judge closing speeds
• the homeowner whose backyard faces an arterial
• the restaurant owner whose patio nobody uses because of the noise
• the driver who lives on the street and would prefer not to be funneled through it at highway speed

These people will never unanimously agree on a bike lane. They will all agree on a slower street. Speed is the political solvent.

This realization shifted what I advocate for. My priorities now revolve around asking about lane widths, daylighting, raised crossings, signal timing, and speed. The bike network naturally follows.

Land use is upstream of infrastructure

The child who can walk to school doesn’t need a bike lane. They need a school within walking distance. The adult who lives a quarter-mile from the train doesn’t need a parking minimum at the station. They need a quarter-mile of housing that the city was willing to permit.

I spent my first 2 years of advocacy treating bike infrastructure as paramount. It is certainly a lever for behavior change, but it is not the most powerful one. The most powerful lever is what the city chooses to allow people to build and where, at what density, and with how much mandatory parking. Every bike lane I have ever fought for is downstream of those decisions. A perfect network in a city zoned for car-dependence produces a few brave commuters and a lot of empty paint.

The math is unforgiving: a typical suburban 100% single-family home neighborhood produces few walking trips because there is nothing to walk to.

The same household in a neighborhood with corner stores, a school, a coffee shop, and a bus stop within 0.5 mile produces walk-trips daily, often without thinking of them as transportation. The infrastructure doesn’t change the behavior, but the destinations do.

Parking minimums are the version of this most people don’t notice. Every required parking space costs somewhere between $25,000-$75,000 (or more) to build when you account for land, construction, and lost development opportunity, and that cost is baked into the rent of every apartment and every cup of coffee in the building above it. They don’t require those parking spaces in the hill towns of Cinque Terre, or central Amsterdam, or most of Tokyo, and those places are not economically impoverished for it. Those cities are among the most productive square footage on earth. The cumulative effect of parking minimums in a city like ours is to make the neighborhood larger, which makes everything farther apart, which in turn makes walking infeasible, which makes a car necessary, which justifies more parking. The bike lane painted through the middle of this loop doesn’t break it.

This is the lesson that requires tremendous patience. A bike lane can go in over a summer. A rezoning takes years, and the development that follows takes years more, and the behavior change that follows the development takes a generation. The advocate who only wants visible wins will gravitate toward paint. The prize is the kid who grows up in a neighborhood where they don’t have to ask their parents for a ride, and that kid is being shaped right now by what the city did or didn’t allow to be built ten years ago.

I still show up for bike lanes. I just know now that there are much bigger fights happening at the same time that need my advocacy too.

Seniors are the most underrated coalition

When I started, I wasn’t thinking much about the demographics of allies or opposition at all. I had a picture in my head of the persuadable audience — vaguely, a 30-something commuter, a parent with a cargo bike — and I worked from that. Six years later I think the demographic that matters most to the work is the one that picture left out: people in their seventies.

Seniors don’t dominate the online cycling discourse and the imagery the advocacy world produces — usually a Lycra-clad commuter or a young family on a Tern — does not feature them. But seniors are the people who actually show up to council meetings, who actually vote in off-year elections, who actually have time for the long arc of a roadway project, and who have personal credibility with other seniors in a way no thirty-something advocate ever will. The “age-friendly” community, as they prefer to be called, has been a steady collaborator on group rides and shared advocacy in San Mateo, and they have moved more than I have.

The case for centering them is also moral, not just tactical. The senior who can no longer drive safely is in a real bind almost no one is solving for. They have spent their adult lives in places designed exclusively around a car they can no longer operate, and the ramps off of driving are mostly grim: stop driving and lose access to groceries, doctors, friends, and dignity, or keep driving and become a danger to yourself and to everyone you pass. Walkable streets and frequent transit are not a lifestyle preference for this person. They’re an off-ramp from isolation.

In practical terms this changed how I show up. I hold space for their needs in my own public comments and conversations, acknowledging where motorized mobility is critical and not something that can be waved away. The advocacy world too often frames car-dependence as a choice that the right messaging can flip. For an 80-year-old with a bad hip and groceries to carry, it isn’t. The job is to build the streets and the transit that give them another option, not to scold them for the option they currently have.

Patience requires infrastructure

Roadway projects take years. The official process is slow, but the attention on any given project is fast. A meeting happens, a commitment is made, and within two weeks the room has moved on. If you are not the person holding the thread, no one is. And no one will tell you that the thread has dropped — they’ll just stop returning emails, and a year later you’ll wonder what happened to the thing you thought was moving.

The lesson is that patience by itself is not enough. Patience without a system is just waiting and forgetting. Vigilance and follow-up are required because the systemic cycle of these projects demands it, and because at a later date my own motivation and time budget will have shifted. Calendar reminders to my future self earmark an opportunity to keep pushing, or to re-calibrate my priorities if the project no longer warrants the energy. Every commitment from staff or a councilmember gets a follow-up date attached. Every email that doesn’t get a reply gets a reminder set for two weeks out. Every council meeting produces a short list of items to track, with dates.

The reason this matters is that the people working against you — the status quo, the agenda items that are easier to shelve than to resolve, the staff member who didn’t reply and assumed the issue was no longer live — are all working on a longer clock than you are. The project that quietly disappears from the work plan is the default outcome. The project that gets built is the one that someone outside the building kept reminding everyone about, for as long as it took.

Mode-switching is the most underrated form of direct action

Riding the bus. Biking to the grocery store. Walking the kid to the park instead of driving. Each of these is a small political act with immediate personal returns, and I undervalued how much of my advocacy was downstream of doing them.

When you stop driving for a trip you would have driven you are voting with the only currency that local government and local business actually count: trips.

All of the following are built on observed behavior, not stated preferences:

• the traffic engineer’s models,
• the retailers decision of where to sign a lease,
• the transit agency’s service planning,
• the city’s parking projections

The survey where you said you’d ride a bus if it came every 15 minutes does not move the needle.

The day you actually take the bus does.

The personal returns came faster than I anticipated:

I save money. I’m in better shape than I was when I drove everywhere. I know my city in a way I never did from behind a windshield — which blocks have shade in August, which have gusts of southbound wind vs. those with without, which intersections have the long signal cycles, which corner store has the good instant coffee, which neighbor is out gardening on Saturday mornings.

None of this was visible driving. The texture of a place reveals itself at walking and biking speed and stays hidden at any other.

The friendships are the part I would not have predicted. The regulars at the bus stop, the parents at the bike rack at school pickup, the neighbors who recognize the cargo bike before they recognize me — these are weak ties that the car-dependent version of my life simply did not generate. Some of them have become strong ties. None of them would exist if I were still in a car for those trips.

I will not tell anyone they should do this. The pitch I would make instead is that the people who have done it report things they did not expect to find — money, health, friends, a city that suddenly feels theirs — and almost no one I know has tried it and gone back.

Closing

These are five lessons I didn’t have when I started. There will be more, and the next version of this post is probably 3 years away.

The work itself hasn’t changed — car dependence, housing scarcity, and unsafe streets are still the things I’m working against - but my understanding of how to actually move them has evolved and will continue to do so.

If you are starting now then you don’t need to learn these the long way that I did - read it in full!

The data tells a different story. And it’s an uncomfortable one for them, because the answer is not a mass “come to Jesus”–it’s policy.

In 1981, the median first-time American homebuyer was 29 years old. The total fertility rate was 1.81. By 2024, the first-time homebuyer was 38 — and TFR had fallen to 1.62.

The age at which Americans can afford a first home has marched right past the age at which a woman can biologically start a family without intervention. Female fertility declines steeply after 35. The line crossed in roughly 2022 and fertility rate fell in lockstep.

We have causal evidence that this is not coincidence. A natural experiment in Brazil that randomly assigned housing access through public lotteries found that adults aged 20–25 who won homes had children at a 32% higher rate than those who didn’t. When you hand young adults a house, they have kids. When you don’t, they don’t.

This is the part of the discourse that J.D Vance will refuse to publicly acknowledge: housing unaffordability is not distributed evenly across the population. It is concentrated with brutal precision on the cohort in their 20s and early 30s — the same cohort whose biological window for forming families is closing.

The median U.S. household headed by someone aged 65–74 now holds eleven times the net worth of the median household under 35 — $410,000 versus $39,000. Older Americans who already own homes have seen their net worth balloon. Younger Americans hoping to form households face a price level set by the asset accumulation of the generation above them.

In California, Proposition 13 is the engine of this concentration. Two identical homes can sit side by side on the same San Mateo street. One purchased in 1978 might pay $3,000 a year in property taxes. Next to it is another purchased in 2024 paying roughly $20,000/year. Same size/quality of house, same services, same street — the difference is who got there first. Multiply that across millions of parcels and you have the structural reason that long-tenured homeowners get richer while new entrants get priced out. You also have a homeowner political class with direct, multi-decade financial incentive to vote against new supply.

