Some 110 years ago, a picturesque new road known as Roosevelt Boulevard began ferrying vehicles across the nascent but burgeoning neighborhoods of North and Northeast Philadelphia. At first, traffic was light, but it rapidly thickened as car ownership rose and the surrounding area developed. By the 1950s, when the boulevard expanded to meet the new Schuylkill Expressway, it was lined with row houses and shops. Today, what was initially a bucolic parkway has become a traffic-snarled, 12-lane thoroughfare snaking its way through neighborhoods that house 1 in 3 Philadelphians.

It is, by all accounts, a mess. 

Dubbed the “corridor of death,” Roosevelt Boulevard has been named the most dangerous street in the city (and among the most dangerous in the nation). In 2021, 24 crashes resulting in deaths or serious injuries took place there. Residents “want to get across the street to the pharmacy to get their medication or get across the street to the supermarket,” Latanya Byrd, whose niece and three nephews were killed in a crash on the boulevard in 2013, said in a video produced by Smart Growth America. “It may take two, maybe three lights, for them to get all the way across.” 

It’s not just pedestrians who loathe Roosevelt Boulevard. “People who walk, drive, or take public transit are all pretty badly screwed,” Philadelphia’s public radio station declared in 2017. 

Aware of the road’s shortcomings, city officials have long sought design changes that would reduce crashes. But they are powerless to act on their own, because the boulevard is controlled by the state of Pennsylvania.

That situation is common across the United States, where many of the most deadly, polluting, and generally awful urban streets are overseen by state departments of transportation (DOTs). Often they were constructed decades ago, when the surrounding areas were sparsely populated. 

Although only 14 percent of urban road miles nationwide are under state control, two-thirds of all crash deaths in the 101 largest metro areas occur there, according to a recent Transportation for America report. In some places, this disparity is widening: From 2016 to 2022, road fatalities in Austin, Texas, fell 20 percent on locally managed roads while soaring 98 percent on those the state oversees. 

“The country is littered with roads that are a legacy of the past, that don’t work very well, and that drive people crazy,” said US Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who calls them “legacy highways.”

Instead of fixing such roadways, state officials tend to keep them as they are, citing limited resources or a need to maintain traffic speeds. In doing so, they constrain the capacity of even the most comprehensive local reforms to respond to urgent problems like car crash deaths, which are far more widespread in the US than among peer countries, or unreliable bus service. 

Unless state DOTs recognize that a successful urban road must do more than facilitate fast car trips, that problem will persist. 

Why we have state highways

In the early 1900s, states from coast to coast created transportation agencies to build smooth, wide roads that enabled long-distance car trips. New high-capacity roadways traversed forests and farmland, often terminating at what was then the urban edge. When Americans went on a car-buying binge after World War II, states like Michigan widened their highways with the goal of keeping traffic moving quickly, a prime directive for engineers. 

High-speed roadways fed rapid suburbanization, with new developments mushrooming on the city periphery. Columbus, Ohio, for instance, roughly doubled in population from 1950 and 2000, while its land area quintupled. Sprawling cities in the South and Southwest emerged seemingly overnight, while new suburbs encircled older metropolises in the North.

In these newly urbanized areas, state highways that had previously meandered through the countryside were now lined with retail and housing. Their designers had initially paid little attention to transit, sidewalks, or tree cover — features that are often afterthoughts for rural roads, but crucial in more densely populated areas.

As with Philadelphia’s Roosevelt Boulevard, the width and traffic speed of state roads in urban neighborhoods now frequently clash with local desires for street safety, quality transit service, and pedestrian comfort. But revising them is rarely a priority for state DOTs engaged in a Sisyphean battle against traffic congestion.

“If a state agency’s primary focus is on moving vehicles, they’re looking at reducing delays and building clear zones” that remove objects such as trees next to a road, where errant drivers might strike them, said Kristina Swallow, who previously led the Nevada DOT as well as urban planning for Tucson, Arizona. “At the local level, you’re looking at a bunch of other activities. You have people walking or on a bike, so you may be okay with some congestion, because you know that’s what happens when people are coming into an economically vibrant community.”

City-state tensions over state highways can take many forms. Roadway safety is often a flashpoint, since fixes frequently involve slowing traffic that state officials want to keep flowing. In San Antonio, for instance, the city negotiated for years with the Texas DOT to add sidewalks and bike lanes to Broadway, a state arterial with seven lanes. Last year the state scuttled that plan at the 11th hour, leaving Broadway’s current design in place. 

Local efforts to improve transit service can also face state resistance. In September, Madison, Wisconsin, launched its first bus rapid transit (BRT) line, a fast form of bus service that relies on dedicated bus lanes. But much of its route runs along East Washington, an arterial managed by Wisconsin, and the state transportation department prevented Madison from making the entire BRT lane bus-only during rush hour. That could sabotage the new service out of the gate. 

“These dedicated bus lanes would serve the bus best in the heaviest traffic, so it’s counterintuitive to typical BRT design,” said Chris McCahill, who leads the State Smart Transportation Initiative at the University of Wisconsin and serves on Madison’s transportation commission. Wisconsin’s DOT did not respond to a request for comment.

The whole point of fast transit programs like BRT is to get more people to ride transit instead of driving, thereby increasing the total human capacity of a road since buses are much more space-efficient than cars. But that logic can escape state transportation executives oriented toward longer, intercity trips instead of shorter, intracity ones, as well as highway engineers trained to focus on maximizing the speed of all vehicles, regardless of how many people are inside them. 

Even sympathetic state transportation officials may not fix dysfunctional urban roadways due to limited resources and competing needs that include expensive upgrades to bridges and interstates. Critical but relatively small-dollar projects, such as street intersection adjustments that better serve pedestrians or bus riders, can get lost in the shuffle. Lacking the authority to make changes themselves, city officials are stuck. 

“How do you create connected networks when you don’t own the intersection, and to fix it you have to compete at the state level with 500 other projects?” said Stefanie Seskin, the director of policy and practice at the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).

