Muizz Akhtar | Vox

What would it mean to treat guns the way we treat cars?

2023-03-27T18:47:51-04:00

A parent walks with their kids from Woodmont Baptist Church where children were reunited with their families after a mass shooting at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023, in Nashville, Tennessee. | Seth Herald/Getty Images

The devastating news emerging from the Covenant School in Nashville resurfaced many troubling facts about America’s exceptional propensity for gun violence. But perhaps one of the most disturbing is that firearms are now the leading cause of death among Americans ages 24 years and under.

While guns have long been a fixture of American life, the emergence of firearms as the leading killer of young people is a relatively new phenomenon.

For years, cars held that distinction. But over the past two decades, motor vehicular deaths involving Americans between the ages of 1 and 24 plummeted, cutting the rate by nearly half. And sometime in the late 2010s, those two lines — deaths by car and by firearm — crossed paths on the graph of leading causes of death for young people.

In 2020, the most recent year for which data was available, firearms killed 10,186 young people, the highest number in two decades.

(It’s worth noting that motor vehicular deaths increased in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. That said, firearms also saw a jump, and remained the biggest cause of death for young people.)

Based on a 2022 analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), the chart on one level tells a tragic story: lives taken too soon. But it also highlights how policy action can move the needle on saving lives — and how policy neglect can deepen a preventable tragedy. The article received some initial attention when first published in April 2022, but its findings have reemerged in various American media outlets following the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas. It’s easy to see why the comparison is striking a chord: The youngest members of our society are dying from the most American of public health problems.

While both the Nashville shooting and the Uvalde massacre has occasioned the latest round of national introspection on guns, the American tragedy of gun violence goes well beyond such incidents. One of the NEJM article co-authors, Lois Lee, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School, told me that mass shootings with at least several deaths are unfortunately just the tip of the iceberg. “Mass shootings actually only account for less than 1 percent of pediatric firearm deaths. … Most firearm deaths are not from mass shootings, but from homicides (62%) and suicides (33%),” Lee said.

Even as firearm deaths among the young have risen, motor vehicle deaths have declined by about half since 2000. Although traffic violence continues to kill many children and has markedly increased in the pandemic, the decades-long decline is nevertheless a hard-fought public health milestone built on research, safety measures, and regulation. This included adopting harm reduction principles in traffic safety policy: People are going to drive cars regardless, the thinking goes, so why not focus on making it as safe as possible?

The current rate of young Americans being killed by firearms is not an inevitability; it is a policy choice. In their analysis of this CDC data, Lee and her co-authors argue that the same approach to reduce motor vehicle deaths among young people can and should be applied to guns.

How America made cars safer but not guns

The decline of motor vehicle deaths in America over the past two decades is part of a broader trend that began in the 1960s. Ralph Nader’s seminal 1965 exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed, catalyzed an auto safety movement that culminated in the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which set up the infrastructure for automobile safety.

From the 1970s onward, the NHTSA would maintained a database on motor vehicle-related deaths, make research investments, and provide safety certifications for cars on the market, incentivizing auto companies to adopt safety procedures. The work of the NHTSA and civil society groups like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety helped usher in a new era where safety features like seat belts and airbags became standardized. All of this, along with measures like universal state licensing of drivers and registration of cars, led to the decline in youth and overall American motor vehicle mortality. The CDC would eventually tout this decline as one of the country’s biggest public health achievements of the 20th century.

And as Lee recounts in the NEJM article, that progress continued into the 21st century. In 1998, frontal airbags became mandatory in all cars and trucks sold in the US. Other improvements like automatic emergency braking, blind-spot detection, side airbags, and rear-facing cameras also contributed to an improved auto safety landscape. “What we’ve seen is more than a half-century of efforts to make the automobile safer,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning and director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University.

If cars went one way with safety, guns went the other. Guns are one of the only consumer goods whose safety is not regulated by any government agency. Gun manufacturers are also very insulated from lawsuits, and perhaps consequently, have little incentive to design safer guns, such as “smart guns” that would only be operable by the users they are registered to. As Moss said, “We really have a Wild West approach to the manufacture of weapons in this country.”

To top it all off, federal research about guns, gun violence, and gun safety was also basically frozen for over 20 years until 2020 due to an NRA-backed measure known as the Dickey Amendment. “We don’t even have a true, real-time national database to understand what is going on with firearm injuries and deaths,” Lee said. “We have a lack of infrastructure, a lack of researchers, and then a lack of knowledge to even know what are the things we can do to mitigate or certainly decrease firearm injuries and deaths.”

Contrast that with cars. When looking at the public health achievement of reducing motor vehicle deaths, safety improvements of cars and the introduction of driver-specific regulations paved the way, says Kerri Raissian, a professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut. “The federal government incentivized the uptake of certain safety actions (by tying interstate money to the legal age of driving, for example) and states enforce road rules,” she wrote to me in an email. “It’s an achievement in terms of the outcome and coordination it took to get us here.”

To be sure, the number of car deaths is still unacceptably high — a recent report from the International Transport Forum, which is affiliated with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), found that the US in 2020 had more road fatalities per 100,000 people than every other OECD country.

In fact, traffic fatalities likely reached a 16-year high last year, with pedestrian deaths in particular rising by 59 percent since 2009. This could be partly attributed to how cars have gotten safer for drivers and passengers, but not for anyone else. The auto industry makes and promotes larger and more dangerous SUVs that are much more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes. SUV sales have also gone up sharply in the last decade, now making up half of all car sales in the US. Despite the increase in pedestrian fatalities, the NHTSA has declined to adopt safety tests other countries use to protect pedestrians.

That said, cutting back on overall deaths and mitigating injuries should be — and has been — the overriding policy goal, and that’s what’s led to results, Lee says. “It’s unrealistic given the numbers of cars on the road and the vehicle miles driven or ridden per person that we would ever get to zero,” she said. “And mitigating injuries or deaths is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many greater injuries that require hospitalizations.”

For legal, cultural, and political reasons, guns, like cars, are inextricable from American life. But if that is the case, it’s all the more reason that we need to try to implement whatever strategies possible to reduce harm. Moss said it plainly: “We’re not going to eliminate the car from American life,” and the same truism can be applied to guns. “I think what’s happened is we have normalized the deaths of children. We’ve become too accepting of this.”

As Vox’s Marin Cogan has written, “To do nothing is to endorse an intolerable status quo.” And even if federal action is not coming anytime soon, there is still plenty that can and has been done at the state level that can successfully decrease the rate of gun violence. Lee also pointed to a study she and her colleagues did that showed the enactment of laws requiring the safe storage of firearms away from children led to a reduction in child homicides, suicides, and unintentional deaths. Furthermore, there is solid research, both domestically and abroad, showing that regulations like licensing can curb firearm deaths of all people, not just youth.