The pro-natalist framing avoids this entirely. It has to. Once you concede that the proximate cause of low fertility is housing affordability for fertility-age adults, you are no longer fighting a culture war — you are arguing for housing supply, for property tax reform, for the political defeat of a homeowner coalition that has spent 50 years pulling up the ladder behind itself.

That is a much harder fight than complaining about Hollywood, and it has a different set of villains.

Prop 13 didn’t just suppress supply. It picked a generation to win and a generation to lose, and the losing generation isn’t having kids.

A natural follow-up: if Prop 13 explains California’s housing crisis, does it also explain why California has fewer babies than almost any other state?

The chart below plots median home price against total fertility rate for all 50 states in 2023. The pattern is unambiguous: the more a state costs, the fewer children its residents have.

California sits at the far right end of that trend line. It’s the 2nd-most-expensive state, TFR of 1.48, down from 17th-highest to 43rd-highest since 2008, but the chart reveals that California isn’t an outlier from the trend. If you know a state’s median home price then you can predict its birth rate with uncomfortable accuracy.

This matters for how we assign cause: rising rents correlate with lower fertility for all age groups, hitting hardest among women in their 20s who are also the most likely to be renters. In California, 44% of households rent, which is the 2nd-lowest homeownership rate in the country (after New York), so high prices fall on exactly the people most likely to be making family-formation decisions.

Prop 13’s role in this story is real but indirect. The policy suppresses property turnover and gives long-tenured homeowners clear-eyed incentive to block new supply near where they reside. Constrained supply drives prices up. High prices suppress birth rates. Prop 13 is 3 steps upstream of the fertility data.

The telling counter-cases are Massachusetts, Washington, and Colorado. They’re expensive states with no Prop 13 equivalent and equally low fertility rates. Their housing costs rose through different mechanisms, and their birth rates fell to the same place.

The one clear outlier is Utah: $547K median home, TFR of 1.80 — well above trend. The LDS community’s emphasis on large families has long outweighed the housing cost headwind, though even that gap is narrowing.

So does Prop 13 entirely explain California’s low birth rates? No. Housing cost is the proximate cause, and Prop 13 is one of several upstream policies that are driving it. California’s fertility rate isn’t unusually low given its prices — it’s exactly as low as you’d predict.

Housing cost is the proximate cause. But California’s housing costs aren’t expensive the way Boston or Denver are expensive. They’re expensive because Prop 13 turned homeowners into a permanent political class with a direct financial stake in keeping supply restricted. The suppression runs through the ballot box, not just the market.

He’s a competent adult who wanted to bike. The thing that almost stopped him wasn’t the route, the traffic, or the hill. It was air.

This is the bicycle’s quietest barrier. It’s also the one almost nobody talks about.

Tires lose air whether you ride or not

Bike tires lose air on their own, even when the bike is sitting in the garage. Skinny, hard tires lose air faster than fat, soft ones — but every type drops noticeably within 1-2 weeks.

If you ride daily, you feel the softness immediately and you keep a pump handy to re-inflate the tires.

If you ride infrequently, which describes most people who own a bicycle, you reach for the bike and might find the bicycle unrideably slow.

Without a pump and the know-how to use it, you have two choices: don’t ride, or ride on soft tires and risk ruining the tire. Most elect to abandon the bike ride.

The pump has a learning curve

To inflate a bicycle tire you need:

• A pump that matches your valve type (Presta vs Schrader — most adults don’t know there are two)
• Knowledge of the correct tire pressure that is appropriate, which is printed in tiny letters on the side of the tire (PSI or BAR) with a minimum and maximum
• The skill to attach the pump head properly
• The familiarity to read a pressure gauge and stop at the right number

None of this is “hard”. But all of it is unfamiliar to someone who has only ever pumped a car tire at a gas station, which is most American adults. A first encounter with a Presta valve is an exercise in “is this thing broken?” The little brass nut you have to unscrew before pumping is not intuitive.

Diagnosing whether the tire even needs air is its own skill. Experienced bicyclists pinch the tire and can guess whether a tire is adequately inflated. The pump itself is an overwhelming set of decisions: floor, hand, mini, CO2 cartridge, battery-operated? Each has different prices and use cases. A would-be cyclist trying to do the right thing has half a dozen decisions to make when first pump-shopping.

Until you know how to reinflate your bicycle’s tires, your bike will be unrideable after 1-3 months.

How big a drag is this on adoption?

No one has cleanly measured it, but we can estimate it:

• A 2022 Ipsos survey found 42% of adults globally own a bicycle, but only 14% use one for a short neighborhood trip. The gap between “owns” and “uses” is large, and is the entire scope of the problem if you care about driving bicycle adoption.
• Bikeshare ridership is robust in cities that build for it precisely because the bikeshare operator handles all maintenance, including keeping tire pressure topped up. Whatever portion of bikeshare users would otherwise be riding their own bike is a signal of how many would-be cyclists are blocked by maintenance friction.
• Bike shops sell “tune-up” services as a paid product because a meaningful share of owners would rather hand over $80–150 once a year than learn to do it themselves, which reveals many (most?) consumers’ preference for outsourcing maintenance.

My personal guess: somewhere between 10–25% of would-be bicycle trips that don’t happen are aborted due to tire pressure issues.

This compounds with every other barrier: gears, route-finding, weather, traffic anxiety, fear of theft.

A would-be bike rider who clears all of these hurdles can still be defeated by a deflated tube on the day they finally feel motivated.

For transportation bicycling specifically, the effect is worse as transportation depends on reliability.

If 20% of mornings starts with “the tires are flat and now I’m late” bicycling fails the basic test of being a transportation mode.

The would-be bike rider drives or takes a rideshare and the bicycle quietly retreats to being a purely recreational object.

What car owners deal with instead

I don’t think much about cars anymore, but the equivalent car-maintenance load is genuinely larger. It’s just outsourced and time-shifted.

A car’s tires need air maybe 2x a year vs. a bicycle’s 8-20x, and modern cars warn you with a dashboard light. Most drivers inflate their own tires in 5-10 minutes at a gas station. Thanks to modern tire pressure monitoring systems the deflated tire risk creates less uncertainty.

The rest of the car-maintenance burden (oil changes, brake pads, transmission fluid, the check engine light, registration, smog, the $1,500 surprise repair) adds up to $1,000s and many hours per year. The driver doesn’t experience tire pressure as a barrier to driving because pressing the ignition is easier than perform a pre-flight check on a bicycle.

The bicycle inverts this: total annual maintenance is tiny ($30–100 for most riders), but you feel the “work” of maintenancing a bike at the moment you mount it to ride it.

You can largely outsource your bike’s maintenance, but you can’t outsource tire pressure unless you live above your bike shop.

Cars cost staggeringly more in dollars, time, and distress than bicycles - but while the bike costs less its costs are timed to inconvenience you exactly when you want to ride.

The kickscooter dodges this entirely

As I argued earlier this month, the un-motorized kickscooter has a near-flat learning curve and a near-zero maintenance burden. Most sidewalk-riding kickscooters have solid polyurethane wheels: no tube, no valve, no pump. The wheel is forever ready.

That readiness comes at a real cost in ride quality and efficiency — the bike is 2–3x more efficient than kickscooters so if you are minimizing sweatiness you should definitely learn how to pump your bike’s tire and pick the bike.

The pump barrier is one of the under-discussed reasons the kickscooter punches above its weight as a last-mile tool.

Bike share fully solves this

The kickscooter dodges the maintenance question by having no maintenance. Bike share dodges it by handing the maintenance to someone else.

Every friction to bicycle riding discussed in this post is solved by bike share. The bike share bike sits at a dock, tire pressure fixed by the operator.

What to do about it

A few things, in rough order of impact:

Treat tire pump access as infrastructure: every bike rack at a transit station, library, school, and major employer should have a public floor pump bolted next to it. They cost a few hundred dollars.

Bundle a pump with every new bike sold: A floor pump with a gauge is $40 retail, and it takes 30 seconds to inflate bike tires. Bike shops should be offering this as a standard add-on at cost.

Teach the pump in every “learn to ride” program. 5 minutes on valve types and pump technique. Without it you are not creating independently mobile riders.

A closing thought: there are many barriers to biking that the experienced have forgotten about (gears, pumps, locks, route-finding, weather).

The infrastructure-only theory of cycling growth has us building protected bike lanes for riders who never make it out of their driveway because the back tire is at 20 PSI and the pump is buried under a recycling bin.

Prop 13 didn’t just shift the tax burden from property onto sales and income.

It gutted political “localism” — the idea that decisions and power should be handled by your own community rather than by distant governments.

The Promise

The promise of Prop 13 was small government.

Cap the property tax, block runaway spending, and most enticingly: protect homeowners from being taxed out of their homes by re-assessments.

Nearly 50 years after passage, the question is: did the overall tax burden shrink?

California has the highest top-bracket state income tax and state sales tax in the nation. A sprawling patchwork of fees, assessments, parcel taxes, property transfer taxes, and special assessments has expanded to fill the space Prop 13 created.

The tax burden didn’t shrink.

It moved. So did power.