As an example, Seskin cited the state-controlled St. Mary’s Street bridge in Brookline, a dense suburb adjacent to Boston. “It’s the only way to get to and from Boston that isn’t on a major, super busy arterial,” she said. “It’s not structurally deficient, but from the position of those walking, biking, and using transit, it’s just not functioning well. It requires a reconstruction” — something that Massachusetts has not done.

The beginnings of a paradigm shift in transportation policy

With deaths among US pedestrians and cyclists hitting a 40-year high in 2022, a growing number of state DOTs are starting to acknowledge that maximizing vehicle speed is not the only goal that matters on urban roadways. The Pennsylvania DOT, for example, is now working with Philadelphia to at last bring lane redesigns, bus lane improvements, and speed cameras to Roosevelt Boulevard. On the other side of the country, the head of the Washington state DOT has requested $150 million from the state legislature to address the shortcomings of legacy highways. 

“I think there are people in every single state DOT who want to be more proactive and to plan for safer streets for people who are moving, no matter what mode of transportation they use,” Seskin told me. “I don’t think that that was necessarily the case 20 years ago.” 

Still, fixing the deficiencies of state roadways requires a paradigm shift within state DOTs, with senior officials accepting that maximizing car speeds jeopardizes crucial local priorities like accommodating pedestrians, enabling rapid transit service, or supporting outdoor dining. 

Such nuance can escape state highway engineers trained with a myopic focus on vehicle speed. “Many of the people doing roadway design work for states are still stuck in the old model,” said Billy Hattaway, an engineer who previously held senior transportation roles in the Florida DOT as well as the city of Orlando.

McCahill, of the State Smart Transportation Initiative, empathized with those toiling within state DOTs. “Think about their position as engineers,” he said. “They’ve got their federal highway design guidelines, they’ve got their state guidelines. They’ve been conditioned to be conservative and not try new things.”

Historically, those roadway design guidelines have prioritized free-flowing traffic. Making them more malleable could empower engineers to get more creative. Instead of applying one-size-fits-all rules for elements like lane widths and traffic lights, “context-sensitive design” encourages engineers working in urban settings to add pedestrian crossings, narrow lanes, and other features that can support local transportation needs. McCahill applauded Florida’s DOT for recently “rewriting” its design guide to incorporate such context-sensitive layouts. 

Federal money could help finance such redesigns — if state officials know how to use it. “There’s a lack of knowledge about the flexibility of federal dollars, with misunderstandings and different interpretations,” said NACTO’s Seskin. Recognizing the issue, over the summer, the Federal Highway Administration published guidance and held a webinar highlighting dozens of federal funding programs available to upgrade legacy highways.

Then there is an alternative approach: Rather than revise problematic roads themselves, states can hand them over to local officials, letting them manage improvements and maintenance. Washington state, for instance, in 2011 transferred a 2.5-mile strip of state road 522 to the Seattle suburb of Bothell. But such moves are not always financially feasible. 

“The risk is that when you transfer a highway to local government, you take away the capacity to properly fund it over the long term” because the city becomes responsible for upkeep, said Brittney Kohler, the legislative director of transportation and infrastructure for the National League of Cities. Unless the revamped road spurs development that creates new tax revenue, as it did in Bothell, cash-strapped cities may be unable to afford the costs of retrofits and ongoing maintenance.

States and cities can work together to fix legacy highways — and federal support can help

In Portland, Oregon, pretty much everyone seems to agree that 82nd Avenue, a major thoroughfare that the state manages, is a disaster. 

Originally a little-used roadway marking the eastern edge of the city, 82nd Avenue has developed into a bustling arterial. It’s been a dangerous eyesore for decades, with potholed pavement, insufficient pedestrian crossings, inadequate lighting, and minimal tree cover, said Art Pearce, a deputy director for the Portland Bureau of Transportation. According to city statistics, from 2012 to 2021, crashes on the thoroughfare caused 14 deaths and 122 serious injuries. At least two-thirds of crash victims were pedestrians, bicyclists, or occupants of cars turning left at intersections without traffic signals. 

During winter storms, Pearce said state workers would often clear nearby Interstate 205 but leave 82nd Avenue unplowed, leaving the city to do it without compensation. “Our priority in snow and ice is to keep public transit moving, and 82nd Avenue has the highest transit ridership in the whole state,” he said.

Nearby residents and business owners have been begging local officials to revamp 82nd Avenue for decades, said Pearce and Blumenauer (whose congressional district includes Portland). The state was willing to transfer the roadway to the city, but the local officials wanted more than a handshake.

“We were like, if you give us $500 million, the city will take over 82nd Avenue and fix it,” Pearce said. “The state officials answered, ‘We don’t have $500 million, so hey, good meeting.’”

A breakthrough came in 2021, when the American Rescue Plan Act offered states and cities a one-time influx of federal funding. Matching that money with contributions of their own, the state and city negotiated a transfer of seven miles of 82nd Avenue from the Oregon DOT to Portland. Some $185 million will go toward new features including sidewalk extensions, trees, a BRT line, and curb cuts for those using a wheelchair or stroller. Blumenauer, who said that reconstructing 82nd Avenue has been a personal goal for 35 years, led US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on a tour of the roadway last year.

The success story is “a bit of a one-off,” Blumenauer admits, reliant on stimulus dollars tied to the Covid-19 pandemic. But a dedicated federal funding source could enable similar roadway reboots nationwide.

At the moment, President-elect Donald Trump and incoming congressional Republicans show little appetite for transportation reforms, but a golden opportunity will come during the development of the next multiyear surface transportation bill, which is expected to be passed after the 2026 midterms. Although Blumenauer did not run for reelection this month, he said he hopes the future bill will include a competitive grant program that invites state and local officials to submit joint proposals to upgrade state highways in urban areas, with federal dollars acting as a sweetener.