“When a child is killed, you are losing the rest of their life as a member of society, as a member of their family, as a member of their community,” Lee said. “And the repercussions of that in some way will never go away.”

Update, March 27, 2023, 6:30 pm ET: This story, originally published on June 4, 2022, has been updated to reflect the news of the mass shooting in Nashville.

Forget tainted candy: The scariest thing on Halloween is parked in your driveway

2022-10-31T16:27:33-04:00

Arial Meehan, 9, center, dressed as a crazy cat lady, smiles as she walks down the street with other trick-or-treaters on Halloween 2018. | Natalie Kolb/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images

As is the custom, millions of children in the United States will be out in the streets this Halloween to trick-or-treat, decked out in costumes. Also as is custom, adults will fret about the mostly mythical dangers children may face. Once upon a time it was razor blades in apples; this year, it’s rainbow fentanyl in candy. But while fears of children receiving narcotic-spiked treats are unfounded, there is a very real danger that America’s children face on this most hallowed of evenings: cars.

That’s because pedestrians under the age of 18 are three times more likely to be struck and killed by a car on Halloween than any other day of the year. That risk grows to 10 times more likely for children aged 4 to 8 years old, according to a study from 2019 in JAMA Pediatrics.

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“You’re going to have increased numbers of children, including younger children who are out on the streets,” said Lois Lee, a professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School. “At the same time, you have adults who are driving, and especially this year on a Monday, people will be driving home from work. If children are in costume, they may be wearing darker clothing … which makes them harder to detect.”

The JAMA Pediatrics study from 2019 corroborates this, noting that Halloween “may heighten pedestrian traffic risk, because celebrations occur at dusk, masks restrict peripheral vision, costumes limit visibility, street-crossing safety is neglected, and some partygoers are impaired by alcohol.” It’s the kind of lethal combination that can turn a fun occasion into a deadly nightmare. Adult victims included, the risk of death to all pedestrians was 43 percent higher on Halloween compared to a regular evening.

But what happens on Halloween isn’t an isolated incident. After gun injuries, motor vehicle injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the US overall. And with pedestrian fatalities (both adult and child) at a 40-year high in the US, it’s worth asking why children roaming the streets is so inherently deadly, and what can be done about it.

“Sometimes when you talk about this issue, you get pushback from people and people say, ‘Well, of course, you have more children on the streets, of course, more children are going to die,’” Doug Gordon, a writer and podcast host who advocates for safer streets and cities, told me. “But that accepts a baseline level of danger that I think we as a society have in fact accepted on the other 364 days of the year.”

There are broader reasons for why streets have gotten even more dangerous for pedestrians recently. One is that drivers are distracted — not just by their phones, but increasingly by the infotainment systems that come as a part of newer cars. A more pressing issue is the increasing size of cars in the US; SUVs make up half of all car sales in the US, and are much more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes than smaller vehicles. “Mass times [acceleration] is force,” Gordon summed up. “When you increase the mass of something, you’re going to increase the force at which it interacts with a small vulnerable child.”

But the biggest reason may be that American streets and cities are designed for cars, and not people. As Charles Marohn — founder and president of Strong Towns and an expert on urban planning and civil engineering — has argued, engineers who design streets prioritize getting cars as quickly from point A to point B over everything else. One recent example: A traffic safety committee in Utah could not find any way to make the five-lane road crossing to a school safer for students aside from just removing the crosswalk altogether.

But there is a lot that can be done to make streets safer, for future Halloweens and every other day of the year. In the short term, cities and towns can build on open streets programs implemented after the Covid-19 pandemic began, which involve closing certain streets to car traffic to allow for more public space. Notably, New York City announced a “Trick or Streets” plan that would see 100 car-free zones in effect from 4 to 8 pm on Halloween this year. And the Big Apple isn’t alone, as Henry Grabar reported for Slate: less dense and more car-dependent cities like St. Petersburg, Florida and Seattle will also either close off the city center for Halloween or actually allow residents to apply for permits that can close off their neighborhoods to car traffic.

In the long run, Gordon believes that places around the US should be able to pass what is known as the popsicle test, where a kid should be able to safely walk to a store, buy a popsicle, and return home before it melts. In essence, every city should be designed to be friendly and traversable to the most vulnerable in our communities. “If you start thinking along those lines, then I think you start thinking along the lines of what infrastructure is needed to make that possible, where I would feel comfortable letting my kid do that,” Gordon said. “Halloween is like a giant version of the popsicle test because it’s not just your kid, it’s every kid in the neighborhood.”

Designing safer streets for children goes beyond safety — it would make for a better Halloween. “Having sidewalks and good lighting is a good preventive measure, not just for injury prevention, but also just general health,” Lee told me, “because that encourages everybody in the neighborhood to walk, exercise, and get outside, which is better for everybody’s health as well.”

And if their safety isn’t enough motivation, designing dense, walkable cities could even lead to bigger candy hauls for kids.

“When you build a city that’s safer, so that kids can walk around by themselves and not be worried about getting hit by a car, or the parents being worried about them being hit by a car, it’s just better,” Gordon said. “It’s awesome. They’re independent. It’s fun. And on Halloween, they get a lot of candy.”

Correction, October 31, 4 pm ET: A previous version of this story had an inaccurate definition of the equation for force.

Max Roser doesn’t want us to lose sight of progress

2022-10-18T18:08:55-04:00

The news cycle often makes it seem like the world is always getting worse. But when looking at the long arc of global history, particularly through a lens informed by data, it becomes clear that, in many cases, that picture is misleading.

That’s what Max Roser, a researcher from Germany, realized. As a student, he felt powerless when thinking about issues like hunger, poverty, public health, and climate change. But while pursuing graduate degrees in philosophy and economics, Roser came to understand a startling fact about the world: It was, by many measures, much better than the one our predecessors inhabited. Over the last few decades, extreme poverty has fallen, literacy has risen, and people are living longer, healthier, freer lives than at any point in human history. As Roser put it in an interview, “I used to be a pessimist, but the data shows the world improving.”

In 2011, while he was working as a researcher in Brazil, he founded Our World in Data, an online publication focused on making the data about the world’s biggest problems easily accessible to the public. With easy-to-grasp data visualizations, one could see just how far humanity had come in the last century alone — from a reduction in maternal mortality to increase in internet access. And unlike academic journals or databases, the information Our World in Data has curated is free and reusable by the public, eliminating a large barrier to the spread of this kind of knowledge.

”Many of us don’t have a good understanding of global problems and change. This is not because the evidence isn’t available,” Roser wrote in 2019. “Unfortunately it is very poorly communicated, with the research hidden behind paywalls and the data stored in dull, inaccessible databases. And science that is not communicated is of not much help, it is just a stack of papers in a drawer.”