What Actually Happened

Local government decides what gets built on your block. It operates your library. It fixes your streets (or doesn’t). It sets the speed limit on the road your kid walks to school on (if state law permits it). It’s the tier of government closest to you — the one where showing up to a Tuesday night meeting can actually change something.

Prop 13 didn’t just cap property tax rates. It froze assessed values at acquisition. This handed cities and counties a structural funding problem with no local solution.

While it stripped cities of the ability to raise property taxes — the most stable local revenue source — it gave the state legislature unilateral authority to raise rates above 1%.

The only available response for cities and counties was to become supplicants to Sacramento.

Grants as governance. Cities and counties now employ staff whose entire job is writing applications for state and federal competitive grant programs. Caltrans, the ATP, HSIP, RAISE, INFRA — an alphabet of funding pots that cities must compete for to do basic infrastructure work. A sidewalk gap that would once have been a line item in a city budget is now a multi-year grant cycle involving consultants, environmental review, and scorecards for winning the money through a process designed in Sacramento or Washington DC — and changing with every election.

Consultant capture. Starved of stable and meaningful tax revenues, local governments forgo full-time staff in favor of contractors and consultants. Grant-writing firms, contract engineers, and lobbyists sit between cities and the money that used to be theirs by default. A meaningful fraction of every dollar a city “wins” goes back out the door to the consultants who helped it win.

Developer dependency. Property tax revenue being constrained, cities chase sales tax — which means chasing car dealerships, big box retail, hotels. Cities don’t plan for the public good. They plan to maximize taxable consumption rather than human habitation. Which is how you end up with California cities taking 7 of the 10 worst commute spots in the nation.

Strings attached. When Sacramento does distribute money it sets conditions on receiving it. Housing element compliance, climate goals, transportation performance metrics. These aren’t inherently bad objectives — some of them I actively support! But when local governments need state funding to function, Sacramento’s policy preferences become local policy by financial coercion rather than democratic deliberation. The appearance of local control is preserved. The substance drains away.

A Caveat

None of this is to say Sacramento is the villain.

Some state intervention has been genuinely necessary. The housing element process, SB 9, SB 35, SB 79 — these exist because locally-captured governments were using their autonomy to exclude, downzone, and delay — the predictable result of homevoter dominance in local politics.. When I argue in favor of state preemption of local zoning I am fully aware of what I’m arguing for.

But the choice shouldn’t be between “local governments with bad priorities” and “local governments financially hollowed out.”

Prop 13’s defenders invoke the principle of limiting government.

What it actually did was hand power upward — away from the tier of government most subject to direct democratic accountability, to the tier most insulated from it.

Something has gone wrong when a city has to hire a consultant to compete for a grant to fix a crosswalk.

That is not limited government. It’s just government that is harder to hold accountable.

Reform

Prop 13 reform is a third rail for good reason.

The politics are hard. The policy design matters enormously. Any serious reform has to protect long-tenured homeowners on fixed incomes, and any serious reform will be fought tooth and nail by the political coalition I described in my last post.

But the first step is getting the diagnosis right. The conversation shouldn’t be about whether government is too big. It should be about where power actually lives, and who it actually answers to.

Right now, if you live in California, local government answers to Sacramento.

And that is not what the voters thought they were voting for in 1978.

This trend is real, decades-long, and expected to continue.

I want to tell you this is good news, and I think it mostly is. But fewer licenses doesn’t mean more kids on bikes — it may just mean teenagers spending more time on screens and not going anywhere at all.

Sources: Federal Highway Administration Highway Statistics, Table DL-20; AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety

The decline is not a “blip.” It began before smartphones, rideshare, and the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. And some of it traces back to the 1980s rollout of “multi-stage licensing requirements” called graduated driver licensing (GDL): learner’s permits, restricted licenses, mandatory supervised hours. These added requirements made getting a license a months-long process rather than a birthday errand at the DMV.

The current causes driving the rate down are well-known: insurance costs are punishing. A 16-year-old on a standalone insurance policy runs $6,000–$6,700/year before all other vehicle costs, The GDL requirements are big hurdles even if teens don’t cite them as the main barrier, and the cultural meaning of the license has eroded. A driver’s license used to mean you could finally go somewhere without asking your parents. That’s a weaker sell when everything comes to you (Uber, DoorDash, etc.).

Optimistically

If declining licensure reflects a genuine mode shift toward transit, biking, and walking then it is unambiguously good news — for public health, for congestion, and for the quality of public space.

Some evidence points this way. Gen Z expresses stronger preferences for transit-proximate housing than any prior generation: 65% of young people say living near transit is important to them, up 9 points since 2020. The car-free or car-light household isn’t a fringe choice for urban yuppies any more.

If kids are skipping the license because they can get where they need to go without one that is a win, and suggests they’ll build wealth faster and have better health outcomes than they would being shackled to a car loan.

Pessimistically

Here’s the problem: walking and biking rates among youth are also down — sharply.

• Children aged 5–14 walking or biking to school: 48% in 1969, 13% in 2009, and the trend has continued downward.
• Youth under 16 share of bicycle trips fell from a historically high proportion to roughly their population share by 2017 — a significant drop in absolute trips, distances, and time.
• Bike ridership among ages 3–17 has declined steadily since 2016; by 2022, only about half had ridden a bike even once in the prior year.

The research on whether declining teen driving has been replaced by transit use is mixed. A peer-reviewed analysis of NHTS data found that young adults’ higher transit use is largely explained by lifecycle factors (lower incomes, smaller households, urban residence) that tend to dissipate as they age — not by a durable cultural shift away from driving.

Or a worse trend is occurring: teens aren’t driving less because they’re walking or biking. They’re driving less because they’re not going anywhere. DoorDashing instead of dining in public. FaceTime instead of a visit to a friend’s house.

This is consistent with declining youth outdoor recreation, declining independent mobility for children, and rising rates of social isolation among adolescents.

What can be done

These two explanations of the youth drivers license trend (mode shift from driving vs. social withdrawal) have completely different policy implications.

If it’s mode shift then the answer is more investment transit, bike infrastructure, walkable land-use reform.

If it’s social withdrawal then more transit won’t fix it. The problem is that young people aren’t traveling to participate in public life at all.

The single biggest determinant of whether a parent will let a child move through the world independently is perceived traffic safety. Not distance, not crime, not stranger danger — traffic. Study after study on children’s independent mobility ranks parental concern about cars as the dominant barrier. This means traffic speed reduction is literally a youth liberation movement. Cities that have implemented area-wide 20mph zones see fewer crashes and they see more kids outside, more kids walking to school, more kids on bikes. The street becomes a place again rather than an obstacle course.

Longer term, where school boards locate their schools is the powerful lever controlling youth transportation choices that almost nobody talks about. The decades-long trend has been to consolidate schools onto cheaper suburban campuses accessible only by car, drawing students from distances too large to walk or bike. This is perhaps the single largest infrastructure decision driving the collapse of children’s independent mobility.

Here’s the number I actually care about: total trips taken by teenagers across all modes.

Like teenagers with driver’s licenses, I expect that number is going down. Between 2009 and 2017, the NHTS found youth accounting for a shrinking share of both bike and walking trips, not just driving.

American youth are not trading the car for the bus/bicycle, they are trading the car for the couch.

It’s up to us to make our communities more welcoming than the screen of a phone. For me personally, that means advocating for spaces and places that are vibrant, car-free, and all-ages friendly.

E-bikes have gone mainstream (1.7 million sold in the US in 2024), and US state e-bike legislation is struggling to keep up.

What comes next will determine whether e-bikes remain a viable car replacement or get regulated into irrelevance.

What’s at stake

Three things are true at once:

1. The current framework is unsustainable. The regulatory gap between e-bikes and gas-powered two-wheelers was tolerable when e-bikes were all 20 mph pedal-assist commuter bikes. It is intolerable when retailers are selling 50 mph pedal-less motor vehicles to 13-year-olds under the “e-bike” label.
2. New Jersey–style blanket moped treatment is a disaster for climate and cities. Requiring a driver’s license, registration, and insurance to operate a 16 mph pedal-assist bicycle destroys the mode-shift appeal of e-bikes, converting a car replacement back into a car, and re-opening the biased-enforcement problems California closed with AB 1909 in 2022.
3. The choice is not “regulation vs. no regulation.” It is whether reform draws sharp, defensible lines — or reaches for the blunt hammer that treats everything electric as a motor vehicle.

My prediction for California

• Class 1 stays a bicycle. No license, no plate, no registration.
• Class 2 gets an age floor on throttles. Operators under 16 will be effectively banned from any throttle-equipped e-bike, but still no license plate, no driver’s license mandate.
• Class 3 gets a plate and a license. 28 mph pedal-assist is where the e-bike reaches moped performance and risk parity, and this is where the regulatory gap closes.
• No insurance mandates — Class 1, 2 or 3–but yes for e-motos (exceeding Class 3 power). CA doesn’t require insurance on <50cc mopeds. The hypocrisy to add insurance mandates for e-bikes when it doesn’t exist for equivalent internal combustion engine (ICE) scooters is absurd.
• The real enforcement fight shifts to e-motos and imports. Tighter manufacturer liability, import screening, and platform pressure on Amazon and Alibaba because that’s where the actual problem lives.

