Along for the Ride #191
Celebrating our fifth birthday (with a little help from our friends)!
Heya friends, happy friday!
Today’s edition is Very Special because it is our fifth birthday! Five years ago, on June 8th, 2018, I sent an email to 40 people on bcc from my gmail account and started spewing my thoughts on urban mobility, particularly AVs. As many of you know this was after I co-authored Siemens white paper on autonomous vehicles, and after I researched the subject for my Master’s dissertation, and after 1,000 conversations with folks just like you about why I questioned if AVs were really the transportation solutions cities actually needed.
Later in 2018, I transferred my small but growing readership to a platform called Revue. In 2021, I moved picked everybody up and moved ‘em over to substack because Twitter bought Revue (!) and the only thing I knew about that was that Twitter would own every subscriber’s data (every link you click on, how many times you open an email, and more) and that gave me Bad Vibes. I am proud to say in retrospect—and everything that’s happened with twitter recently—that was a great decision!!
This year I want to celebrate five years of Along for the Ride with some help from my friends. I asked folks to share with me what is currently inspiring them, on a personal level, about life, mobility, and cities. Given California might defund transit [1], my home in Canada is up in smoke—as well as many parts of the Eastern US [2], and London and the UK’s DfT is being sued for cutting funding for sustainable travel [3], hope can feel like a distant cousin twice removed that you sometimes see at a wedding every other year.
I’m excited to share these excerpts from friends, some of whom have subscribed since that first gmail. Without further ado, I present a teeny-tiny amount of hope.
❤️🔥 The Hope Edition ❤️🔥
John Surico, Journalist, Educator, Fellow Newsletter Writer Extraordinaire
Lately, I've used my bike ride home as a barometer of how far my city has come in rethinking its streets. For me, that's downtown Manhattan to western Queens, or about a 8-mile ride. Several years ago, it took an hour and a lot of sweat. Now, on an electric Citi Bike, it takes 40 minutes and a breeze.
Several years ago, the ride was about 30% protected — I had to dodge traffic on Delancey Street, got a brief reprieve on the Williamsburg Bridge, then rode the waterfront in patches of sharrows and green. Astoria, where I live, had no protected bike lanes. Now it's closer to 70%-80%: Delancey has a protected bike lane (and more soon thanks to federal dollars), there's now a regular Open Street where I ride alongside people walking, and the waterfront continues to expand. A north-south protected bike lane arose during the pandemic in Astoria, and one day soon, we'll have an east-west counterpart.
With each passing year, my bike ride home gets safer, more joyful and busier. And after 100 years of our streets looking the exact same, it's something to behold.
Fun fact: John and I tried to organize a Transport Camp in London in 2020, and well that didn’t go far, but we did become friends and I’m forever grateful for that. John also recently wrote about bike buses in the NYT!
Georgia Yexley, Founder of LOUD Mobility, Absolute Bad Ass
My experience in the micro-mobility and active travel world began in marketing, moved to commercial, and then into senior leadership. DEI has been a focus of my day-to-day work in the context of acknowledging the reality of who is the global majority—such as women… and building teams that aren't all duplicates of my bosses or me, makes for good business decisions.. The market is shifting. There's more support for businesses, even entrepreneurs, who's success metrics span broader than shareholder returns. There's recognition that thriving industries cater to the general public at large.
Fun fact: Georgia is the person I know who has been around the micromobility block more than any other: from Mobike in China, to Beryl’s hyper-local focus, and Tier’s global expansion she has been there, done that, and has the stories to prove it. Stay tuned for more from Georgia soon!
Debs Schrimmer, Mobility Wizard and Poet
I'm inspired most by the intersection of people and space. As a San Franciscan, I can't help but celebrate the victory of converting Golden Gate Park's JFK Drive — once choked with traffic and parked cars — to the JFK Promenade, which is now brimming with vitality and people. You see parents towing their kids to school on cargo ebikes, roller skaters spinning figure 8's to disco music, older couples on a leisurely stroll, fitness enthusiasts, dog walkers, drag queens, tourists, you name it. Where there were once humming engines and honking horns, there are the dings of a bike bell, an impromptu string quartet or piano soloist, boom boxes blasting top 40's music on a picnic blanket, the clinking of glasses from the beer garden, or even the beautiful silence of an early, foggy morning. What once seemed impossible now feels like how it's always been, in its rightful place.
Sempervirens
A poem by Debs that she wrote after a bike ride through the Redwoods.
