Extraordinarily good Aaron Naparstek piece from January (ostensibly) about the new Popwheels e-bike battery swap system in NYC. But it's actually about people and economic justice. As all transport/urban policy stories are. I'm fully on board with this narrative: the electrification revolution started a decade ago, led by low-income folks because electrifying small vehicles lowers the cost of participating in society. We need to embrace that and help make it even cheaper and safer. Experiencing Gogoro in person last year transformed my understanding of what the future of mobility looks like. It's cheap, useful, and abundant. Yet In the US the electrification story is twofold: automakers selling status via expensive and impractical (high-margin) vehicles that look like what we already have; and platforms exploiting the collapsing cost of new small electric vehicles to build expensive and impractical (high-margin) mobility networks. If the US is going to succeed in making the pivot to electric transport we need to embrace lowering costs and expanding access to the people our current transportation system fails. As this piece makes clear, that's already happening, but it involves people we treat as invisible/irrelevant and thus we're doing nothing to support it at a policy level, or with the technologies we build and sell in the US.
Artist and public historian
10moJulian Boggs everything my old friend Kevin is posting recently reminds me of your work, might be worth checking out.