The endpoint: Class 3 becomes regulated roughly like a <50cc moped (mandatory license, plate, no insurance). Class 1 & 2 remain labeled “bicycles” with targeted age restrictions.

Why this matters if you care about getting people out of cars

No amount of mandates layered on e-bikes prevent the thing that actually kills cyclists: a 4,500-pound SUV making a right-turn across an unprotected bike lane. License plates on e-bikes are not a substitute for protected bike lanes, and nobody should let them be framed as one.

Every hour spent regulating a Class 2 commuter is an hour not spent regulating the Amazon/Alibaba pipeline that ships 50mph motor vehicles into the hands of middle- and high-schoolers.

There is a version of the next decade where California writes new e-bike laws that preserve frictionlessness for real bicycles, treat e-motos like the motorcycles that they functionally are, and go after the distribution problem at the source.

Or there is a version where California legislators regulate e-bikes as we know them out of existence.

Background: how we got here

The boom

A decade ago, California wrote the national playbook for e-bike law: three classes, 750W motor cap, 20 or 28 mph speed limiters, no operator license, no registration, no insurance. 46 other states followed.

The policy worked exactly as intended — keeping e-bikes legally indistinguishable from bicycles and letting a new mode scale without friction.

US e-bike imports hit ~1.7 million units in 2024 — up 72% year-over-year. California alone is ~$500M of that market. E-bikes outsell electric cars globally by a wide margin, and in the US they now outsell electric cars by unit volume. A growing share of American teenagers gets an e-bike before (or instead of) a driver’s license.

The asymmetry

Alongside legal e-bikes, a parallel category has exploded: vestigial (or no) pedals, 3,000–6,000 watt “e-motos” (Sur-Ron, Talaria). Sold online, capable of 50+ mph, ridden overwhelmingly by youth under 18. These are unregistered motorcycles — but in practice they are what most of the “e-bike” news coverage is actually about.

The physical gap between a Class 3 e-bike and a 50cc moped is narrowing. The regulatory gap has not moved. That gap is exactly why e-bike adoption scaled so rapidly, and why the pressure to close it is now coming from every direction at once.

What California is doing

SB 1271 (Min, signed Sep 2024). The big one. Reclassified any e-bike with a throttle as Class 2 (throttles now prohibited on Class 1 and 3). Criminalized aftermarket speed-mod kits. Required UL 2849 / EN 15194 battery certification for any e-bike sold, leased, or distributed in California starting Jan 1, 2026. Gave police clearer authority to impound sub-four-wheel vehicles that don’t meet the e-bike definition.

AB 2234 (2024). Authorized San Diego County jurisdictions to bar riders under 12 from Class 1 and 2 e-bikes.

AB 1778 (Marin pilot). As of July 2025: 16+ to operate a Class 2 in unincorporated Marin, helmets required for all ages.

AB 544 (2026). Rear red reflector or light required at all times.

AB 1942 (Bauer-Kahan, introduced Feb 2026). Would require DMV registration and a special rear license plate for every Class 2 and Class 3 e-bike in California. Currently in Assembly Transportation. Opposed by Bike East Bay, CalBike, and most active-transportation advocates; supported by parents, local officials, and law enforcement citing enforcement difficulty on modded bikes and e-motos.

SB 586. Creates an “Off-Highway Vehicle” classification for pedal-less, >750W, Sur-Ron-style two-wheelers.

Police departments across the state are now routinely confiscating e-motos from teens, and school districts are banning them from campus.

What the rest of the country is doing

Three states have broken from the 3-class framework.

New Jersey, Jan 19, 2026 (S4834 / A6235). All e-bikes reclassified as motorized bicycles. Every rider needs a driver’s license or motorized bicycle license (15+). Every e-bike needs DMV registration. Throttle e-bikes and 28+ mph pedal-assist bikes require liability insurance. Operators under 15 banned outright. The deadline to comply is July 19, 2026. The MVC has not finished building the registration system.

New York, NYC. Throttle e-bikes capped at 25 mph citywide; enforcement ramping against delivery riders.

Local bans. A growing list of cities and school districts have banned throttle e-bikes from specific corridors, campuses, or age brackets.

The New Jersey law matters because it is the template other states will copy. It is also catastrophically bad policy: it treats a 16 mph pedal-assist cargo bike used by parents to take their kids to school the same as a 45 mph Sur-Ron. The bicycle industry, parents, and advocacy community were blindsided by it.

Appendix: regulatory comparison

If you want to do something about it: the California Bicycle Coalition, Bike East Bay and Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition are tracking AB 1942.

But suggest that someone ride a scooter to work? You’ll probably get an odd look!

Before I go further, I want to clearly define “scooter”. By scooter, I mean an un-motorized two-wheel kickscooter, the type you might have had as a child and forgotten about for decades or until you became a parent or aunt/uncle:

While both the scooter & the bicycle are used for transit I compare the two in this post in order to explore what it would take to get more people out of cars.

Who can actually ride a bike?

Riding a bicycle requires internalizing dynamic balance where the bike only stays upright when it’s moving. Keeping the bike (and rider) upright requires a constant series of small steering corrections that happen largely subconsciously.

This dynamic balance is a learnable skill, but it is also an ability that can be lost (or never gained) through disability.

New bike riders also have to unlearn a human instinct: when a bike starts to tip left, the correct response is to briefly steer left (countersteering), which feels completely wrong until it doesn’t.

This is a “cliff” in the learning curve and while most people clear the cliff it takes hours to days to do so. Adults learning to ride a bike later in life find it meaningfully harder than children.

In spite of this cliff, roughly 94% of American adults know how to ride a bike.

Of them, maybe half know how to shift gears.

Who can actually ride a scooter?

The scooter’s total addressable market is approximately everyone. If you can walk then you can ride one.

The learning curve is nearly flat. One foot is always available to touch the ground, there’s no counterintuitive reflexes to develop.

Most people achieve basic competency on a scooter within minutes.

Even without riding the scooter, it can be the most simple combination of mobility aids: walking stick + shopping cart!

Or even an improvised stroller:

When we discuss all ages transportation options the kickscooter delivers:

But the bicycle is more efficient

The bicycle is the most energy-efficient vehicle ever built. A cyclist traveling at 15 mph expends roughly 19–32 watt-hours per mile (Wh/mile) of forward progress. A scooter rider at 10–12 mph uses roughly 40–72 Wh/mile. Walking runs around 113–129 Wh/mile.

The bicycle is about 2–3x more efficient than scooting, and 4–5x more efficient than walking. Riding a scooter is essentially assisted walking.

These measures of efficiency matter a great deal for how we think about consumer choice and realistic range. A commuter on a bike can realistically cover 10–15 miles with moderate effort. On a scooter, the practical range for most people is probably 2–4 miles before fatigue sets in.

The scooter is a short-range device.

The practical picture

Beyond physics, the day-to-day comparison breaks several ways:

The scooter’s portability is underrated in the advocacy conversation. A folded kickscooter can go anywhere its rider goes — on the train/bus, in a rideshare, into a meeting. You don’t need to carry a lock and their cheapnes makes them less of a theft target.

This makes the humble kickscooter an under-estimated tool for transportation. The person who scooters to the station, boards a train, and scooters to the office has solved the last-mile problem without any infrastructure dependency beyond the train itself.

Motors change everything

Electric bikes have dramatically expanded the bicycle’s total addressable market by neutralizing hills and distance which are the two things that most reliably defeat new riders.

E-scooters close much of the efficiency gap with bikes and extend range significantly, though they reintroduce higher cost and servicing/maintenance headache.

The shared e-scooter boom of 2018–2022 introduced millions of people to the (motorized) scooter form factor who had never considered it.

The electric versions of both bikes and scooters deserve their own lengthier blogpost — while this post is intentionally scoped to the un-motorized versions.

How cities can encourage their use

The kickscooter and the bicycle require the same infrastructure: protected lanes, traffic calming (slowing peak car speeds).

The scooter’s lower barrier to entry means it reaches people that the bike doesn’t: people who never learned to bike, people who are ultra-constrainted on storage/space.

The bicycle is the better long-term ride: more range, more cargo capacity, better with hills, lower effort.

Ultimately, cities and communities benefit when they embrace the economic firepower and public health benefits of active transportation–but data and anecdotes require building grassroots momentum and understanding of the facts:

The goal is to get people out of cars and meeting each other in their community — and different people need different onramps.

So roughly what percentage of people who know how to ride a bicycle also know how to shift gears?

Nobody has directly surveyed this. We track the rate of bicycle ownership, how often people actually use a bike, infrastructure investment, and injury statistics.

We have not ever asked at scale: “do you actually know how to use your bicycle’s gear shifter?”

Let’s estimate from what we do know.