What started as a personal project by Roser has today grown into a widely respected publication, now based at the University of Oxford with a team of more than 25 people. In 2021 alone, it saw more than 89 million global visitors, and many academic institutions and media organizations (Vox included) use Our World in Data as a resource.

Our World in Data’s work not only made sense of humanity’s past, but of the present as well. While many governments and media organizations initially struggled to provide accessible data on the Covid-19 pandemic, Roser and his team jumped into action, and their research was essential to helping people understand the scope of the pandemic.

In addition to being the director of Our World in Data, Roser is also a researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development. With his colleagues at Oxford, he started companion projects looking at economic inequality and tracking the world’s progress on reaching the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

In all of his work, Roser wants people to take away one simple yet difficult truth: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.”

Liu Hongqiao is holding China accountable for its role in the climate crisis

2022-10-21T14:33:43-04:00

Perhaps no country will play a bigger role in fighting climate change than China, the largest global emitter of greenhouse gases. But without a thorough understanding of China’s approach, the people living within and outside of its borders won’t be able to ensure it does what it needs to. That’s where people like reporter Liu Hongqiao come in.

Born and raised in China, Liu wrote for the Southern Metropolis Daily and Caixin Media, some of the country’s premier investigative news outlets. Beginning in 2010, along with her burgeoning coverage of climate change in China, she investigated a slew of environmental issues, including unsafe drinking water, rice laced with toxins, and contaminated soil. As a result of pushing the government to address these problems, she later won journalism awards for her impactful environmental reporting.

However, since current President Xi Jinping took power at the end of 2012, the Chinese media ecosystem has become much more censored and difficult to operate in for investigative reporters like Liu. Two years later, she temporarily left the industry to work as an independent consultant in China, and later in Europe.

Liu advised NGOs and policymakers alike on environmental and climate issues in China for more than seven years, focusing particularly on issues related to water risks. In 2017, Liu then moved to Paris, where she still lives today, and has continued consulting there. But her work outside of journalism only confirmed to her that reporting is the best avenue to highlight issues related to climate and the environment in China.

“How do you use the same type of knowledge, capacity, intelligence to inform policymaking, inform the public, and inform civil society groups who are pushing for a better society?” Liu told me. “For me, journalism is really the most powerful and effective tool to do that.”

Liu saw her opportunity back into climate journalism when Xi announced at the 2020 UN General Assembly that China would aim for carbon neutrality by 2060. Despite the magnitude of this announcement, she found much of the press in the West did not handle the topic with the nuance it needed. “We need to push China for higher ambitions, I acknowledge that, but to do that, you have to understand what is actually happening on the ground in the mind of [Chinese] policymakers,” Liu told me.

So in 2021, she joined Carbon Brief, the award-winning climate newsroom based in the UK. There, she was a founding member of its China reporting project, where she reported on what China’s commitments actually meant in practice as well as how China could support the Global South in addressing climate change.

After a year at Carbon Brief, Liu left to become an independent reporter. She recently launched Shuang Tan, a newsletter tracking China’s dual decarbonization goals of peaking its carbon emissions by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2060. Being a one-person newsroom, though, has not been without challenges (the newsletter is currently on hiatus due to a lack of financial support). But Liu said she eventually plans to build out a team.

Above all, she hopes to serve as a bridge to facilitate understanding and empower good policymaking related to China’s decarbonization. Her work in this regard culminated last year when she participated in the TED Countdown Summit, where she spoke about how China can live up to its climate ambitions.

“Whether it comes in terms of climate diplomacy, cooperation, or competition, however you frame it, you have to understand the biggest [carbon] emitter of the world,” Liu told me. “What works, what doesn’t work, [and] what can be taken away as lessons for other developing countries that will also go through this process.”

Leah Garcés proved animal rights activism can make room for everyone — even the farmers

2022-10-18T18:09:08-04:00

Sometimes, for activism to succeed, it requires someone with an unexpected point of view.

Leah Garcés — the president of Mercy for Animals, a nonprofit focused on investigating and reforming factory farms globally — is just such an activist. She’s a pioneer within the animal welfare and protection movement, where she has worked for over two decades in Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world. Garcés and her team’s investigations documenting the conditions of factory farms and slaughterhouses, especially for chickens, have garnered national attention and ultimately have improved the conditions of countless broiler chickens (chickens grown for meat, not eggs).

Prior to her work at Mercy for Animals, Garcés engaged in about a decade of animal protection activism across 30 countries, before returning to the US in 2009 and founding the US chapter of Compassion in World Farming two years later.

Over the course of the 2010s, Garcés improved the conditions of chickens by working with unlikely allies — the chicken farmers themselves. Historically, animal rights activists and farmers tended to be in opposition, with the farmers being cast as perpetrators in a system of violence and activists seen as attacking the livelihoods of essential workers.

But Garcés recognized that the factory farm system hurt both animals and farmers (a 2001 study found that most growers whose sole source of income was broiler farming live below the federal poverty level). She built a relationship with a North Carolina farmer named Craig Watts, who played a pivotal role by allowing Garcés and her team to film the conditions of the chickens he raised under contract from Perdue Farms in 2014.

The resulting video was picked up by national media outlets like the New York Times, and prompted Perdue Farms to improve the conditions of its chickens over the next several years.

And they’re not alone. Other chicken producers, like Costco, are now slowly improving their farming practices as well.

Much remains to be done, and Garcés is still working. At Mercy for Animals, where she became president in 2018, Garcés has become focused on helping ex-poultry farmers like Watts through a project called Transfarmation, which involves collaborating with farmers to start producing plant crops like peas and oats for food or hemp for medicinal purposes, and then connects them with businesses in need of their products. As Watts, who has become a mushroom farmer, told Stone Pier Press in an interview, “You’ve got to have something that’s good for the farmer, good for the animal, good for the environment, good for the consumer, good for the community.”

This holistic, inclusive approach has been key to Garcés’s success. And though it’s an uphill battle against some of the biggest titans in food production, it’s clear this activist is in this fight for the long haul.

Explaining science doesn’t have to be complicated. Just ask Kurzgesagt’s Philipp Dettmer.

2022-10-18T18:11:05-04:00

The most compelling science channel on any platform right now is run by a German high school dropout.

When Philipp Dettmer was 15, he found school and learning to be so boring that he just up and left. But a chance meeting two years later with a teacher changed everything. Over the course of a class Dettmer took with her, she delivered information into his brain in a way that actually made a topic like history exciting and invigorating, according to an interview Dettmer did with the Guardian. This ignited within him a passion for learning and understanding the world — and sharing that knowledge with the rest of us.