I want to be like the mighty Redwood
Who stands rooted in the aftermath of the burn.
Resolute and uncompromising,
She is still magnificent.
Weathered but not broken
She grows back anew —
Reaching towards the sunlight.
Fun fact: Debs is my favourite neighbour ever, and sometimes she lets me dog sit her sheepadoodle Pax (the ultimate source of all joy: dogs). Debs also taught me how to clip into speedy road bike shoes, and I have yet to fall over once when speedy cycling, and I owe it all to her!
Marcel Moran, Ph.D of All Things Cool and Transport Related
I'm inspired by Paris reclaiming its streets away from cars and giving it back to pedestrians and cyclists. The city hums with bikes throughout the day, with more and higher-quality bike lanes being rolled out each week. People of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds are biking, and it's enriching the entire feel of Paris.
Fun fact: Marcel has been subscribed since Day 1. So cool, so nerdy.
Laura Fox, Queen of all Urban Mobility
I grew up in a transit desert on the Southside of Chicago and traveled 60-70 minutes each way to get to high school via a long walk to a train, and then a bus —so how we get from A to B was constantly top of mind (and a pain point). But, it wasn’t until I moved to Doha, Qatar, at the age of 24 that I realized that I wanted to work on transportation issues within my career. I was a pedestrian in a city almost hostile to folks who chose to travel in anyway other than a personal car. In addition to the extreme heat, Doha lacked sidewalks across most of the city and had no public transit at that time. I felt like a lonely advocate for transportation alternatives in that setting; since then, I’ve been inspired by the incredible groundswell from everyday citizen advocates in cities globally for better streets for people rather than cars, from local bike trains and justice rides, to “train bragging” and urbanist bus memes. Here’s to the joy of embracing more livable streets, together :)
Fun fact: In my early days at Lyft, the first project I ever worked on was with Laura and I am forever grateful that the universal orbs put me in the same zoom room as her. P.S. you can learn more about her venture firm, Streetlife Venture, here.
Tejus Shankar, Sustainable Mobility Sorcerer
Growing up in Tokyo as a kid, I became obsessed with trains and public transportation. That carried over into Thomas the Tank Engine, bullet trains, you name it! Moving back to the Chicago suburbs after living in Tokyo, I wondered why I couldn’t walk down the street, go to a corner store, or interact more with those living around me. Going to college in the City of Chicago, these thoughts motivated me to write my public policy thesis around funding new transit infrastructure through value capture, enabling more walkable, transit-friendly communities through the built environment. I also became a cycling enthusiast while in high school and college, and when I graduated the first bikeshare systems rolled out. For me, Divvy was supreme... so much so that my sister told me at the time that I should leave my previous job as a consultant to go work for Divvy. A couple years ago, I did just that (almost). My love for bikes/bikeshare, trains/transit continue and I'm excited to continue along for this multimodal ride.
Fun fact: Tejus is also my neighbour (!), and he lives on Page Slow Street (woop-woop), and sometimes when I go on morning walks I take selfies outside of his home and send them to him after, like the perfectly normal human being that I am.
Chante Harris, Climate Tech Guru
It is no secret that EV charging is a primary focus of this Administration, industry, and investment with mobility making up a significant amount of the 80% of climate unicorns in 2022. With this emphasis on the role of transportation in our energy transition, there has also been increased focus on a part of the puzzle that has historically been overlooked. This piece is infrastructure and its inevitable tie to successfully integrating new modes of transportation and the energy that powers them successfully across the country and globe. I'm excited by this momentum not only because of the return of credits through IRA that incentive it's financing but the return to the human capital that is required and critical to implement all of it. Funders and founders are increasingly focused on the processes, projects, and workforce development necessary to bring these solutions to life. I'm excited and hopeful about what this reckoning means for the way that we creatively imagine, finance, and implement interconnected strategies to deploy technologies that value place, people, and the future of our planet.
Fun fact: Chante was one of my first friends I met through this newsletter. Forever grateful and impressed for her kinship.
A huge thank you to John, Georgia, Debs, Marcel, Laura, Tejus, and Chante. And a massive thank you to you for everything these past five years. What inspires me the most is each and every one of you (I am a sap, and I stand by it forever). Every new subscriber, every newsletter open, and every typo that you don’t correct (despite the fact that it probably made your eye glitch a little), mean the world to me.
Here’s to five more years, and five thousand more typos.
Have a beautiful weekend friends. Tap the heart to show our hope-filled contributors some love.
Sarah