Otherwise, these state roads will continue to obstruct urban residents’ most cherished goals of safety, clean air, and public space. Flourishing cities cannot coexist with fast, decrepit roads. Too many state officials have not yet learned that lesson.

Correction, November 13, 6 pm ET: An earlier version of this story miscalculated the number of pedestrian fatalities on Roosevelt Boulevard in 2022. There were 59 city-wide.

Despite a recent slowdown in US sales, global forecasts for electric vehicles remain bullish. Countries across North America, Europe, and Asia are expanding charger networks and offering EV subsidies; global EV sales are projected to nearly triple by 2030, reaching 40 million vehicles annually. 

The incipient wave of EV purchases raises a question: What will happen to the millions of gas-powered cars whose owners no longer want them?

The likely answer: Rather than scrapping used gas vehicles or selling them domestically, rich nations will dispatch them to developing countries where limited incomes and low levels of car ownership have created eager buyers for even older, substandard models. 

An influx of used gas cars would be a welcome development for those in the Global South who aspire to automobile ownership, a luxury that many in affluent countries take for granted. But it would undermine efforts to mitigate climate change, since shifting gas guzzlers from one country to another doesn’t lower global emissions. For developing countries themselves, a sharp increase in car ownership could amplify calls to build auto-reliant infrastructure, making it harder to construct the dense neighborhoods and transit networks that can foster more sustainable growth. And since these imported used cars would be fueled by gasoline, air quality would further decline in cities that are already choked with smog.

The world is in an era of polycrisis, facing concurrent challenges including climate change, toxic air, and extreme inequality. Difficult trade-offs are often inevitable. Such is the case with the thorny issue of what to do with the millions of gas cars that the rich world will discard as its fleets are electrified. 

Electrification is a necessary goal. And it’s natural for people in the developing world to desire the same luxuries that characterize middle-class comfort in wealthier countries. The question is how to manage a transition with enormous stakes that has largely been ignored. The experts who do pay attention are growing alarmed.

“I’m really worried that everything is going to be gas vehicles for many years, maybe decades,” said Godwin Ayetor, a senior lecturer in engineering at Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. “I’m worried about the health implications, and also the congestion. It’s already difficult to walk through Accra because of all the traffic, and the cars keep coming.”

Today’s steady flow of used cars into the Global South could become a torrent as the rich world electrifies. A deluge of gas vehicles would be a double-edged sword for low-income nations — and a risk to the planet.

How used cars move from rich nations to poor ones

Although it generates few headlines, a massive industry transports used cars across borders every day, with exporters collecting lower-quality models from dealers and wholesale auctions. Ayetor noted that colonial legacies are reflected in the trade flows: the UK, with its car cabins designed for drivers who keep to the left, tends to ship to former colonies like Kenya and Tanzania that still follow the same rules.

According to a report issued in June by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), some 3.1 million used cars were exported in 2022, up from 2.4 million in 2015. Most come from Japan, Europe, and the United States. (In the US, around 7 percent of all cars no longer in use are sent abroad. The rest end up in junkyards where their parts and materiel are sold off.)

About one in three exported used vehicles is destined for Africa, followed by Eastern Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Imported models often dominate local auto sales, since international carmakers send few new vehicles to the Global South and rarely establish production facilities there. (In sub-Saharan Africa, only South Africa has local factories.)

The developing world’s demand for cars is robust, in large part because comparatively few people own one. According to one 2020 estimate, the US had 860 cars for every 1,000 residents, while South Africa had 176, Morocco 112, and Nigeria just 56. Meanwhile, growing populations provide a steady supply of new potential customers. Africa is home to all of the world’s 20 fastest-growing countries, with Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, and Uganda expanding their populations by at least 3 percent per year. (For comparison, the US population is growing at a 0.67 percent rate). 

As long as their price is right, aged or damaged used cars will be snapped up in the Global South. Many vehicles shipped from abroad have been in crashes, stripped of parts, or manufactured decades ago, when emissions and safety rules were more lax. A 2020 study by the government of the Netherlands found that most Dutch used cars sent to Africa lacked a roadworthiness certificate; many were manufactured over 20 years ago. 

“Old cars mean old technologies,” said Ayetor, “and old technologies means they don’t have modern systems to reduce the impact of the emissions before they leach out into the atmosphere.”

Wealthy countries have generally turned a blind eye to the shoddy quality of used cars sent overseas; they are profitable transactions for domestic businesses and the risks are largely borne elsewhere. “Most countries do not impose significant restrictions on trading unroadworthy or highly polluting vehicles,” concluded a recent study by the International Transport Forum, the transportation arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The receiving countries can also take a laissez faire approach. About half the 146 nations examined by UNEP do not regulate used car age or quality. Others have adopted policies such as barring used car imports outright (as in South Africa), banning older cars (as in Kenya, where imported vehicles must be less than eight years old), and scaling import tax rates with the age of the vehicle (as in Ghana). 

Adjacent nations may have different import rules, however, which creates loopholes.

“What happens is that vehicles are exported to one country, and then they go to neighboring countries as well,” said Joseph Mashele, who was an automotive regulator in South Africa before recently joining Jaguar Land Rover. 

Case in point: Despite South Africa’s official ban on used cars, tens of thousands still arrive annually.

“Really shady cars make it into emerging economies, because there is still a market for them,” said Andreas Kopf, an author of the ITF’s recent report. His team found that roughly a quarter of used cars sent to the developing world adhere to emissions standards that are at least 21 years old.

Many of these cars lack modern safety features and pollution controls that are commonplace in newer vehicles made in wealthier countries. That is a particular concern in Africa, which despite its low level of car ownership still has the world’s highest rates of road deaths and some of its dirtiest air, according to the World Health Organization.

In recent years, the developing world’s voracious appetite for used cars has caught the attention of senior leaders in China, an emerging colossus of automotive manufacturing. Until 2019, China banned the export of used vehicles, focusing instead on supplying its burgeoning domestic market. Now those restrictions have been removed, and the Chinese government is actively promoting the used car trade because it can attract foreign currency and stoke domestic demand for automaking heavyweights like BYD and Geely. By sending older gas-powered cars out of the country, China can also nudge residents to buy new EVs, which the government favors with subsidies and a recent cash-for-clunkers program that provides money to those trading in an older-model car.