Single-speed bikes are the global norm

A 2022 Ipsos survey of more than 20,000 adults across 28 countries found that about 63% of adults globally say they know how to ride a bicycle — but only 42% report owning one, and just 14% on average use a bike for a short neighborhood trip.¹

That tells you most of the world’s cyclists are occasional riders and that occasional riders are far more likely to be riding simple, cheap bikes.

This matters because the global bicycle market is dominated by bikes for transportation and not for sport.

A peer-reviewed study in “Nature Communications Earth & Environment” found that China alone accounts for roughly two-thirds of global bicycle production.² Chinese utility bikes — the kind that have moved hundreds of millions of people across Asia for generations — are predominantly single-speed. India, the world’s second-largest producer, has a similar profile. A separate Johns Hopkins study tracking bicycle ownership across 150 countries estimated at least 580 million privately owned bicycles worldwide, with India and China accounting for a disproportionate share.³

Even in the Netherlands most bikes are “slow, heavy utility bicycles rather than road and mountain bikes.”⁴ The classic Dutch “Omafiets”, which makes up the bulk of that enormous fleet, is traditionally single-speed.⁵

And then there are children’s bikes. In the United States, kids’ bikes accounted for 57% of all bicycle units sold in 2023. The vast majority of those are single-speed with coaster brakes. A child who learns to ride on one of those bikes and never upgrades has simply never had the opportunity to learn gears.

Owning a geared bike doesn’t mean you know how to use it

Now consider the people who do ride geared bikes. Plenty of them leave the shifter alone for most or all of a ride. Maybe they got a used bike and nobody explained the gearing. Maybe they tried shifting gears once, the chain made an alarming noise, and they never tried again. Maybe they just grind up hills in the wrong gear because it’s never been a problem they were aware could be solved.

If the bar for “knowing how to shift gears” is simply “can physically move the shifter,” that’s probably most geared-bike riders.

If the bar is “shifts deliberately — choosing a gear based on terrain or effort level” — which is what most of us mean when we say someone knows how to shift — a more honest estimate is probably less than half of regular geared-bike riders.

The bottom line

There’s no concrete number here, because no one has measured it. But when you add together the world’s single-speed riders, the children who learned on coaster-brake bikes and never graduate, and the geared-bike owners who use their shifters haphazardly, the share of all cyclists who can deliberately and intentionally use gears is likely a minority.

It’s fair to say the true share lies somewhere between a 25-50% depending on geography and how you define “knows how to use gears.”

For a US or Western European audience the number is higher. Globally, it’s probably lower. Either way, it is almost certainly not a majority.

Does this matter for advocates?

PeopleForBikes’ 2022 Bicycling Participation Study found that more than half of American kids under 14 rode a bicycle at least once in the previous year — but that participation rate drops to 42% among 15–17 year olds, and keeps falling through adulthood. The steepest cliff happens right at the age when riders typically transition from simple single-speed kids’ bikes to adult geared bikes.

No study has isolated gear-shifting competency as a cause of that dropout, but it’s a plausible and underexamined contributor. A rider who inherits a used 7-speed from an older sibling with no one to explain what the shifters do is encountering a machine that feels harder and less intuitive than the bike they grew up on.

That friction is compounded by the fact that most advocacy programs, bike education, and cycling marketing assume basic gear literacy which likely accelerates dropout.

This extends to infrastructure design itself. A protected lane over a highway overpass or hill is a genuine achievement — but it’s only usable by someone who knows how to shift into an easier gear to make the climb. Advocates who fight for that infrastructure and then point a new rider toward it without any gear education are setting them up for exactly the kind of defeated and sweaty experience that ends the cycling experiment. We can build the right infrastructure and still lose the rider if we’ve skipped a step.

Every rider who stops cycling in their mid-teens is one fewer person building the political constituency for safer streets, one fewer commuter shifting mode share, one fewer body counted in the ridership numbers we use to justify infrastructure investment.

If gear-shifting competency is a barrier — even a partial one — then treating it as a non-issue quietly harms the goals we’re trying to achieve.

Getting parents to swap car trips for bike trips is a harder sell if they’ve never figured out why their bike is so hard to pedal uphill.

Reaching new cyclists doesn’t end with handing them a bicycle and seeing them ride down the street.

It requires closing the gap between “can ride a bike” and “rides a bike happily up a hill with cargo next to vehicle traffic”–and to stop assuming those are the same thing.

A closing thought: the explosive popularity of electric bikes with a hand throttle and/or pedal assist may affirm this estimation about the global bicycling population’s gearing familiarity.

Start with what you already own

You do not need to buy a new bicycle to carry things.

A standard bike can carry a surprising amount with zero accessories.

Hanging a bag from each handlebar works. Two full canvas shopping bags hang cleanly from most handlebars. That’s enough for a mid-week grocery stop, a pharmacy run, a hardware store visit.

Keep the weight roughly even and don’t pile so much that steering is unmanageable.

A backpack adds more capacity without touching the bike at all, and nearly everyone already owns one. They suit dense loads: boxed goods, a change of clothes, pantry staples. The tradeoff is that their weight on your back means sweat on your back, which matters more on longer rides, going up hills, or on hotter days.

A messenger bag works similarly but handles irregular shapes better and is faster to load and unload. They’re less common than backpacks, but worth knowing about if you’re carrying things that don’t pack neatly.

Carry more without wearing it

A handlebar bag or basket mounts to your cockpit and sits in front of you. In the 1–5 liter range it holds a wallet, phone, and keys. In the 10–20 liter range it handles a grocery run and keeps the weight low and forward.

Most front bags/baskets detach quickly so you can carry the bag into the store and clip it back on when you leave.

Here is a bigger one that looks like a bucket, and worked perfectly for my wife & I as we went picnicking:

Here is a smaller one that detaches and looks like a small briefcase (it fits my 13-inch work laptop):

Adding a “rack” is where carrying capacity significantly expands.

Racks can be added to the front or the back of your bicycle, above the front or the back wheels.

A rear rack offers a metal platform above the back wheel that turns your bike into a low-profile truck:

You can use a simple bungee cord to carry items atop the rack:

Round objects roll and tall objects tip, so you learn quickly what does not work.

A crate can be zip-tied or bungeed (multiple times) to the rack and is cheap, durable, and holds an extraordinary amount: bags of groceries, a six-pack, a bag of dog food.

It looks DIY because it is, and it works perfectly:

Panniers, also known as “saddlebags”, hang off each side of the rear rack, and are the most powerful tool:

A pair of panniers on either side of your bike gives you 40 liters of enclosed, weather-proof carrying capacity. That’s roughly equivalent to two large backpacks, and unlike a backpack they hang low for excellent balance and off your back so you do not get sweaty. Panniers double as grocery bags since you can detach them from your bike and carry them into the store.

We don’t want to forget the front-rack, which also can be used with bungee cords, combined with a backpack or messenger bag:

Carrying a child

This is where a lot of parents assume the car becomes mandatory. It doesn’t.

A rear child seat mounts to the rack and holds a child from roughly the time they can sit independently — around 9 to 12 months — until they hit the seat’s weight limit, typically 40 to 48 pounds. They attach in minutes and leave your hands on the bars.

Rear child seats can even be doubled:

A front-mounted seat attaches to the frame between the bars and your body, with the child facing forward. You can see them and talk to them throughout the ride. The weight limit is lower and some riders find the proximity to the handlebars takes getting used to.

This bike has both:

Neither setup requires a special bike — just a bike with the right mounting points for the seat you choose. Check compatibility before buying.

A note on cargo bikes

Cargo bikes — longtails, box bikes, bakfiets — exist to take all of this further: multiple children at once, a full week of groceries, lumber from the hardware store. But they’re a different post. Everything above works on the bike you probably already own.

These bikes are designed to be “super bikes”–carrying well beyond the traditional bicycle:

Like I said at the beginning: you do not need to buy a new bicycle to carry things.

But browsing cargo bikes online (or seeing them in-person) can be a mind-expanding exercise.

The barrier is the first trip

The biggest shift of all is mental: trips that feel “car-shaped” can be performed as trips by bike.

The first time you ride home from the grocery store with groceries, the mental model updates permanently.

You already know how to ride, the rest is just hardware!

I don’t own a car. I haven’t for 5 years. I live in a suburb of San Francisco with my partner and our infant.

There is obvious skepticism about how car-free suburban life works: groceries, rain, the pediatrician. I’ll write about those another time.

Today I want to talk about something harder to see: the enormous cognitive load that simply disappeared from my life when I sold my car.

Things I do not spend time thinking about:

Gas prices. I am vaguely familiar with what gas costs right now ($5-8/gallon?). I couldn’t tell you within a dollar. When gas prices dominate the news cycle, I experience it the way I experience reports about the price of soybeans: information about someone else’s life. I recognize fuel prices are passed on to me, but it is genuinely not on my mind.

Parking. I have never circled a block in downtown San Mateo looking for a spot. I have never been late because I couldn’t find parking. I have never paid for a parking garage. I have never had the low-grade argument with my partner about whether to park here and walk or keep looking for something closer. I bike to the restaurant, lock up at the rack, and walk in.

