Episode 37: Finnish Lessons

[Ambient sound of shovels scraping on snow]

Sarah Goodyear: That is the sound of winter in Finland. In early February, I was in the Finnish city of Joensuu, where I was attending the 8th International Winter Cycling Congress. The event kicked off in a schoolyard where dozens of 10- and 11-year-old students were participating in a workshop to improve their winter cycling skills.

Teacher: Behind you, there are four kinds of straight lines that simulate different conditions and surfaces of winter.

Sarah: The temperature was about nine degrees Fahrenheit. The sky was gray. It was snowing lightly, and at least half of the kids in that schoolyard had ridden their bikes to school. I talked to one of them, an 11-year-old girl named Saimi Bruu, about her daily commute.

Saimi Bruu: I have a very steep uphill, which is not very fun, and then I have a very nice downhill with a sharp turn, which is never fun because I always fall. And then I have two bridges probably on the way. And then I go through town, so I have to watch out for all the people. But it’s pretty easy.

Sarah: Do you ever feel scared of the traffic?

Saimi Bruu: Not really, because it’s quite safe here. Like, really safe. And I rely on the cars. Well, of course I stop, but they’re always kind. They’ll let me go first. I’m not really scared that I’m going to get run over by a car.

Sarah: Welcome to The War on Cars, the podcast that dreams of a world in which we can all rely on the cars.

Aaron Naparstek: They’re reliably terrible.

Doug Gordon: Yeah, you can rely on them to run you over.

Sarah: Yeah. I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Aaron: I’m Aaron Naparstek.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: And I am super excited to tell you about all the things I learned in Finland about winter biking and winter streets, and what they can tell us about how to make our lives better.

Doug: But before we hear from Sarah about that, we have some business to get out of the way. We rely on you to help us keep the podcast going, and if you want to contribute, you can go to thewaroncars.org and click “Support,” and you can make a Patreon contribution that way.

Aaron: We will send you stickers, buttons and other great stuff, and you will be part of a fighting force that spans the globe from Australia to Russia to Ireland to Utah to Finland to Japan.

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah!

Doug: We will beat them in the driveways. We will beat them in the parking garages.

Sarah: Speaking of the globe, I did have to go halfway around the globe to get to this winter cycling congress, and I did that because the Finnish government invited me to do that, which was pretty great. Want to let everyone know that that was paid for by the Finnish government. Thanks, folks, because I could not have afforded that. It also made me think a lot about flying, which is something that a couple of listeners have asked us what we think about flying around so much. So that’s something we’re gonna get into probably more in depth at another time, but I was feeling really guilty about that.

Doug: That’s something we should reckon with, and try to figure out and talk about on an upcoming episode, for sure.

Aaron: We need some kind of like, guilt offset program where you can, like, buy guilt offsets.

Doug: That’s just called going to therapy, I think. You just—you pay someone, like, $150, and …

Aaron: Climate guilt offset?

Doug: Yeah, it’s a 50-minute hour, and then they talk to you and you feel fine at the end.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I did buy carbon offsets, but that just seems …

Aaron: Did you really?

Sarah: I did. It just seems really theoretical to me. And anyway, we’ll talk about that later. I really wish that when we were traveling to Denver, we could have taken high-speed rail that would have just, you know, zipped us out there.

Doug: But there’s good news: we have a live show coming up in Washington, DC, on March 16. And we are all taking the train from New York to our nation’s capital.

Sarah: Yes.

Aaron: Yes. Even though it is more expensive than just flying, which seems perverse and wrong.

Doug: That’s what’s nuts.

Sarah: Yeah. Anyway, it was well worth the trip to go to Joensuu and Finland because there were people from all over the world there. There were people from Belgium and Canada and the Netherlands, of course, and Sweden and Russia. And it was really wonderful to talk to all of them about the challenges that they face in their countries to get people out and actively getting places on bikes in the winter, which is something that here in the United States, you’re always told this is impossible, right?

Aaron: Oh, yeah.

Doug: Right. If you’re fighting a war on cars in your city and you want to make it better for biking specifically, the number one question you are asked probably is, “Well, what are you going to do when it snows, when it’s cold, when there’s ice on the road?” And that’s something we have to confront.

Sarah: So the first day I was in Finland, we were in Helsinki, the capital. We went for a bike ride led by Oskari Kaupinmäki, who is the cycling coordinator for the city of Helsinki. He works in their urban environment division. And the weather in Helsinki when I got there was actually pretty much the same as it was in New York. I don’t know what I expected. I think I expected it to be much colder. It wasn’t, and there wasn’t any snow on the ground. That’s unusual. They’re having an anomalous winter there, the same way that we are here.

Aaron: Winter biking, not a growth industry, probably.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: Well, I mean actually, that’s an interesting question, because biking on hard, dry snow is a lot nicer than biking on slush, which is what they have to deal with in Helsinki a lot of the time. So when we were riding around Helsinki, what I experienced was an emphasis on separated, protected bike lanes. They have a lot of grade-separated bike lanes, and sometimes they’re on the sidewalk—the separation is just the curb. There were a few places, like outside the main train station where there were some conflicts with pedestrians, but in general, their standard seems to be much higher than a lot of the lanes that we see here. You know, they don’t think that paint is enough there.