“You can just pull existing internal combustion engine cars out of your fleet, and then you stimulate new sales,” Kopf said. “This is what they are doing in China.” 

Although China exported only 40,000 used cars in 2022, that figure is expected to skyrocket. According to the ITF’s analysis, Chinese used car exports may total 8 million vehicles annually within the next decade, more than double current trade flows from Europe, East Asia, and North America combined.

Still, China’s future trade in used cars could be dwarfed by a tsunami of gas vehicles set to depart the wealthy world. Its cause: Electrification.

Electrification will push even more vehicles to the developing world

With privately owned automobiles responsible for about 10 percent of global CO₂ emissions (and more than twice that share in the US), wealthy nations are rightly moving to electrify their vehicles as quickly as possible. The European Union, for instance, has committed to ending the sales of gas-powered cars by 2035, around the same time as Japan. In the US, the Biden administration has vowed that a majority of new cars will be all-electric or hybrid by 2032.

In May, electric and hybrid vehicles represented a little less than half of new car sales in the European Union and under 7 percent in the US. But as electrification ramps up, the Global North’s demand for gas cars — including used ones — will wane. 

“The total number of cars in rich countries is relatively constant,” said Kopf. “That means that if an EV is entering the fleet, a combustion engine is leaving.” With fewer people shopping for a used gas car within rich countries, more will likely be sent abroad — potentially a whole lot more. 

Norway, the world’s most aggressive adopter of EVs, provides a preview of what’s to come. With the government providing an array of generous incentives, Norwegians have gone all-in on electric models, which comprise over 90 percent of new car purchases. Around one in four cars on the road in Norway is now electric, compared to under 2 percent in the US. 

Norway’s EV embrace has triggered a veritable explosion in exports of used gas vehicles: They more than quadrupled in the decade from 2012 to 2022. 

As other rich nations electrify their own fleets, ITF’s Kopf said he anticipates “similar behavior” to what Norway has experienced. If used car exports in Europe, East Asia, and North America match Norway’s trajectory, those regions would collectively ship 12 million gas vehicles per year, on top of the potentially 8 million coming from China. A total of 20 million used gas cars exported annually to developing nations would be seven times greater than current levels. 

That would be welcome news for those in lower-income nations who yearn to own their own car, since the laws of supply and demand predict that a growing supply of used vehicles would lower their market price. Ayetor said that “a lot of Africans are hoping” that such a scenario unfolds.

But Jane Akumu, a Nairobi-based transport expert at UNEP, said that used car buyers in the Global South should be careful what they wish for, because aged models may not be the bargain that they appear. “If you are importing 20-year-old cars, you have to bring in an equal shipment of parts, because they will break down so quickly,” she told me, noting that immobile cars can clog motorways, thickening traffic as well as smog.

Theoretically, an influx of used cars could reduce emissions and breakdowns if newer, cleaner vehicles were displacing the older and dirtier models currently in use. But no one I spoke with expects that to happen. Instead, imported gas guzzlers would be added to the existing fleet — increasing total pollution. 

“A new used car is not going to replace an older one; it’s just going to be absorbed,” Kopf said. “So you’ll have the 30-year-old car running around, plus the new 10-year-old car.” 

A 2010 study of used cars shipped from the US to Mexico supports his point: The authors found that although imported cars were cleaner than the average Mexican car, their arrival still increased total emissions because they added to, rather than supplanted, the preexisting vehicle fleet.

The world needs a plan to adapt

The risks of aged, polluting cars sent abroad will not be borne by the Global South alone. Climate change is a planetary phenomenon; driving a gas guzzler produces the same amount of emissions in Lusaka as it would in London or Los Angeles. Reducing greenhouse gasses requires reducing total vehicle emissions, not just shifting their location.

In an ideal world, electrification would enable the rich world to scrap its most decrepit gas cars. Instead, wealthy nations are likely to ship them to poorer countries, which will be left to figure out what to do when even the most MacGyver-like mechanics cannot keep them running.

“All of your worst vehicles end up here,” Ayetor said. “When we want to get rid of the vehicle, what do we do?” No wealthy nations currently screen exported vehicles to weed out those that flunk basic quality tests, Kopf said. But that may soon change.

The European Union is now considering new regulations that would prohibit exporting “end of life” vehicles, requiring that cars shipped abroad obtain a certificate confirming their roadworthiness. Its adoption would be a “game-changer,” according to UNEP’s Akumu. (She and Kopf said they know of no comparable proposals under consideration in North America.)

But Mashele noted that export controls provide only a partial solution. “Sometimes things happen in transit,” he said, “and certain equipment has been tampered with or removed,” making the vehicle more polluting or dangerous upon arrival than when leaving its port of origin. He wants to see stricter emissions and safety checks in the Global South, too.

Those countries have a lot of policy work to do. In 2023 the UNEP gave 57 developing nations a rating of “weak” or “very weak” for their vehicle import rules, with the bulk of them in Africa. But the UNEP did note some progress, such as the five East African countries that in 2022 required imported vehicles to adhere to the EU’s Euro 4 emissions standards, which were introduced in 2006. That move followed a similar one in 2021 by a bloc of 15 West African countries, which stipulated that imported used cars follow Euro 4 and be less than 10 years old. Syncing such rules can prevent importers from circumventing countries with strong regulations by shipping to their less stringent neighbors instead. 

But even if strict vehicle standards are applied universally, the number of used gas cars flowing into the developing world is still poised to rise as the rich world electrifies. As the ranks of car owners in the Global South expand, many are likely to demand new roads to drive on and more places to park. Bowing to such requests will be risky. 