This was what motivated Dettmer to start Kurzgesagt, a YouTube channel and animation studio based in Munich focused on education about all sorts of scientific topics. German for “in a nutshell” and pronounced kurts-guh-zaakt, Kurzgesagt tackles it all, from dropping a nuclear bomb on the moon to what can be done about climate change and even loneliness and how to make friends. Its style and clear, to-the-point explanations make even obscure philosophies like optimistic nihilism and longtermism easy to understand for a general audience.

Since its conception in 2013, shortly after Dettmer graduated college, Kurzgesagt has grown into a heavyweight in the science YouTube space, now boasting almost 20 million subscribers, with videos released in multiple languages including English and German.

For Dettmer, it vindicates the truth he learned from that history teacher. “Everything complicated is only complicated because someone is bad at explaining it,” he said in an interview. Through the visually and intellectually enthralling stories Kurzgesagt’s videos tell, Dettmer hopes to spark curiosity in his audience to learn more about the world and themselves.

This is all best exemplified in Kurzgesagt’s coronavirus explainer, the channel’s most popular video at over 87 million views. In the video, released at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, Dettmer and his team (in collaboration with Our World in Data) adeptly broke down what Covid-19 is as a virus, disease, and pandemic. It is a master class in science communication, something that — as Dettmer told New Scientist about Kurzgesagt’s ethos — grandparents can watch with their grandkids.

Last year, Dettmer took his approach to print by releasing his first book, Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive, informed by his own study and experience with cancer.

Disease, pandemics, climate catastrophe, and nuclear explosions are not cheery topics. But Dettmer’s project somehow doesn’t mire you in gloom. At their core, the videos he and his team make don’t just inform and empower — they evince hope that humanity can continue to move toward a better future for all.

Josh Morrison took risks for science, and he thinks you can, too

2022-10-18T18:08:25-04:00

The most rewarding, beneficial scientific outcomes usually require a bit of sacrifice for those who make it happen. That’s why society needs people like Josh Morrison: a founder of organizations that advocate for and support people who participate in kidney donation and human challenge trials, and an expert willing to take on risks and help make progress happen faster.

Morrison first became familiar with this kind of direct public health participation when he read about kidney donations in the New Yorker when he was a law student in 2009. In the piece, people explained why they gave their kidneys to strangers in need — though there was slight risk to donors, the reward and benefit for the recipients was more than worth it. Two years later, he donated a kidney himself.

Morrison described the donation to me as an “amazing” experience, one that was transformative for someone who was an otherwise unmotivated corporate lawyer at the time. He was spurred to connect with other kidney donors, and to learn about the many problems that hold back organ donation, including the burdensome hidden costs foisted upon donors that make the process less accessible than it needs to be and leave more than 90,000 Americans in need waiting for a kidney.

Morrison decided to finally leave corporate law, and in 2014, founded WaitList Zero, a nonprofit focused on addressing the kidney shortage and making sure donors got the proper support they needed. In 2019, after six years of advocacy, his work helped push the Trump administration to enact the Advancing American Kidney Health initiative, which reduced the cost burden for donors and made it easier to become a kidney donor.

“The basic logic of my work in general is to try to use a sort of identity politics to get better political decision-making,” Morrison told me. “So with kidney donation, the theory is if kidney donors are more empowered in the political system as a sort of identity group, then the system will treat donors better and that will mean more people donate.”

Morrison would take his ethos to the next level during another public health crisis: the Covid-19 pandemic. Stuck in his Brooklyn apartment at the onset of the pandemic and finding himself struggling with what to do, Morrison learned about “human challenge trials” for Covid-19, vaccine studies where volunteers are dosed with either a vaccine or a placebo and then directly exposed to the virus to more rapidly assess the vaccine’s efficacy. While vaccine trials normally involve both groups (treatment and placebo) going about their regular lives with the possibility that they may encounter the virus in the wild, the urgency of the pandemic raised the profile of a more direct trial.

Though challenge trials raise ethical questions, the potential benefit of saving countless lives with faster development of vaccines made them very appealing during the teeth of a global pandemic. As Morrison told my colleague Dylan Matthews in May 2020, “If challenge trials are likely to benefit society, and well-informed people want to participate, we should respect their freedom to do so.”

Realizing elevating Covid-19 challenge trials could be the most important thing he ever did, in the spring of 2020, Morrison helped launch 1Day Sooner. This organization would be laser-focused on recruiting and supporting individuals who wanted to take part in these high-risk, high-reward studies to get Covid-19 vaccines out faster. 1Day Sooner would go on to direct the world’s attention toward challenge trials, and to get almost 40,000 people in over 150 countries to sign up for them. Morrison’s work will hopefully help pave the way for faster vaccine development in the future, including for other diseases and future pandemics.

But Morrison and 1Day Sooner are just getting started. They are working with partners at the Institute for Progress and Schmidt Futures on a project called “Operation Warp Speed 2.0” to accelerate the development of the next generation of Covid vaccines, including universal vaccines that could cover all variants, as well as intranasal options that could lead to better protection from airborne pathogens that enter the body through the nose and throat. They also want to ramp up human challenge trials for neglected diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis C in order to accelerate the development of more highly effective vaccines.

Finally, Morrison and his team want to grow their work in the UK and Africa especially, preparing for the next pandemic and making sure countries that faced the greatest vaccine inequities are in a better bargaining position via a pandemic insurance fund.

Morrison could have stayed a corporate lawyer, but to really make a difference, he knew he needed to have some skin in the game. What started as him helping one person has grown into building a community of fellow travelers willing to take on personal public health risks to build a more equitable and healthy world.

What Xi Jinping’s third term means for China and the world

2022-10-14T18:26:51-04:00

People stand in front of a display of images of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Museum of the Communist Party of China in Beijing on September 4. | Noel Celis/AFP via Getty Images

The biggest political event of the year is happening this weekend — and it’s not an election.

Beginning on October 16, some 2,300 delegates from around China will assemble in Tiananmen Square’s Great Hall of the People for the Chinese Communist Party’s week-long Party Congress. After much behind-the-scenes deliberations among party elites, the choices for China’s top leadership for the next five years will be presented to the country. The party will also review last term’s progress and set out its domestic and foreign policy goals for the next one. Decisions on both policy and personnel will be finalized officially in the spring.

The stakes of what happens during this Congress for China and the rest of the world will probably be the most momentous in decades. President Xi Jinping, who has more personal power over China than any leader since Mao Zedong, is expected to be confirmed to serve an unprecedented third term.

“The question is: How elevated will Xi Jinping be?” said Michael Swaine, the director of the East Asia program and an expert on Chinese defense and foreign policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “There’s going to be a lot of continuity with a probable strengthening of his position.”