Doug: Yeah, because interestingly, at least in New York, standard bicycle lane, that terminology means a painted bicycle lane next to parked cars and next to traffic.

Sarah: Yeah. They do have some of that, but it’s not considered to be, you know, what they’re aiming for, what they’re building.

Aaron: Is it a very car-dominated city? I mean, do you feel cars in your presence in Helsinki? Is the transit good? Like, what’s it like?

Sarah: The transit is excellent. They have a lot of trams, so there are a lot of rails on the street—something to watch out for when you’re biking, obviously. But it’s definitely a car city. Like, it’s not one of these European cities where the streets are so narrow that you can’t imagine how a car would ever get in there. There’s definitely wide streets with people driving on them, and there are cars. Like …

Aaron: Are they doing—I think they were going to do congestion charging? Like, pricing the roads.

Sarah: They don’t have—they haven’t done that yet.

Aaron: Okay.

Sarah: But they do have a lot of goals when it comes to the city in general, and transportation is a big part of that. But Oskari told me about an interesting goal that Helsinki has for itself.

Sarah: You talked also about the idea of trying to make Helsinki the world’s most functional city. It seems so practical.

Oskari Kaupinmäki: If you know something about us Finnish people, we’re humble, and we don’t usually make bold claims like that. But we really went there. And I find that a good thing, because we cannot call our city the most functional city in the world if you don’t have the most functioning bicycle infrastructure to, you know, aid people moving from point A to point B on a bike. We already have a decently good pedestrian infrastructure and we’re improving that. We have really good public transport. We’re improving that. And if you bring bicycle traffic into that equation, it’s not too bold of a statement at all.

Sarah: I really love that goal. I think it’s amazing.

Aaron: That’s like my dream for New York City, that we’d just be a functional place. You know, just, like, the buses work well, the trash gets picked up well, the biking is safe, the housing is affordable. Like, let’s just make it functional.

Sarah: Right. Instead, we’re like, “We’re the greatest city in the world!”

Aaron: Right.

Sarah: Like, no.

Aaron: Or we have, like, these big ideological goals or something. You know, like, we’re gonna be the fairest big city.

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron: It’s like, okay, that’s good. But let’s just be functional.

Doug: Yeah. Can I get my trash picked up?

Aaron: Let’s just make shit work.

Doug: Can I get from A to B without worrying about falling into a pothole? Yeah.

Sarah: Yeah. And I think that’s—you know, I asked a lot of Finnish people while I was there, you know, what are the qualities of the Finnish nation or whatever. Because I don’t really know that much about Finland—or I didn’t. And they were so just reasonable. “Oh, we’re honest. We’re, you know, reserved. We’re hard-working.”

Aaron: Trying to be less dysfunctional.

Sarah: Yeah. Trying to be less dysfunctional. And I just really admire that way of thinking of a city. And then to have bicycle transportation be just an integral part of making the city more functional, to think of bicycles as something that makes your city function better instead of something that gets in the way of your city, or that bothers people or whatever. That blew my mind.

Aaron: This episode of The War on Cars is brought to you by Spin Scooters. There are a lot of new micro mobility companies on city streets these days. What makes Spin different from the others? We asked Spin’s head of policy initiatives, Beaudry Kock.

Beaudry Kock: Spin is attracting a lot of people who have a different agenda with scooters. We don’t necessarily see scooters as just the next Silicon Valley thing, we see it as a moment in time in which we can change streets, in which we can change mobility and make it more sustainable, make it more democratic and make it more equitable. As far as I know, there is no comparable streets program at any other micro mobility provider, so I think it’s kind of a people-driven revolution from within Spin.

Aaron: Spin Scooters is a proud ally in the war on cars. Learn more about the work Spin is doing to support safe, just and livable streets at Spin.app/streets. Again, that’s Spin.app/streets.

Doug: Okay, so, you know, coming at this from the perspective that I come at this from, I can hear the people saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, that’s Helsinki, but that’s not New York. We’re never gonna be like that. You know, Helsinki’s a tiny little city, and it’s not Chicago. It’s not New York. It’s not Los Angeles.”

Sarah: Sure, Helsinki is not New York. It’s not Chicago. But it’s not that different from a lot of other cities in …

Aaron: It’s like a mid-sized US city, right?

Sarah: Yeah, it’s got—Helsinki proper is 630,000 people—it’s about the same as Louisville or Las Vegas. The metro area is about 1.4 million. It’s comparable in density and size to Seattle, probably is the closest example. And it is relatively flat. But, you know, it’s not a unicorn city. There’s nothing special about Helsinki and its geographic—I mean, as a matter of fact, because it’s dark and cold a lot of the time, you might think it would be a place where people would just throw up their hands and say, “Oh, no, people won’t walk here, they won’t bike here.” But on the contrary, when they look at prioritizing transportation modes, Oskari had some very interesting things to tell me about how they see transportation in the city.