Insurance. I don’t comparison-shop auto insurance policies. I don’t get in accidents. I don’t worry about whether my rate went up. I don’t think about deductibles. I don’t carry an insurance card in my wallet.

Maintenance. I don’t do oil changes. I don’t rotate tires. I don’t experience anxiety over driving noises. I don’t drop my car off at 7am and figure out how to function for several days without it. I don’t get the text from the mechanic saying they found something else ($$$). My bike(s) needs a new chain every couple years and a brake adjustment occasionally. I do it myself in the driveway in twenty minutes.

Registration and smog. I don’t go to the DMV. I don’t think about the DMV. I couldn’t tell you what a smog check costs these days.

Traffic. I don’t check Google Maps before leaving the house. My “traffic app” is Transit which shows me the bus and train departure times near me. But mostly I walk or bike which is the most predictable travel times imaginable.

Car washes. It rains on my bike and then it dries. This is fine. I couldn’t tell you what a car-wash or detailing costs these days. $25?

The “check engine” light. The glowing icon on the dashboard means somewhere between $0 and $4,000 is about to leave your bank account. You won’t find out which until a stranger tells you–and do you really have time to go consult another stranger?

Each of these is small, but they are constant. They run in the background of your mind, and you may not notice their cost until you stop.

I can’t tell you what amount of space these thoughts cost, but I can tell you about what occupies my mind these days:

• I think about my wife & son.
• I think about who I might see on my bike ride.
• I think about the neighbor whose construction project is coming along nicely.
• I think about recipes for dinner.

These are not profound thoughts. But they are thoughts pertaining to the life I am living today–not to the maintenance of a machine that skips past it.

No single one hardship from my list is bad enough to question the aggregate costs of car-ownership.

Most Americans absorb the whole package: the insurance, the parking, the gas prices, the maintenance, the traffic, the registration, the anxiety.

These are the baseline cost baked into your “cost of living” equation. You stop noticing it the way you stop noticing a noise you’ve been hearing for twenty years.

I noticed when it stopped.

I’m not saying everyone should sell their car tomorrow–I understand the critical utility it provides to many.

My household still has one car, and my partner drives it. I’m not saying that owning a car is morally wrong.

I am saying it is expensive in ways that are difficult to grasp, and that most people have never experienced the alternative long enough to understand them.

The next time you’re idling in traffic, or on hold with your insurance company, or watching the mechanic’s estimate exceed the number you were expecting:

I want you to know that the feeling in your chest right then is not inevitable. It is not an obligatory cost. It is the cost of one specific machine that you have been told you need.

And the moment you begin to question that you are free.

I get around my city by walking, biking, and taking public transit.

Here’s why.

The opportunity cost

My household can financially afford a car and all its attached costs. Most of my neighbors can too. My story isn’t a story about financial necessity.

It’s a story about what car ownership actually costs you–in money but more importantly in distress, time and mental overhead.

The AAA puts average annual car ownership at over $12,000 per year. That’s real money I (and I imagine others) would rather commit elsewhere (savings, housing budget, healthier food, childcare services).

But the subtler costs of driving come from the physical and mental distress it causes you.

The physical health damage is largely caused by time spent driving eliminating available time for exercising. I completely negate this by walking and biking in my transportation journeys every day.

The mental distress is more difficult to quantify, but it is very real.

I personally have had both a family member and a close friend die by car.

77% of American drivers will be in at least one crash in their lifetime and 22–32% of crash survivors develop PTSD. That makes car crashes one of the largest sources of trauma-related psychological distress in the US.

Driving imposes a sizeable cognitive tax that comes with owning a vehicle: seeking parking, scheduling/procuring maintenance, renewing registration, dealing with insurance claims, getting smog checks, remembering to move the car on street cleaning day. None of these things are catastrophic but they are just a persistent low-grade drain on your attention.

I ride a Yuba Mundo cargo bike that carries more groceries than a sedan trunk. For longer trips as a family, Caltrain or the SamTrans bus works.

The financial comparisons are staggering, and my household banks those savings.

Who else does not drive?

There’s a second reason I don’t drive and it’s the most important:

I want to know what my community looks like to someone who cannot afford a car.

Can a person without a car in my community get groceries safely? Get their kid to school? Access a bank, a government office, a doctor?

The answer to that question is one of the most honest measures of a community’s social health.

A city that has made full participation in (economically, culturally, politically) contingent on car ownership is an exclusionary city.

It is a city that has decided that some residents matter more than others through infrastructure choices.

I don’t not-drive to prove a political point. I do it to feel whether the streets, the transit, the bike infrastructure are actually functional for someone without a car, and to notice when they are not.

Most of the time in San Mateo they are adequate. Sometimes they are even good! Occasionally they’re genuinely hostile. I want to keep knowing which is which.

And as an added benefit on top, I truly meet new friends through avoiding driving. I know the dog walkers, bus drivers on my regular routes, and I recognize fellow riders who I wait with together at bus stops.

I can demonstrate to my son what being a member of a community means.

What it actually costs me

Honestly, it costs me a whole lot less than most people assume to go car-free.

An e-bike extends your range and carrying capacity dramatically. Hills disappear. Trips that would be a slog on a regular bike across town with a full load of groceries, or with a kid on the back become unremarkable.

Your mental map of what’s reachable expands considerably once you have one.

The biggest difficulties are weather and daylight. San Mateo is mild by most standards, but rain still means raingear and a potential change of clothes.

Winter’s short days mean more trips happen in the dark which is fine with good bike lights, but it shapes when I run errands and how I think about timing.

I adjust my schedule around daylight in the winter in a way that I don’t in the summer.

The case I care more about

When you drive you leave your neighborhood.

Not physically but experientially. You experience your neighborhood as a series of obstacles between you and parking. Stoplights. Pedestrians crossing. Narrow streets.

When you walk and bike, you are in your neighborhood. You notice the new restaurant that opened. You meet your neighbor. Your child learns social and skills of independence. You feel the weather, you hear the birds, and you exist in the place you actually live.

This is the entire difference between “living” somewhere and “sleeping” somewhere.

Ivan Illich called this the “remoteness” that speed creates–a framing I’ve written about before. Beyond a certain speed of travel, you are no longer inhabiting space.

I have a new baby. I want him to grow up knowing his neighborhood–the coffee shop owner, the librarian, the bus driver. Doing this requires slowness. It requires being present in the same places repeatedly at a human pace.

Driving takes that away from us all.

Driving is the privilege

We have it backwards when we say “going car-free is a privilege.”

Driving is the privilege.

American roads, parking minimums, free street storage for private vehicles, highways bisecting neighborhoods–these are massive public subsidies, built and maintained at collective expense, that primarily benefit people who can afford to drive. The person who can’t afford a car doesn’t opt out of a neutral system. They’re excluded from one that was engineered around everyone else.

When I don’t drive, I’m not enjoying some luxurious, exotic lifestyle. I am just refusing to depend on infrastructure that was built by displacing people poorer than me.

The question worth asking is not “can I afford not to drive?”

It’s: “what kind of community am I building by driving through it?”

I absorbed the state’s self-image from a young age and recognized the state by fundamental truths: confident, a financial powerhouse, and a leader in progressive causes.

I left for a bit, and I came back for its weather and economic opportunity.

Newly returned as an adult I paid rent, I bought a car (I had to in order to visit rental listings).

And I observed who lived and who left: the reasons they shared for leaving and the reasons that I could infer.

I had to wonder: why would people leave California?

The truth is that it’s not a choice.

California is punishingly regressive.

It is the most regressive state in the USA.

I took this photo flying into LA.

LA goes on forever.

It is single-family houses, cul-de-sacs, strip malls–all the way to the mountains.

California has the worst housing shortage in the country. By the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (adjustments for actual cost of living) California ranks dead last among all fifty states.

Last.

In the most recent three-year data, 17.7% of Californians live in poverty by this measure, tied only with Louisiana and well ahead of Mississippi at 16.4%.

The national average is 12.7%.

The comparison that actually keeps me up at night is Texas.

I don’t want to live in Texas, in fact I don’t think most Texans want to physically live in Texas.

But a teacher in Texas can buy a house. A nurse can afford to live in the city where he or she works instead of a van.

In the Bay Area, those same people are commuting ninety minutes from somewhere they can halfway afford, or they’ve left entirely.

In contrast to California, Texas built housing.

It is car-dependent, sprawling, aesthetically grim housing—-but Texas built housing.

California did not.

California’s homeowner class made sure that didn’t happen here, and the bill got paid by renters, immigrants, and anyone who arrived after the good seats were taken.

The “Homelessness in California” Wikipedia article is an informative read.

I took this photo a couple of miles from my residence.

El Camino Real is a stroad, running through some of the most expensive real estate on earth.

Five lanes, surface parking, a bus stop with no shelter.

The exact same arterial road that you find in any Texas suburb, except the houses behind it start at $2 million.

We didn’t avoid the bad parts of Texas urban planning.

We just added $2 million houses and called it progressive.

The policy that ties it all together is Proposition 13.

Passed by the voters in 1978 with 62.6% of the vote, it caps property taxes based on when you bought.