A century ago, American leaders built highways and reconfigured cities to accommodate the automobile, in the process locking the country into car-oriented development that has lengthened commutes, increased emissions, and undermined city life. The automobile’s dominance has also raised the cost of living: The average American spends 16 percent of their income on transportation in 2020, 5 percentage points higher than those in the denser and more transit-rich nations of the European Union.

UNEP’s Akumu is already concerned by what she is seeing in Kenya. A few years ago, she said, nearly half of Nairobi’s children walked to school. But “that number keeps going down, because when you graduate in income, you want to own a car.”

As incomes in the Global South grow, density and robust transit service could make driving an option rather than a necessity. For example, South Korea and Taiwan became wealthy nations in the latter half of the 20th century, and both built excellent mass transportation systems. In 2020, their rates of car ownership (458 per 1,000 people in South Korea and 344 per 1,000 in Taiwan) were far below the US (860 per 1,000).

Investing in multimodal infrastructure now could help lower-income countries avoid the planning mistakes that the US made a century ago. Many residents of the Global South are understandably eager to purchase their first motor vehicle, but “we need to make sure that an influx of cars does not displace a potential buildup of public transportation,” Kopf said.

A number of such projects are currently in the works, including new subways in Abidjan and Algiers and an urban rail network in Kinshasa. Meanwhile, Tanzania is revamping its rail system, while Botswana and Namibia are building a Trans-Kalahari Railway. As World Bank transport researchers argued in a recent blog post, “investing in rail can help put African cities on a more sustainable track,” noting that many existing tracks could be adjusted to ferry people as well as goods. 

Indeed, that would be the wisest strategy to manage an impending glut of used gas cars: ensure that people can flourish without one, regardless of where they live.

Facing a barrage of criticism following her 11th-hour turn against congestion pricing in Manhattan, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul held a hastily planned press conference last Friday evening — not a time when politicians tend to spotlight issues they’re glad to talk about. Trying to justify her about-face, she invoked Manhattan merchants fearful that congestion pricing would cripple them by deterring suburban patrons unwilling to pay a $15 weekday toll on vehicles entering Manhattan south of 60th Street.

Small business owners are “deathly afraid that they’ll lose their customers who may come in from places like New Jersey,” she said, mentioning Comfort Diner, Townhouse Diner, and Pershing Square, whose owner is apparently “very happy” with her decision to slam the brakes on congestion pricing. Answering a question from the press, she added, “I encourage you to go to the next diner with me … watch the people come over and thank me.”

Hochul’s claims drew eyerolls from those wondering how many people were using a car to reach diners in the densest, most transit-rich county in the country — particularly Pershing Square, which is across the street from Grand Central Station. Transportation outlet Streetsblog accused the governor of “plutocratic populism” — deferring to the preferences of the affluent over the public interest — while a Gothamist reporter who visited all three of the restaurants spoke with one owner who vehemently denied ever discussing congestion pricing with her.

In New York City, where the majority of residents don’t own a car, it seems odd to assert that a policy benefitting transit users, pedestrians, and cyclists is bad for attracting customers. Commuters who drive into Manhattan have significantly higher incomes than others who work in the borough, so Hochul’s claim that killing congestion pricing would relieve New York’s cost of living crisis is just as suspect.   

Even if Hochul is telling the truth about restaurateurs’ complaints, they’re still a terrible justification for her flip-flop on congestion pricing. The same goes for public leaders elsewhere who scuttle other urban transportation reforms that merchants often loathe, such as replacing street parking with dedicated lanes for bikes and buses. When it comes to shoppers’ travel habits, small business owners simply don’t know what they’re talking about — and not just in New York.

Small business owners wildly overestimate how many customers arrive by car

In study after study in city after city around the world, researchers have found that merchants exaggerate the share of patrons who arrive by car and undercount those who walk, bike, or ride transit. Those misperceptions lead them to oppose transportation reforms that would limit the presence of cars and make urban neighborhoods cleaner, more pleasant, and less polluted — and would likely increase spending at their business, too.

Consider a 2021 study in Berlin, in which researchers asked 145 shopkeepers and over 2,000 shoppers about travel behavior. The share of shoppers who drove was 15 percent below what shopkeepers predicted, while the portion who took transit, walked, and biked was higher (by 8.1 percent, 6.2 percent, and 3 percent, respectively). Similarly, a 2011 study of Dublin concluded that business owners overestimated the percentage of customers arriving by car and undercounted those who didn’t. The same bias has been observed in Graz, Austria, and Bristol, England.

It’s a similar story in North America. In Toronto, a group of small business owners vehemently opposed new bike lanes on Bloor Street in 2016, but a subsequent academic analysis found that retail spending and customer counts increased after the bike lanes were installed. 

A 2013 study of the Portland, Oregon region concluded that “bicyclists, transit users, and pedestrians are competitive consumers and, for all businesses except supermarkets, spend more on average than those who drive.” That analysis surprised many business owners in the relatively car-centric city, prompting one convenience store chain to install bike racks near its entryways, said Kelly Clifton, a professor of community and regional planning at the University of British Columbia who co-authored the study.

The findings about business owners’ perceptions of customer travel are remarkably consistent. I have yet to see a single study where survey respondents accurately estimated their customers’ modal split or made errors in the opposite direction (i.e., undercounting those who drive and overestimating non-drivers). The bottom line: Business owners think shoppers use cars more often than they actually do.

It’s easy to see how such misperceptions could arise. Shopkeepers and restaurateurs themselves may drive to work, perhaps because they travel at night when transit is closed or have to carry equipment. Last year, a chamber of commerce in Chicago’s Lakeview and Roscoe Village neighborhoods surveyed local residents and businesses about how they prefer to navigate the community, finding that 83 percent of residents preferred to walk or bike, while a majority of business respondents chose driving. A cognitive bias known as the false-consensus effect could lead such business owners to mistakenly assume that their customers drive just as much as they do. 