China has changed dramatically under Xi’s now decade-long rule. Xi will likely laud his administration’s success on ending extreme poverty, tackling climate change, curbing corruption, and, at least until recently, growing the economy. Despite its initial missteps in containing the virus, China’s zero-Covid guidelines succeeded at limiting mortality from Covid-19 compared to many other countries, though that success has come with serious economic and political side effects. China also transformed its foreign policy and became the world’s largest creditor with the Belt and Road Initiative, a massive global infrastructure and development program.

During Xi’s time in power, however, China has also become more nationalist, authoritarian, and repressive. The government has engaged in what many critics, including the United States, have called genocide toward the Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minority groups in Western China and crushed any semblance of autonomy in Hong Kong. Abroad, China has become more assertive of territorial claims in the East and South China Seas, engaged in border skirmishes with India, and most notably, ratcheted up military action and threatening to use force to bring Taiwan under its control.

Given that all of the major policy and personnel decisions have already been made behind the scenes, the best way to think about the Party Congress is as a weather forecast for China and the world. Internally, China is dealing with significant economic issues, partly as a consequence of its strict zero-Covid policies and a real estate crisis. It’s also facing more climate catastrophes and a looming demographic collapse as its population appears to have begun to decline. Externally, China finds itself with frostier relations with the US and European Union — its largest trading partners — while the Global North’s public opinion of China has soured because of its pandemic response.

This year’s Party Congress will begin to make clear whether and how Xi and the Chinese government will reframe their approach to a world that has hugely changed since the last Party Congress five years ago. Xi “still recognizes that China must remain an international player in many, many different ways in order to succeed,” Swaine said. “He cannot isolate China and turn it into a sort of self-contained entity.”

To learn more about the future of China, I spoke with Swaine about what to expect and how Xi views the current geopolitical moment. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Muizz Akhtar

What does a third term for Xi Jinping mean? Why is it such a big deal?

Michael Swaine

Under normal circumstances, at least in recent decades, Xi Jinping would be stepping down, but of course, he will not. What this means is that Xi Jinping is truly a very powerful, dominant figure within the Chinese Communist Party. He will likely continue to exercise that dominance over the next five years, at least. He may even stay in power until 2035, which is one big milestone or benchmark that the party has put in its development plans. What that really does suggest is that he’s continuing to make and remake the party in some ways in his own image, but also put his supporters in positions of power. That’s really the critical other issue: to what extent will people seen as very loyal and beholden to him be put even more so in positions of power through the Party Congress?

This is not just a question of Xi Jinping having removed any possible opponents to himself and put in his own supporters. Large numbers of the party leadership support the general thrust of Xi Jinping’s direction and his governance. His whole role has been to strengthen party leadership and party control within China to correct the corruption, the backsliding, and the confusion that emerged over recent decades as to what the party’s role is in society, the economy, in politics, and foreign policy. His whole tenure has really been focused on strengthening the party and leading China into the 21st century.

Muizz Akhtar

So it sounds pretty much like we know what’s going to happen — at least the top line. Can we expect any surprises? Is there anything we should be watching out for?

Michael Swaine

There aren’t really any individuals in the leadership who you can say are opposing factions. He has essentially eliminated those kinds of potential leaders, like Bo Xilai and other people from the past, who might have been able to challenge him in any really significant way.

What people look for in terms of changes are individuals who are perhaps not so closely tied to Xi Jinping, who are more in the realm of technocrats or reformers, who are interested in [the question of]: “How do we really try to maintain market incentives and China’s role in the global trading system while we’re sort of increasing party control?”

Today, it’s really all about your stance toward specific policy questions, issues of economic reform, how much success you’re having in your policies at home and overseas. So Xi Jinping’s future rests more with his policy failure or success than it does with his power relationships with other factions.

Muizz Akhtar

How has Xi maintained his support in the CCP in spite of the domestic crises that have come about? I’m thinking about the economic problems, real estate bubble, and fallout from the zero-Covid policies.

Michael Swaine

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that everybody moves in lockstep, and nobody’s unhappy and there’s no grumbling going on in the ranks or among some fairly high leaders. China is encountering increasing numbers of both domestic and foreign problems, in part because of Xi Jinping’s policies. Over time, if these continue and they worsen — say, zero-Covid, which I think the Party Congress will continue to back, continues to grate a lot of people in the country, and it expands in nature — these things could rebound against Xi Jinping over time. But I would not say that at this point in time, that there is a movement afoot, let’s say, to sort of challenge Xi Jinping on policy issues.

It’s a qualified leadership. His leadership is strong, and is likely to get stronger in many ways if the policies don’t fall apart. And there’s all sorts of arguments as to whether the economy is going to tank or whether relations with the West are becoming so strained that it creates problems for China domestically. But if that doesn’t happen, you’re still probably going to get Xi Jinping ruling, but the policy questions will remain.

Muizz Akhtar

Why does what happens at this Party Congress matter to China’s broader population? What will tell us about China’s domestic trajectory under Xi?

Michael Swaine

There are several issues. The first one is that Xi Jinping is connected to very specific types of policies and visions for China’s future. Like the grand rejuvenation of China, which he hopes to achieve by 2049, the elimination of inequality so that you have a more just society, corruption, etc. All of those things are going to be continued under Xi Jinping. And those have important consequences for Chinese society.

It also involves a very strong role for the party. There’s greater effort to try to control the activities of interest groups in China and the activities of institutions. All of this is something that does grate up against what some people regard as the importance of some level of free communication and some level of market-based activity.

Muizz Akhtar

What does this mean for China’s relationship with the United States and the world more broadly?

Michael Swaine

You’ll see continuity with what’s been established under Xi Jinping already, which is that China is fully committed to engaging the world, and pursuing “win-win” outcomes. It wants to invest more in the world and be a part of the world community. At the same time, it wants to see changes in some of the norms and standards that have governed in certain areas in the direction of greater justice as defined by the Chinese, which means justice for developing societies and developing countries, and justice for China’s own influence — in other words, giving China greater say at the seat of the table.

Alongside that, you’ll have the desire to preserve and protect China against what is seen now as efforts by the United States to contain the development of the People’s Republic of China. The Communist Party will define US policy as not just anti-party but anti-China.

So the Chinese government under Xi Jinping will continue to try to guard against greater levels of US pressure because they see the US struggling with its own problems internally, and in other ways, China’s leadership sees the United States as potentially more dangerous. Which is exactly the same kind of argument that people [in the US] project against China’s leadership. I think both of those arguments are overblown, but they do get some traction within the leaderships of both of these governments. And so the competition between the US and China will deepen and the danger of continuing down this route is that it really does pose some serious dangers, particularly over Taiwan.

Muizz Akhtar

What do you think the media gets wrong about the 20th Party Congress and political succession in China?