This means someone who bought in Palo Alto in 1987 pays almost nothing compared to someone who bought last year.

It’s a policy perfectly designed to entrench the advantages of whoever got here first, and it’s been untouched for nearly fifty years.

The revenue that gets lost has to come from somewhere so it comes from sales taxes, which hit lower-income households hardest.

California’s state sales tax is the highest in the nation at 7.25% (it falls to 7th when you account for local/county) (source).

This is the most regressive property tax structure of any state in the country, and it is held in place by the political coalition that considers itself the “progressive ones”.

California spends a lot on social programs, and its income tax is genuinely progressive. But on the outcomes that define whether a working-class person can build a life here (housing, cost of living, whether you can stay) the state has failed and it has failed because the people with the most power to change things had the most incentive not to.

This fake progressivism becomes most pronounced when discussions of rent control come up.

When these rent control efforts are made they are dunked to the ground and curb-stomped by a cadre of electeds at every level who own homes and do not rent.

Rent control for me (Prop 13), but not for thee!!!

Prop 13 has survived untouched for nearly fifty years and it isn’t because Californians lack self-awareness.

It’s because the people most harmed by it don’t vote. Nationally, homeowners turn out at rates roughly 20 points higher than renters. In California the gap is even more severe: ~73% of the state’s likely voters are homeowners, while ~63% of unregistered adults and ~58% of infrequent voters are renters.

Renters are close to half the state’s population, but they are a fraction of its participating electorate.

This isn’t an accident. Renters move more often, which means re-registering more often. They work hourly jobs with less schedule flexibility. They are disproportionately immigrants, younger, nonwhite which are the groups with compounding barriers to political participation.

Meanwhile homeowners–whose property values depend directly on keeping housing supply restricted–show up reliably and vote their balance sheets. A Stanford study shows that homeowner voter turnout nearly doubles when zoning is on the ballot (source).

California doesn’t just have a housing policy failure. It has a democracy failure, and the two are the same failure.

Dolores Park, San Francisco.

I love this place. I came back to it on purpose. I am raising my kid here.

On a good day in California (most of the year) it still feels like nowhere else.

That is why I wrote so critically of it.

California has every advantage: the weather, the geography, the economy, & the talent.

Dolores Park on a summer evening is a real thing.

The question is:

How many people get to afford to live in proximity to this scene?

And whether we’re willing to ask that question out loud.

The direct outcome of California’s policies is that its population is not keeping pace with the rest of the US, and so has its political clout.

We’ll see how the next decade looks as far as how folks vote with their feet.

As someone who cares for a more positive outlook for California I hope that its legislators and voters make the systemic reforms it needs to stay relevant for the next 50 years to come.

The examples I used were New York City and Montreal—-both well-documented pedestrian successes, but also enormous corridors that make it hard to make a persuasive case that their learnings could be applied in any city smaller than a New York or Montreal.

This post is for the smaller places.

B Street in downtown San Mateo, CA. The lights are nice. On most nights, it’s quiet.

B Street on a slow afternoon. The mural is there. The planters are there. The benches are there. The people aren’t. A closed street without a reason to visit it is just an empty street.

Also B Street. Same street, different night. Kajiken opened on the pedestrianized street and regularly has lines out the door to this day.

Closing the street is step one–but not the whole plan.

The Effect Isn’t About Scale

A 2022 study across 14 Spanish cities found that pedestrianized streets outperformed car-dominated ones in retail sales.

It also found that geographic location was insignificant. If anything, smaller cities saw a larger effect.

Mid-sized towns had the same outcome as major metros.

The mechanism is the same everywhere:

(make a street feel less hostile) + (slow people down) = (people spend money)

Philadelphia’s Center City District launched “Open Streets” in September 2024.

They closed blocks of Walnut and 18th streets on Sundays.

After 21 events and one full year foot traffic was up 65%, sales were up 39%.

In Hamburg, New York (population ~10,000) the village fought a highway-widening proposal and got traffic calming roundabouts instead.

The main street is now credited with having more businesses, more pedestrians, and higher tax revenues than before.

You don’t need Times Square foot traffic for this to work, you just need a street where people feel comfortable slowing down.

Giralda Avenue in Coral Gables, Florida (top) and Castro Street in Mountain View, California (bottom). Both suburban, both permanent, both are not Times Square.

The Ladder

Most small downtowns are already doing temporary pedestrianization without calling it that:

• A farmers market that closes a block on Saturday mornings
• A holiday street fair
• Restaurant week with tables in a parking lane

These are all the same thing. The only difference is nobody’s measuring whether the coffee shop two doors down did more business that morning.

And nobody’s using that data to make a case for doing it more often!

Here is a ladder of steps to pedestrianize a street–from minimal to maximal effort:

Beginner: One-off event

A street fair, a block party, a holiday closure.

Before you do it count foot traffic on a normal version of that day. Afterwards, survey the merchants.

This data is the key to everything.

Burlingame Avenue, Burlingame, CA closed for the holidays.

The infrastructure required to close a residential block for a day is basically nothing.

The physical infrastructure for closing a street to throw a block party. The harder part is collecting enough neighbor signatures to get the city permit.

On a commercial street, that bureaucratic hurdle largely disappears

A business improvement district (BID) or city department can handle the paperwork without needing signatures from every adjacent merchant.

The harder part is political will and not logistics.

The entire closure scheme for Burlingame Avenue. A police car and some sawhorses.

Medium: Weekly recurring

This could be a farmers market on the same block, every week.

People who came for the fresh produce walk past the coffee shop and the bookstore.

Start checking whether adjacent non-market businesses see a bump on market mornings, as they usually do.

The Burlingame Farmers Market on Park Road. The sign says no animals, the dog does not care!

San Carlos, CA closes Laurel Street the same way Burlingame closes Burlingame Avenue: cones and a sign.

The Claremont, CA farmers market. Music, families, cyclists. There’s a reason to be here beyond groceries.

I organized a group bike ride from downtown San Mateo to Burlingame’s Sunday farmers market.

I did it partly to show a safe route between the two downtowns, partly to celebrate Burlingame for closing the street for it.

Harder: Seasonal open streets

Close a block every Sunday afternoon from May through September. Some chairs, maybe a musician, minimal infrastructure. Philadelphia has been doing this since late 2024 — 21 events, 65% increase in foot traffic, 39% bump in sales.

B Street Beats — a city-organized music series on the pedestrianized blocks. Two kids running toward a guitarist is a decent sign the street is working.

Red Adirondack chairs and a jumbo Connect 4 on a closed street in Palo Alto, CA. Expensive-looking furniture, left out in public. Somehow it doesn’t walk away.

Programming is the thing most cities skip. A closure without programming is just an empty street with the cars removed. A closure with a musician, a game, a reason to sit down — that’s a destination.

A craft festival on Laurel Street in San Carlos. Stalls on both sides, people in the middle, reason to be there.

Expert: Six-month pilot.

Bollards, outdoor seating, delivery access until 10am, data collection, merchant partnership, a decision point at the end with actual numbers.

This is what I described in the last post.

Cities find their own version of the same infrastructure:

San Mateo, CA uses wooden planters on wheels as movable barriers for B Street. They’re cheaper than bollards, easier to move for deliveries, and avoid the risk of hitting aged undocumented utilities if you dig. The sign on the front says commercial loading is permitted from 1am to 10am.

Miami Beach, FL uses green plastic jersey barriers on Ocean Drive.

San Carlos’s early attempt at closing Laurel Street. Not aesthetic. Gets the job done. The banner says “A Great Place to Be.”

Every city finds its own version of the same solution. There’s no right answer.

Each rung generates evidence and political goodwill for the next one. A merchant who’s watched foot traffic spike every market Saturday is a completely different conversation than one being asked to imagine what it might do.

The train is silly. The line for it is not.

The street closure created the space. The train created the destination. People didn’t come because the road was closed. They came for the train and stayed for the shops. That’s the whole theory in miniature.

Why Farmers Markets Fail

While I label the farmers market for “beginners”, a lot of them quietly die.

Understanding why they die is useful if you want yours to survive and grow.

The most common failure is a chicken-and-egg problem between vendors and customers.

A market needs enough vendors to attract customers and enough customers to attract vendors.

Without the customers, farmers won’t renew their permits.

Without the vendors, customers stop coming.

A market with three stalls isn’t a market: it’s a sad parking lot, and once it gets that reputation recovery is hard.

The second failure is location and layout.

A market tucked behind a building, or oriented away from where foot traffic is coming from works against itself from day one.

Shade matters too—-a wide-open plaza with no tree cover is uncomfortable to linger in when it’s hot, and lingering is what you’re selling.

And don’t forget bathroom access.

The third is grant dependency.

Seed funding gets a market started, but a market that never develops real vendor and customer bases before the money runs out will collapse when it does.

Recurring paying customers are the only sustainable foundation.

The fourth is programming.

A market that’s only vegetables competes on produce.

A market with live music, a food truck, something for kids, and a reason to stay for an hour becomes a destination.