Merchants may also commute from relatively far away, which (again, because of the false-consensus effect) leads them to undercount customers who live close enough to walk, bike, or ride the bus. One piece of supporting evidence for that hypothesis: The 2021 Berlin study found that the average shopkeeper thought about one in eight customers lived within a kilometer of their establishment, but more than half of surveyed shoppers said that they did.

It’s also possible that business owners are misled by what they are told about local transportation. Think about it: If you’re on your way to a restaurant and your train is delayed or you can’t find a nearby bike corral, would you complain to the staff? The thought likely wouldn’t cross your mind. But what if you were in a car, and you had to circle the block a few times before squeezing into a parking spot? Now the odds of sharing your annoyance are probably higher, since there are few more universal American experiences than complaining about parking. If store owners hear more griping from car owners than from transit riders, cyclists, and walkers, they might conclude that the bulk of their customers are driving — and that any policy that worsens drivers’ burden could spell doom.

Don’t let pro-car bias kill good policy

Whatever its genesis, the pro-car bias of business owners presents a major roadblock to urban policy reform. In the District of Columbia, small business owners have been among the most vociferous critics of a 2.7-mile dedicated bike lane that had been planned for Connecticut Avenue, a major thoroughfare in the city’s northwest quadrant, before Mayor Muriel Bowser abruptly reversed course in April and declared the bike lanes dead. Despite frequent hostility from small business owners, the installation of bike lanes has had a positive or neutral effect on retail sales in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Los Angeles. 

Dedicated road lanes for buses are similarly despised by many business owners; they have been opposed in San Francisco, Montreal, and Indianapolis (where the Indianapolis Star observed that the conflict pitted “business vs. neighbor,” with the bus lanes enjoying widespread community support).

In New York City, many employers, especially large ones, have backed congestion pricing, since the policy would provide desperately needed funding to modernize the subway system that underpins the city’s economy. The head of the Partnership for New York City, a powerful chamber of commerce, offered strong support for the policy after Hochul’s sudden reversal last week. But a loud group of small business owners has warned of crashing sales from congestion pricing. Speaking to ABC 7 in February, Steven Traube, the owner of the Wall Street Grill and a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to block congestion pricing, said that if the policy is implemented, he will “definitely [have] to rein back on staff because I know sales will go down.”

Regardless of whether Hochul really did meet lots of patrons in Manhattan diners who drove there from New Jersey (which, by the way, has the most diners per capita in the country), it’s certainly plausible that she has heard from business owners insisting that congestion pricing would crush them. A wise response would have been to ask if they had done a customer survey to make sure that they know how their patrons are arriving. Based on findings from prior research, they probably don’t.

Simply accepting business owners’ criticism of congestion pricing at face value is a terrible reason to jettison a policy that would improve transit service, enhance quality of life, and reduce emissions that damage the planet as well as human health.

Then again, perhaps Hochul is well aware that her argument is bogus. She just can’t find a better one.

OSLO, Norway — With motor vehicles generating nearly a 10th of global CO2 emissions, governments and environmentalists around the world are scrambling to mitigate the damage. In wealthy countries, strategies often revolve around electrifying cars — and for good reason, many are looking to Norway for inspiration.

Over the last decade, Norway has emerged as the world’s undisputed leader in electric vehicle adoption. With generous government incentives available, 87 percent of the country’s new car sales are now fully electric, a share that dwarfs that of the European Union (13 percent) and the United States (7 percent). Norway’s muscular EV push has garnered headlines in outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian while drawing praise from the Environmental Defense Fund, the World Economic Forum, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “I’d like to thank the people of Norway again for their incredible support of electric vehicles,” he tweeted last December. “Norway rocks!!”

I’ve been writing about transportation for the better part of a decade, so all that fawning international attention piqued my curiosity. Does Norway offer a climate strategy that other countries could copy chapter and verse? Or has the hype outpaced the reality?

So I flew across the Atlantic to see what the fuss was about. I discovered a Norwegian EV bonanza that has indeed reduced emissions — but at the expense of compromising vital societal goals. Eye-popping EV subsidies have flowed largely to the affluent, contributing to the gap between rich and poor in a country proud of its egalitarian social policies. 

Worse, the EV boom has hobbled Norwegian cities’ efforts to untether themselves from the automobile and enable residents to instead travel by transit or bicycle, decisions that do more to reduce emissions, enhance road safety, and enliven urban life than swapping a gas-powered car for an electric one.

Despite the hosannas from abroad, Norway’s government has begun to unwind some of its electrification subsidies in order to mitigate the downsides of no-holds-barred EV promotion.

“Countries should introduce EV subsidies in a way that doesn’t widen inequality or stimulate car use at the expense of other transport modes,” Bjørne Grimsrud, director of the transportation research center TØI, told me over coffee in Oslo. “But that’s what ended up happening here in Norway.”

And it could happen in other countries, too, including in the United States, where transportation is the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The federal government now offers tantalizing rebates to Americans in the market for an electric car, but nothing at all for more climate-friendly vehicles like e-bikes or golf carts (nor a financial lifeline for beleaguered public subway and bus systems).

Ending the sales of gas-powered cars, as Norway is close to doing, is an essential step toward addressing climate change. But a 2020 study found that even the most optimistic forecasts for global EV adoption would not prevent a potentially catastrophic 2 degree Celsius rise in global temperatures. Reducing driving — not just gas-powered driving — is crucial.  

As the world’s EV trendsetter, Norway’s experience offers a bevy of lessons for other nations seeking to decarbonize transportation. But some of those lessons are cautionary.

How Norway fell in love with the electric car

At first glance, Norway’s EV embrace might seem odd. The country lacks a domestic auto industry and its dominant export is, of all things, fossil fuels. Nevertheless, Norway’s unique geography and identity helped put it at the vanguard of car electrification. 

Historically, Norway has been mostly rural; as recently as 1960, half the nation’s population resided in the countryside. But as the postwar economy boomed, Norwegians migrated to cities, and especially to their fast-growing, sprawling suburbs (much as Americans did at the time). They also fell hard for the automobile.