Michael Swaine

The media often tends to take a very sort of one-dimensional and simplistic look at the way the party exists and how it operates in China. Yes, the Party Congress is kind of a showcase more than it is a deliberative body. But the party in China is nearly 100 million people. This is not a small elite group of power-hungry people at the top of the system who are keeping everybody down; it is deeply infused in Chinese society in many ways that are in some respects seen by ordinary Chinese as good and beneficial. This is no doubt a one-party dictatorship — there’s no question about it. They do not tolerate dissent, either in words or inactions.

However, the policies of the party, that representation at local levels, how they interact with this Chinese society at the root level, is much more complex than that simple narrative of a dictatorial one-party, top-down system. The media needs to appreciate that complexity more and understand that the party is, in many ways, serving the interests of Chinese society, while at the same time in some ways threatening the future of China because of this heavy-handedness that is exercised under Xi Jinping.

Climate change has come for the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter

2022-09-29T19:51:28-04:00

Smoke and flames rise from a hill during a forest fire in Chongqing, China, on August 18, when the highest temperature recorded there was 112 degrees Farenheit. | Chen Chao/China News Service via Getty Images

China just finished one of its most disastrous summers on record, with record-breaking heat, drought, and wildfires leading to water shortages even into the fall. More than 900 million people — or about 64 percent of China’s population — faced brutal heat waves alone, highlighting how much further the nation has to go to protect itself against worsening climate-related disasters.

As weather historian Maximiliano Herrera told New Scientist magazine last month while the heat waves were ongoing, “There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China.” In at least 17 provinces, more than 240 cities saw temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit. (Normally, a metropolis like Chongqing, at the center of this heat wave in southwestern China, only sees temperatures as high as 92°F.) China’s largest river and freshwater lake mostly dried up, reaching record-low water levels due to drought, all while wildfires raged. As in the United States, while some places baked, others flooded.

All this is taking place as China, the world’s largest current emitter of greenhouse gases, has positioned itself as a leader on mitigating climate change. With President Xi Jinping committing to net zero carbon emissions by 2060, China is already investing heavily into clean energy domestically and plans to stop financing coal-fired power plants abroad.

However, while China has increasingly focused on carbon mitigation efforts over the last decade, the country is just beginning to seriously tackle the equally difficult question of adapting to the effects of climate change. China’s complex geography and large landmass spanning various types of climate zones have always made it vulnerable to extreme weather events like droughts and floods. Due to the worsening factor of climate change, Beijing will need to step up its game to future-proof the country. As the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports emphasize, both mitigation and adaptation work is key to reducing vulnerability to climate change — and China still has a long road ahead of it.

“The climate story is a China story”

As Jeremy Wallace, a professor at Cornell University focusing on the effects of Chinese politics on climate and cities, told me, “The climate story is a China story.” China’s rapid industrialization and recent rise to becoming the second largest global economy was mostly fueled by coal. As a result, China was responsible for 27 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2019, the most in the world and greater than every country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union combined. That carbon-heavy energy load helped drive prosperity and historic poverty reduction, but there was a steep environmental cost for China, too, including major air and water pollution, desertification, ecological devastation, and the rise of extreme weather events.

Mounting concern and political pressure, mostly internal and to a lesser extent international, forced Beijing to act. Over the last two decades, the Chinese government passed domestic climate legislation, and made commitments to the international community, most notably when it signed the 2015 Paris agreement.

Scott Moore, director of China programs and strategic initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that the Chinese government acknowledged opportunity and risk, with the latter especially playing a big role in climate policymaking. “Of the world’s large economies, China is probably the single most exposed to climate risk,” he said.

The first factor is that many major cities, like Shanghai or Tianjin, are located in low-lying coastal or river valley areas that are vulnerable to flooding. Second, glacier melt from China’s portion of the Tibetan plateau is increasing floods downstream. And finally, China’s highly urbanized landscape, and the concentration of population and infrastructure that comes with that, makes China more vulnerable to disasters like floods.

There’s self-interest, too. The Chinese government also saw a huge opportunity in investing in the global clean energy market, which today is worth trillions of dollars. “China is the world’s largest investor, developer, deployer, and manufacturer of clean energy across the board,” said Michael Davidson, professor of global policy and engineering at the University of California San Diego. China invested $380 billion in renewable energy in 2021 alone, accounting for almost half of new renewable energy capacity worldwide. Because of entrepreneurship and large government subsidies, the country has built out an enormous domestic network of wind and solar plants, and become the global leader on electric vehicles.

These changes are reflected in the very air that people living in China breathe, with the air quality in cities like Beijing markedly improving over the past decade. “It’s hard to say that they’re lagging” on tackling climate change, Davidson told me, and indeed, a recent report by Carbon Brief found China’s carbon emissions have seen their longest decline in a decade.

On the adaptation side, despite the severity of the current floods, far fewer people are dying today from floods in China than they used to. Floods are a historic problem in China, but because the Chinese government invested in flood control over the past two decades, the risk of death isn’t as high as it used to be, Moore told me, when the worst floods could kill people in the millions. The flood adaptation measures included the construction of large dams and reservoirs, but also the improvement of early warning systems and emergency management strategies such as evacuation.

The dam projects came with sizable environmental and human costs, ironically, including the destruction of wetlands that may have otherwise absorbed floodwater. Floods in recent years have also called the effectiveness of megaprojects like the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project ever created, into question. The central government recently acknowledged the unintended side effects in its climate adaptation strategy, finally passing a wetlands protection law last year to not only conserve but restore wetlands. China is also increasingly embracing nature-based solutions like “sponge cities,” retrofitting and designing cities to better absorb floodwaters, which could help reduce the severity of future floods.

Beyond its carbon mitigation efforts, the Chinese government also released an updated climate adaptation plan in June to better prepare the country by 2035. Its aims include improving early warning systems for extreme weather, shoring up food security, and boosting conservation efforts both inland and along the coast. Notably, the plan is a follow-up to a 2013 adaptation plan that heralded China’s “war on pollution” and led to China decreasing as much air pollution in seven years as the US did in three decades. This new plan will hopefully be similarly ambitious, because it aims to have a nationwide climate impact and risk assessment system by 2035. This would ensure major infrastructure projects consider potential environmental consequences, like the aforementioned dams used to control flooding and generate hydropower.

China has a plan to adapt, but is it enough?

Still, for whatever progress China has made toward mitigating climate change, its adaptation strategies may not be enough to meet the current moment. The consequences of climate change are coming faster than most governments, policymakers, and even scientists anticipated. “The reality we’re facing now is that the carbon emissions that are already in the atmosphere are baked in for a period of time,” said Jonas Nahm, professor of energy, resources, and environment at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Things are going to get worse before they get better, even if we do everything to meet the Paris agreement models.”