Destination markets generate the foot traffic that keeps vendors coming back season after season.

What Happens When the City Doesn’t Follow Through

A weekday closure of Burlingame Avenue that almost nobody knew about. The city reportedly did little to no marketing, and the city manager left on vacation just before it launched. The bike racks are empty. The street is empty. This is not an argument against closing streets. It’s an argument against closing them and then doing nothing.

A COVID-era parklet being dismantled on Burlingame Avenue. Parklets built on car-accessible streets face strict structural standards for vehicle impact. When the cars come back, the parklets go. Allowing cars on a street has compounding costs.

The city creates the space. The city can also take it away.

The merchants who understand this are the ones who have the most to gain from locking in the closure before the next administration reconsiders it.

What You Can Actually Do

Show up and buy something.

The most basic contribution is also the most important.

Consistent customer volume is what keeps vendors renewing.

If you go once and the tomatoes are good, go again.

Make it a Saturday habit.

Bring someone who’s never been.

Farmers markets spread by word of mouth more than advertising.

A new customer who has a good first experience becomes a regular.

Spend time, not just money.

Linger. Sit down if there’s somewhere to sit. Talk to a vendor.

The case for converting a temporary closure into something permanent is built on foot traffic counts and dwell time.

Every extra minute on that block is a data point.

Put furniture on it.

The city creates the space but doesn’t always furnish it.

A group I’m part of called B Street Boosters fundraised for three picnic tables and placed them on the empty pedestrianized block while the city moved slowly:

All three occupied the first time I walked by.

The city had created the space but hadn’t furnished it, so a small group of us raised money for picnic tables and put them there.

That’s the level of intervention that can move a street from empty to used.

Volunteer.

Most markets are understaffed. Setup, breakdown, staffing the information table.

This is what keeps management from burning out, which is one of the main reasons markets fail.

Help recruit vendors.

Know someone who makes jam, grows vegetables, does woodworking?

They can’t say yes if they are never asked!

Take on a bigger role.

If your market is fragile then someone needs to own it.

That might mean joining the organizing committee, taking over social media, or being the person who recruits new vendors each season.

Markets don’t grow by themselves.

B Street before the mural. The street was already worth being on.

B Street in San Mateo. The city chose a street mural that will last 5-7 years over a bigger upfront hardscape investment. You don’t have to choose between a coat of paint and a full rebuild.

The street fair that becomes weekly market that becomes a seasonal open streets program that becomes a permanent pedestrian corridor.

That progression happens because someone started at the bottom of the ladder and kept climbing.

The pitch to a skeptical merchant or city council isn’t “look what Times Square did.”

It’s:

You know how it’s always busier on farmers market Saturdays?

We want to find out if we can make more Saturdays like that.

Start there.

I want to be upfront about something: I go to city council meetings to protect bike lanes. I volunteer on a feedback committee for a bus agency. I use the phrase “induced demand” in casual conversation. I am exactly the kind of person whose eyes are supposed to bleed at Buc-ee’s.

For the uninitiated: Buc-ee’s is a Texas-born chain of highway travel centers that have become, improbably, a genuine American phenomenon.

We’re talking 74,000 square feet. A hundred-plus gas pumps. Bathrooms that have won national awards. A beaver mascot with the brand recognition of a mid-tier Disney character.

People with otherwise normal judgment will drive an hour out of their way to stop at one. They post TikToks, buy the merch, and go back over and over again.

I visited the Royse City, Texas location. Royse City is a town of about 25,000 on I-30, roughly 35 miles east of Dallas, that exists largely because of the highway running through it.

It is not the kind of place urbanists travel to for inspiration (I did it to visit to family).

I came away with something I did not expect: genuine intellectual respect.

Not for the car dependency it serves (that part is as bad as you’d imagine, and we’ll get there).

But rather respect for the specific, deliberate, and largely unspoken placemaking mastery that Buc-ee’s applies to their properties.

Urbanists talk endlessly about placemaking: how to create spaces that feel alive, welcoming, memorable.

Amsterdam is visited and celebrated, walking and biking is praised. We ban cars from downtowns.

And then we come home to bus stops with no shelter and no public bathrooms for miles.

Buc-ee’s, a gas station, is doing several things better than us. Here’s an honest accounting.

The Bathroom, Which Is Not a Small Thing

Let’s start here, because Buc-ee’s does.

The restroom entrance is announced with a sign the size of a doorway: RESTROOMS — World Famous!

In 2012, Buc-ee’s won the Cintas “Best Restroom in America” award.

They have dedicated bathroom staff trained in sanitization rotation protocols, earning $20+ an hour.

The founder, Arch Aplin, has described his vision for Buc-ee’s as “a happy, Texas version of Grand Central Station”.

The stalls have full-height doors, not the standard American public restroom garbage ones with a gap at the bottom large enough to make eye contact with a stranger

Actual floor-to-ceiling, hotel-style privacy. The tile is clean. The grout is clean. There’s art on the walls in the corridor leading in.

I stood in there longer than strictly necessary just to admire the rarity of a comfortable communal bathroom.

The sink area has redundant everything: two soap dispensers, two paper towel dispensers, a trash opening labeled “TRASH” cut directly into the counter so there’s no ambiguity about where anything goes. It is, functionally, a system designed not to fail. If one dispenser runs out, you are not stranded. This seems like a low bar, and it is, and yet.

There are two baby changing stations. Side by side. In a dedicated alcove. With the beaver logo on the sign above them.

I have changed diapers on the parking lot ground behind a furniture store. Buc-ee’s is not that.

The existence of two clean, accessible changing tables at a highway stop is not a luxury.

It is a decision someone made to take families seriously as users of this space.

Here’s the thing about bathrooms:

They are the single most reliable indicator of whether a space respects the humans in it.

A good bathroom says: we thought about you being here. We anticipated your needs. We staffed accordingly.

A bad bathroom (or worse: a locked one) says the opposite.

Most American public infrastructure including transit stations that urbanists celebrate fails this test constantly.

Buc-ee’s passes it because failing it would cost them customers.

The incentive structure is different, and the outcome is different. That’s worth sitting with.

A Few Other Things They’re Getting Right

Wayfinding as hospitality. Department signs run the length of the food hall wall:

• JERKY
• CHICKEN & FRIES
• BURRITOS & TACOS
• BAKERY

They’re large, consistent, and visible from across the store. You are never confused about where to go.

This sounds trivial until you’ve gotten lost at a transit station due to non-existent signage.

Abundance as a design philosophy. A teenager in a Buc-ee’s cowboy hat and branded denim apron is hand-assembling pulled pork sliders next to a “Certified Angus Beef” sign, at a gas station, off I-35.

Most transit and retail design optimizes relentlessly for the minimum viable experience.

Buc-ee’s goes the other direction and people drive an hour out of their way because of it.

Delight is infrastructure. There is a lowered 1950s Chevrolet pickup, painted Buc-ee’s red with the beaver logo on the door, parked inside the store, loaded with plush stuffed animals, with a giant beaver mascot sitting in the bed. It serves no transactional function. It exists to make you stop, look, and feel something — the same reason a good plaza has public art, the same reason a well-designed market has a focal point. Most gas stations have a hot dog roller. Buc-ee’s has a beaver truck. The gap between those two choices is the gap between a space and a place.

They know exactly who they’re for. “Don’t Try Me, Try Jesus.” “Salty.” “Bless Your Heart.” Three shirts, same rack, aimed at three completely different people who all feel seen. Buc-ee’s doesn’t achieve pluralism by being neutral — it achieves it by being extremely specific about multiple different someones simultaneously. This is harder than it looks, and most public spaces never figure it out.

The Contradiction You Can’t Design Around

Nobody biked here.

Buc-ee’s sits on seventeen acres. The pump canopy alone covers the footprint of a city block.

The parking lot is a sea of asphalt that glows like a sports stadium at night.

The design excellence we’ve been discussing exists entirely in service of car dependency.

Every single person who patronizes Buc-ee’s does so arriving by a car from a highway in a landscape with no sidewalks and no alternative.

The beautiful bathroom is a reward for driving.

The cowboy hat employee is making you a sandwich because driving on a Texas interstate is genuinely terrifying and you deserve a sweet and fatty treat.

And while we’re being blunt: Buc-ee’s isn’t a neutral marketplace. It has a point of view.

The Grunt Style display is an intentional reflection of their customer demographic.

Buc-ee’s is extraordinarily good at reading its real audience and serving them without apology.

That’s partly what makes it work, and it’s worth being clear-eyed about what that audience looks like and what it values.

This is not Copenhagen.

I don’t think the lesson here is “build Buc-ee’s in cities.”

A 74,000-square-foot car-dependent retail campus is a disaster in land-use terms.

The lesson is narrower and far more embarrassing than that.

The lesson is that Buc-ee’s holds itself to a standard of cleanliness, wayfinding, hospitality, and delight and applied it to a gas station because they had a financial reason to care about the experience of being in their space.

Our public bathrooms have users too (or they would have users too, if we unlocked them).

What’s our excuse for failing to compete with Buc-ee’s?