“The car was this genius idea for Norwegians,” Ulrik Eriksen, author of the book A Country on Four Wheels, told me over dinner in Oslo, after stashing his cargo e-bike. “Because there is plenty of land, cars opened up urban space for people to live in, letting more of them get sizable single-family homes.”

Norway embarked on a road-building binge, constructing bridges over fjords and boring tunnels through mountains to connect downtowns with new neighborhoods on the urban fringe. As Norwegian cities expanded, public transit took a back seat. Bergen, for instance, shuttered its extensive tramway service in the 1960s, dumping some of the trams into the North Sea. 

Those decisions cast a long shadow: Norway still has one of Europe’s lowest rates of public transportation usage and a higher car ownership rate than Denmark and Sweden, its Scandinavian neighbors. “Most Norwegian cities now have more of a car-centric, American approach toward transportation than a multi-modal, European one,” Eriksen said.

Norway’s city residents often own an automobile even though they seldom use it, Oslo-based urban planner Anine Hartmann told me. “Norwegians identify as coming from the place where their parents or grandparents come from,” she said. “Many people have a car to return to that place or simply to visit a cabin in the country.” 

By the 1990s, the automobile was Norway’s indispensable vehicle. It was then that Norwegian entrepreneurs launched two early electric car startups, Buddy and Think. Though their models were clunky and inefficient by today’s standards, the companies spurred excitement that Norway could become a global hub of EV production. Seeking to give the carmakers a tailwind, the Norwegian government exempted EVs from the country’s steep taxes on car purchases, which today add an average of $27,000 to each sale. Even better, EV owners — who at the time were few and far between — would not pay for tolls, parking, or ferries (over all those fjords) anywhere in the country. 

Norway’s dreams of becoming a global hub of EV manufacturing quickly fizzled when the companies ran into financial problems. (This summer, I spotted a tiny, aged Buddy squeezed into an Oslo parking spot, dwarfed by SUVs on either side.) But the incentives remained on the books; since few people were buying EVs, their cost was negligible. 

That changed as the global EV market improved in the mid-2010s, with carmakers like Tesla offering stylish, high-performance models that attracted more buyers. Norway’s EV policies were now championed as a centerpiece of the national effort to slow climate change in an economy whose electricity is already clean, produced largely from hydropower. “We want people to buy electric cars,” Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said in 2019. “It is the most important thing you can do personally and privately to help reduce climate emissions.” 

As EV models improved, Norwegians began to realize how valuable the cost savings from government incentives could be, particularly for urban commuters. After an already discounted EV purchase, owners’ ongoing expenses were minimal because Norwegian electricity is inexpensive (due to abundant hydropower), and EVs were exempt from tolls, parking, and ferries. EV owners were even invited to drive in bus-only lanes.

Hundreds of thousands of Norwegians responded to the government’s invitation to buy an EV, seemingly saving money and the planet in one fell swoop. But not every EV purchase replaced a gas guzzler; Grimsrud noted that the Norwegians owned 10 percent more cars per capita at the end of the 2010s than they did at the decade’s outset, in large part due to the EV incentives. “The families who could afford a second or third car ran off to the shop and bought one,” he said.

Norway’s incentives have unquestionably reshaped the country’s car market and reduced carbon emissions. EVs’ share of new vehicle sales surged from 1 percent in 2014 to 83 percent today. Around one in four cars on Norwegian roads is now electric, and the country’s surface transportation emissions fell 8.3 percent between 2014 and 2023. 

The national government seems ready to declare victory. “When it comes to electrical vehicles, I’m quite proud,” Cecilie Knibe Kroglund, Norway’s state secretary for transportation, told me at the Oslo headquarters of the Ministry of Transport. “My main lesson is that incentives work. We have succeeded at a large scale.”

But not everyone shares her enthusiasm. Although the EV rush has reduced tailpipe emissions, it has also entrenched car dependence, which inflicts other kinds of damage. “Climate change gave Norway an opportunity to change how we travel,” said Eriksen. “I worry we had this once-in-a-generation chance to fix our transportation network, and we blew it.”

EV subsidies fueled car sales, but Norway’s cities want fewer cars 

As electric car sales picked up throughout the 2010s, Norway placed few constraints on its EV incentives. Wealthy Norwegians could buy as many high-end EVs as they liked, receiving a full package of subsidies on each one. Luxury carmakers like Porsche advertised Norway’s promotions in their marketing materials.

Although the EV policies were fueling a car-buying frenzy for affluent residents, they offered little to those of limited means. Many low-income Norwegians do not own a car: In Bergen, for instance, 67 percent of households in the lowest income quartile go without one. One recent study found the likelihood that a Norwegian household would purchase an EV rose 26 percent with each 100,000 Norwegian Krones (around $11,000) in annual income, suggesting that electrification subsidies — which ballooned to $4 billion in 2022, equivalent to 2 percent of the national budget — have redistributed resources toward the rich.

Meanwhile, EV incentives have undermined the shift away from automobiles that Norwegian city officials, like their counterparts throughout Europe, are increasingly encouraging. “Everyone agrees that 100 percent of cars should be electric. That’s not the question,” Tiina Ruohonen, a climate advisor to the mayor of Oslo, told me. “The real question is whether you really need to own a car in Oslo.”

Over the last decade, Oslo has joined Bergen, Trondheim, and Stavanger (Norway’s four largest cities) in committing to meet all future trip growth through transit, biking, and walking — not cars. Seeking to reduce driving, Oslo has removed over 4,000 parking spots since 2016 while also building bike lanes, widening sidewalks, and adjusting traffic patterns to reduce through traffic. Those efforts helped the city achieve a remarkable milestone in 2019: For a full year, not a single pedestrian or cyclist was killed in a crash.