The realities of the baked-in effects of climate change were in full view in Sichuan, the southwestern province at the center of this summer’s heat wave and drought. Hydropower systems there faced a serious electricity shortfall due to reservoirs and rivers drying up. “For all of this sort of anticipation, and planning, China’s also scrambling to try to figure out how to respond to this in the same way that the Europeans are with all these rivers running dry,” Nahm told me.

While hydropower makes up 16 percent of China’s total power production (almost equal to its other renewable energy sources combined), it’s more than 80 percent of Sichuan’s power production, and in fact, it usually has so much excess hydropower that it delivers a third of what it produces to the rest of the country. However, drought affected Sichuan’s hydropower generation, and because it couldn’t curb its power sharing with other provinces, rolling blackouts had to be implemented to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed by demand. Even as the drought eases, there are worries that Sichuan and other parts of China will face power shortages in the winter.

“You’ve seen over the last several years that some of the existing infrastructure just isn’t prepared,” said Nahm. A key example of this is the South-North Water Transfer Project, the largest water diversion project in history, and perhaps even the most expensive infrastructure ever built, period. Built over the past two decades, the project aimed to bring water from water-abundant southern China to water-scarce northern China, which, despite containing around half the country’s population, only has about 20 percent of the country’s total water supply.

But at best, the South-North Water Transfer Project has served as a Band-Aid to buy the government more time, and has done little to solve the issue of water scarcity. More damning, it has actually worsened the issue of water pollution. As Jennifer Turner, director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, told me, water pollution doesn’t make the headlines like air pollution, but is probably China’s biggest environmental problem. And the water pollution problem is so bad that it actually exacerbates China’s water scarcity problem. The resources that went into this megaproject could have gone to less flashy solutions like better collection of rainwater and water recycling. Ultimately, Turner said, the Chinese government has to address both the short and long term if it wants to fix its water problems.

China’s infrastructure issues go beyond just its water projects, however. Wallace, the Cornell professor, said China may also need to fundamentally rethink how it builds urban areas. As in the US, Chinese cities have a tendency toward sprawl that is more polluting and carbon-intensive. “Once you build the city,” Wallace said, “it’s really hard to go back, right?” There is some research to suggest that sprawling cities have to deal with more extreme heat events than do more compactly designed cities.

In the meantime, UC San Diego’s Davidson told me, there are still things China could do to protect provinces like Sichuan from extreme weather in the future. For one, the central government could ensure that it has a more unified power system that can better respond to energy shocks, such as a spike in demand for air conditioning when it’s boiling hot.

Another is better urban design: More efficient air conditioning, better insulation, planning, and cooling centers can help Chinese cities better cope when there’s a heat wave. China could also improve monitoring systems for extreme weather, support the agriculture sector, reevaluate current infrastructure projects, and bolster reforestation and flood control efforts to not only control flooding but also prepare for future drought scenarios.

With the advent of its new 2035 climate adaptation plan, which will implement a road map to bolster China’s risk assessment and its “climate-sensitive sectors,” it appears the Chinese government is looking to implement many of these policies. But this will require upending what Nahm described to me as the economic and engineering approach that China has largely taken to its infrastructure up to this point, green or otherwise. Rather than building dams or water diversion systems, China will have to double down on nature-based solutions.

At an environmental conference in Beijing, Ge Le, director of the climate change and energy program at the Nature Conservancy in China, pointed to recent reforestation efforts in China and trying to integrate more greenery into cities, like the aforementioned sponge cities, as positive examples for China to expand on. She also brought up the oyster reef restoration projects in Alabama, which aim to strike a balance between ecological restoration, climate adaptation (as reefs function as seawalls), and commercial benefit for the communities that harvest oysters.

To some observers, China’s catastrophic summer may appear to be an indictment of Beijing not having done enough to meet the current climatic moment. But the truth is that China has done a lot to mitigate the effects of climate change, as well as adapt to its effects. And while the Chinese government could certainly do more, the unveiling of the 2035 adaptation plan makes it clear that there is a lot more to come. The problem facing Beijing, then, is the same faced by Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere: Climate change is already here, and things are going to get worse before they get better. China, like the rest of the world, is going to have to buckle in and work harder than ever.

Too many Americans live in places built for cars — not for human connection

2022-08-25T13:52:36-04:00

Part of the Friendship Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

I’ve lived in Houston for most of my life, and there’s never been a time when I’ve reasonably been able to walk anywhere. Houston is practically the poster child for American urban sprawl — the landscape is dominated by spread-out neighborhoods with single-family homes and massive “stroads” (street-road hybrids with the worst aspects of both) lined with strip malls and expansive parking lots, connected by miles and miles of highways. It’s an environment designed to be solely traversed by car, not by foot.

That had a dramatic effect on the friends I could make, especially when I was younger and based in the city’s outer suburbs. Both of my parents worked, and without a car, if I missed my school bus home, I’d have to make the one-and-a-half-hour trek by foot under the hot Texas sun — forget easily going to the mall or the movies with my classmates.

College was eye-opening. I attended Texas A&M University, and spent most of my time in a denser, walkable campus environment that made it easy to meet and get to know people. I could start my day going to classes, then move to a dining hall, then the green space in front of my department building, and finally, the library — all without a car. It was easy to bump into friends, old and new, intentionally and by accident.

But when I returned to Houston to start working, friendship became exhaustingly difficult, as the long commutes made it hard to consider going anywhere but straight home after work. Even now, living in the inner ring of the city — “inside the loop,” as Houstonians call it — if I want to visit anyone beyond my apartment complex, I have to get in my car. It has made it hard for me to regularly see friends and even family. My parents live at least a half-hour drive away without traffic. (For reference, Google Maps tells me it would take me roughly seven hours to get there on foot.)

I am not alone in my experience. As Mateusz Borowiecki — a public health researcher and creator of Eco Gecko, a YouTube channel about urban planning and the issues with American suburbia — told me, the sorts of “spontaneous encounters” with friends and strangers I experienced in college are much more difficult in car-dependent suburbs. The importance of such connections and easy encounters was made especially clear when the Covid-19 pandemic sent the world into lockdowns and loneliness spiked. A major study in May from the American Psychological Association found that pandemic mitigation measures like social distancing and quarantine led to “a small but significant” increase in loneliness among people in the United States and elsewhere. This was especially true for children, but also the elderly and those with disabilities, who have experienced unique forms of isolation during the pandemic.

Distance and isolation are fundamentally built into the urban areas — defined by the US Census Bureau as any area with at least 5,000 people — where most of us live. State and local governments prioritize building infrastructure for cars, and public transportation remains underfunded and unreliable. Wide roads and parking lots spread everything out and make walking extremely difficult, if a neighborhood even has sidewalks to begin with. Today, because a majority of Americans, including an increasing number of children and the elderly, live in car-centric areas like suburbs, our ability to form connections and community is limited.