Walking and biking through Oslo helped me understand how it became so safe. The few motor vehicles I encountered within the city center moved carefully through streets thronged with pedestrians (some blocks are entirely car-free). Traffic typically moved at the speed of my e-bike; my one moment of anxiety came when a passing streetcar startled me as I gazed at Oslo’s picturesque harbor.

Many local leaders recognize that reducing car dependence will enhance urban life. “I am certain that when people imagine their ideal city, it would not be a dream of polluted air, cars jammed in endless traffic, or streets filled up with parked cars,” Hanne Marcussen, Oslo’s former vice mayor of urban development, told Fast Company in 2019. 

But there are inherent conflicts between cities’ efforts to limit driving and the Norwegian government’s promotion of EVs. Oslo’s elimination of street parking and creation of pedestrian-only streets, for instance, nudge Norwegians away from driving, but they also diminish EVs’ usefulness. 

“The way to get people to buy EVs is to make them easy and cheap to use,” said Eriksen. “But cities don’t want driving cars to be easy and cheap.” A recent study of EV subsidies in Bergen underscores those tensions, finding that promoting EV adoption hampers cities’ ability to build dense neighborhoods that shorten trips and strengthen transit.

The effect of EV adoption on public transportation has been a particular concern for Norway’s cities because boosting transit ridership has been a linchpin of local mobility strategies. Bergen, for instance, opened its first light rail line in 2010, and Trondheim overhauled its bus fleet in 2019. But because generous EV incentives make driving cheaper, they make public transportation relatively less cost-competitive. 

Worse, EV promotions have shrunk the funding available to invest in transit improvements because Norwegian public transportation budgets are partly funded through the road tolls that the national government exempted EV owners from paying. As more Norwegians purchased EVs, transit revenue fell, threatening major investments like a new metro line in Oslo. “One of my primary concerns is that because we are subsidizing EVs through the cheaper toll roads, we don’t have the money to pay for big transit infrastructure projects,” said Eivind Trædal, an Oslo city councilmember who until a few weeks ago led the city’s council’s environment and transportation committee.

National officials, for their part, have stuck to pro-EV messaging and refrained from discouraging driving. Despite its generous incentives for electric cars, the Norwegian government provides no discounts for those buying e-bikes or e-cargo bikes (Oslo and Bergen offer limited programs for residents). The country’s current 12-year National Transport Plan includes initiatives to catalyze the adoption of zero-emissions vehicles, but none to reduce car trips.

Trædal said that politics led the Norwegian government to downplay reducing transportation emissions through transit, biking, and walking — all of which produce significantly fewer emissions than driving an EV. “Nobody’s mad about getting a cheaper new car, right?” he shrugged. “It’s politically easier to just give them car subsidies.”

When I asked Kroglund, the country’s transportation state secretary, if Norway’s government seeks to reduce total kilometers driven, she said it does not. “We don’t have a specific goal [to reduce driving],” she told me. “Of course, we would like to get more people on public transportation and bikes. But that is more something that cities work on.”  

But national policy decisions inevitably affect local transportation efforts — and sometimes undermine them. Last October, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration opened E39, a four-lane highway into Bergen that the city had opposed due to concerns that it would increase driving. Those fears proved justified. Lars Ove Kvalbein, a Bergen city adviser on sustainable mobility, told me that before E39 opened, 30 percent of those traveling into the city from the south had used a car, but after the highway opened that share jumped to 40 percent.

“E39 was part of a national plan that smashed all the positive local plans to pieces,” he said.

Other countries can avoid repeating Norway’s mistakes

In the last few years, Norway has begun to confront the tensions within its push for car electrification. In 2017, the country began requiring EV owners to pay for parking, road tolls, and ferries, although they still receive a discount. As of this past January, only the first $45,000 of a new EV’s purchase price is tax-free. Buyers of the largest (and often priciest) EVs must also pay an additional fee that scales with vehicle weight. 

“The argument is to make the tax system more fair,” said transportation state secretary Kroglund, “and not give benefits for things that are unnecessary for the transition to EVs.” As a result of the new policies, Norwegian sales of some high-end EVs, like the enormous Chinese Hongqi SUV, have collapsed.

Looking to the future, TØI’s Grimsrud hopes that Norway’s next 12-year National Transport Plan beginning in 2025 will include a goal of limiting total driving, which could restrain highway expansion plans and direct more investment toward transit. “If you start with a national goal for reducing transportation emissions, it will force you to focus more on public transportation and less on road construction,” he said.

For other countries, a clear Norwegian lesson is that a focus on reducing transportation emissions through electric car adoption can worsen inequality. Capping the price of eligible vehicles and limiting the number of EVs that a household can purchase tax-free are intuitive moves that Norway took only belatedly.  

At the same time, Norway offers a warning about the dangers of promoting EVs at the expense of modes that are more beneficial to the environment as well as urban life. The national government’s decision to subsidize electric cars but not e-bikes makes no sense from a climate perspective, although the United States Congress made the same mistake when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act last year. At a minimum, countries should ensure that EV adoption does not deplete resources needed for public transportation investments, as has happened in Norway and could occur in the US, since EVs reduce gasoline tax revenues, a portion of which funds American transit.

With frequent bus and rail service, walkable city centers, and expanding networks of bike lanes (including, in Bergen, the longest purpose-built bike tunnel in the world), Norwegian cities are far ahead of American peers in providing viable alternatives to driving. Nevertheless, over the last decade, US cities have taken significant steps forward: Bike share programs are now a fixture, and new bus rapid transit lines have emerged in places like Madison, Richmond, and Washington, DC. New York City and San Francisco have even experimented with making major thoroughfares car-free. But if local initiatives aren’t matched with supportive federal policies, Norway’s experience suggests that an influx of electric vehicles can hinder efforts to escape the automobile’s urban stranglehold.

“The mistake is to think that EVs solve all your problems when it comes to transport,” said Ruohonen, the Oslo mayoral adviser. “They don’t.”

The reporting of this story was supported by the Heinrich Boll Foundation through a Transatlantic Media Fellowship. Lucas Peilert provided research assistance.