Not everyone who studies urban planning believes that rethinking car-centric communities will reduce loneliness in America. “For average Americans…I would suspect a measurable but modest difference,” said Claude Fischer, a professor and sociologist at UC Berkeley who has done research on urban life. “And I understand that doesn’t lead to good headlines in Vox. That’s the nature of the beast.”

Yet there’s data that shows that both car-heavy places and a lack of access to transit have a detrimental effect on socializing and a sense of community, especially for those who can’t drive. As local governments across the US increasingly take steps to make car-centric cities more walkable and amenable to public transit, it makes sense for us to consider what it would take to do the same for car-centric suburbs. Americans of all abilities deserve to participate in society independent of their ability to own, maintain, and drive a car. That includes being able to make friends on their own two feet.

Having friends and social connections is important for many reasons, but especially because they can stave off or reduce loneliness. While everyone feels lonely at times, long-term loneliness is dangerous and can lead to a variety of physical and mental maladies, including high blood pressure, heart disease, a weakened immune system, anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, and even death.

According to a 2021 study by the Survey Center on American Life, Americans make most of their friends at work, followed by school, existing friend networks, their neighborhood, their houses of worship, and clubs or organizations. However, the way most American cities, towns, and suburbs have been designed makes it increasingly difficult to access these places and form friendships and communities. The central issue is that so many of these urban areas in the US are built for cars, not people.

American urban areas weren’t always built this way. As Gregory Burge, an economist at the University of Oklahoma who studies how local revenue collection affects urban density, told me, older cities such as Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia were designed to accommodate walking, and thus have narrower roads and are much more dense, allowing residents easier access to community centers, businesses, churches, and more. “It wouldn’t be uncommon at all to walk a city block or two and to see literally all the kinds of urban development that you might think of as being a part of human life,” he said.

The birth and rise of the automobile would allow for the development of car-centric development like modern suburbia, where, Burge explained, land use and zoning regulations cordoned off areas into categories such as residential and commercial. Thanks to the car, suburban neighborhoods with homes could be built farther away from restaurants, schools, shops, and more — contributing to what we know as “sprawl.” Car-centric development was given preference over everything else, and in the decades after World War II, highways and parking lots would come to dominate the urban American landscape. This came at the expense of public transportation, walkability, and the ability of most Americans to carry on their lives without a car. The consequences of designing entire communities around car use are manifold: Car-centric development is harmful to the environment, discriminatory, expensive, and bad for public health.

But do car-centric environments like suburbs really make it that much harder for people to make friends? Borowiecki said that while the relationship is fuzzy, and more research needs to be done, there are some notable correlations. For one, many suburbs have an issue of “community severance” where “the amount of [car] traffic on the streets…literally acts as a barrier that prevents people from moving around or walking from interacting with their neighbors,” Borowiecki said. Streets clogged with speedy and noisy cars in a study done by Jennifer S. Mindell and Saffron Karlsen were found to reduce “physical activity, social contacts, children’s play, and access to goods and services.”

Another study Borowiecki shared found that car-centric neighborhoods hinder “children’s social and motor development and put a heavy strain on the parents,” who must chauffeur their children to school and other activities. American children cannot legally get driver’s licenses until age 16 and are dependent on the adults who drive to navigate their environments. As a result, kids growing up in car-centric areas like suburbs have less independence and ability to play and traverse their communities, and more fundamentally, have fewer opportunities to meet and socialize with others, thus ending up with fewer friends.

It’s not just children whose social connections suffer in car-centric cultures. One study of mobility among older people in Arlington, Texas, found that the lack of access to public transportation in a low-density city makes it difficult for older people to get around, making socializing and maintaining friendships and other relationships that much harder — all the more worrisome because older people in the US are more likely to live alone than others elsewhere in the world. In a country where the general population is aging and the number of older people is set to reach 80 million by 2040, the general lack of mobility among older Americans is a pressing issue. One study participant noted the ways the lack of access to public transportation limited the ability to socialize, or as she put it, to “shoot up to the mall and have lunch, us girls.”

So what would it look like for a person who couldn’t drive if we built our urban areas with their needs as our baseline? It might look like the experience of Borowiecki’s 85-year-old grandmother, who lives in a dense, public transit-rich city in Poland.

“She has plenty of access to green spaces to walk around and it’s high enough density that she knows people there and socializes with them,” he said. “She has free public transit — like three or four trains that stop five minutes from her front door that will take her all over the city. And she’s able to live a normal life and a social life and an independent life.”

We can have that in more of the US as well. Different polls say different things about which places Americans would ideally like to live in, but all paint a clear picture that a majority prefers to live in more populated urban areas like cities, towns, and suburbs rather than more sparse rural areas. The pandemic highlighted the importance of building dense, walkable cities, with more and more Americans valuing walkability and easier access to community.

That said, building new infrastructure in the US is notoriously a difficult, expensive endeavor, and upending a dominant form of urban development is an even taller order. Borowiecki told me, however, that it actually wouldn’t take that much: The urban planning literature suggests that the density required to have walkable neighborhoods is achievable by just having suburban neighborhoods be built closer together, say, by getting rid of lawns, and downsizing to something similar to the bungalow neighborhoods of outer Chicago. Gradually repairing American urban sprawl and retrofitting suburbs not only make neighborhoods more walkable and amenable to public transportation, but also makes it easier for Americans to encounter and socialize with neighbors, friends, and strangers alike.

The aforementioned study by the Survey Center on American Life found that Americans today have fewer close friends than Americans in 1990, and that people with more friends (regardless of closeness) tended to be more satisfied with their overall number of friends. Close friendships can be difficult to form and maintain, but it’s clear that other friendships, like what the study calls “situational friends” or “place-based friendships” are easier to form in communities that are dense, walkable, and filled with spontaneous encounters. Above all, if we want to design a more socially connected society that would allow for these friendships and encounters, urban planning in the US will need to become much more “active.” This will mean going beyond zoning, and centering the interests of people, not the vested interests that prefer the status quo of prioritizing cars and moving car traffic, to the detriment of pedestrians and disenfranchised communities.

My city, Houston, isn’t exempt from any of that. Even during the pandemic, unlike major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, the greater Houston area’s population has continued to grow, and is projected to have a population of over 10 million people by 2040. Houston, too, could reconsider its growth model, as sprawling out with more and more road lanes is not the answer. Houstonians today are mounting perhaps the biggest fight against highway expansions in a generation and approved a referendum to expand public transit over the next few decades — though the plan, perhaps misguidedly, is merely being framed as a way to “ease traffic congestion.” Traffic is a problem, but because of what it does to us as people, not just as drivers. A more walkable, denser, and transit-rich Houston — and America — would be one where we’re not constantly stuck in traffic just to meet our friends, including those friends we have yet to encounter.