Oskari Kaupinmäki: We’ve made a strategy called “Mobility in a Growing City.” We see that when we look at, you know, vibrant cities, the pedestrians are the king. Then after that, we want to promote sustainable forms of transportation. We want to become carbon-neutral by 2035, so therefore, bicycle traffic is second. And just, you know, it makes sense, because in the space for one car, we can fit 10 bicycles. And we’re a dense, growing city, so bicycle traffic really makes sense. After that, of course, public transportation, because when you go past five kilometers or three and a half miles, bicycle traffic is not the best choice for all ages and abilities. Then good transport because, of course, you’ve got to transport the goods into the city somehow. And cars, because cars really do serve a purpose in the entire transportation system. If you’re thinking about going to places where you can’t reach by public transit, that’s what the car’s for. So we still welcome cars, but we’re not going to make that the most obvious choice for inner-city local traffic, which is meant for the people who actually live in that city.

Doug: Yeah, I really love that hierarchy that he’s talking about, that you’re gonna prioritize pedestrians because naturally, we are all born as and exist as people who walk or roll on our own power. And then bicycles. And then he said after that was public transportation, and then after that was goods transport: trucks, cars. And then finally at the bottom of the list was the private automobile.

Sarah: Yes. And I like the way he sort of talked about the cars like they were sort of—I don’t know, as an afterthought.

Aaron: Even though they’re not the best mode of transportation for the city.

Sarah: Yeah, they’re an afterthought. But then the crucial thing that he says at the very end.

Doug: Oh yeah, I love that.

Sarah: Which is that the inner city is meant for the people who live in that city.

Doug: Which is the opposite of how so many American cities and the people who govern them think. They think that the cities are for the suburbanites who come in, perform their jobs, maybe see a show or go out to dinner in the evening, and then drive home as they extract wealth from the city. They don’t see it as for the people who actually live there.

Sarah: And is that—I mean, maybe that’s just a legacy of the decaying American city of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and the white flight of that period. Like, I had never even thought about it, but it seems like that’s almost like this leftover thing where we still haven’t really admitted that cities are for the people who live in them.

Aaron: Right. We, like, came home from World War II, and we basically just destroyed our cities and created the suburbs and the interstate highway system. And, you know, wrecked our cities some more, sucked the value out of our cities by car. I mean, and then we want to attract suburbanites back to the city. I mean, it seems like that’s sort of like the American MO for urban planning.

Doug: What I really liked about that comment was when we are talking about closing streets to cars here, making them more accessible for people on foot, you often hear people say, “But you’re gonna make the city inaccessible for people who don’t live here, for people who come in from the suburbs.” And I’m always kind of standing in the corner saying, “Yeah, but if we’re accommodating every car that’s coming in, then we’re making the city inaccessible for me, for my neighbors, for the people who live a few blocks from me and just want to walk to the park without the suburban in their—the suburbanite in their Suburban, as we’ve talked about, driving in to access some of those same places.

Sarah: Well, and so as far as the winter side of this goes, you know, you might also say, isn’t this very difficult to keep a city like Helsinki in good enough shape where bicycling could be your second priority? You know, this is a city that has cold temperatures for many months of the year, and usually has quite a lot of snow. And so they have this system, a prioritization system, where they prioritize clearing bike lanes in different zones. And it’s very clear and concrete which lanes are gonna be cleared when so that you can rely on that as part of your transportation network. And they sort of work out from the more central areas. There’s different levels of priority for that. But it’s all just very clear. And I feel like that’s another thing that’s really different from US transportation policy, right? Doesn’t this just seem, like, super clear?

Aaron: Well, I mean, we mostly don’t prioritize anything except for the automobile. Like, it’s just like there’s the automobile, and then everything else is essentially, like, some secondary afterthought, some, you know, alternative mode. You know, anything that’s not a car is an alternative.

Doug: Well, just the fact that they prioritize clearing bike lanes and sidewalks, whereas here we clear the roadways, and sidewalks are left to individual property owners. So some of them might be good about it, some of them might not be. And bike lanes are a total afterthought.

Aaron: Yeah, how did they do this? How did it get that way? Do they have bike advocates who pushed for this? Does the government itself just kind of want to make these things happen? What’s the force behind this movement?

Sarah: I don’t have a really good idea. I do know there are bicycle advocates there. I met some of them. And they are definitely pushing. They don’t feel like the city is going far enough. But I think it’s also that they have these carbon goals, these decarbonization goals that Oskari mentioned, and that drives a lot of what’s happening in Europe, frankly, when it comes to transportation innovation. They have to meet these decarbonization goals—in Helsinki’s case by 2035. Well, you can’t do that with cars. So I think that puts a lot of pressure on them to find more functional solutions.

Sarah: So after I left Helsinki, I went north and east about 250 miles to Joensuu. It was an almost five-hour train ride and it was a complete shift, very different kind of place. A few Finnish people I talked to had told me about what they call “The Finnish paradox.” The most consistent winter cycling in the nation happens not in relatively warm Helsinki, but in cities like Joensuu and Oulu, which is farther north. These are smaller cities, with much more snowfall than Helsinki, and much colder. And also darker. Joensuu is a college town that’s near the Russian border in the region of North Karelia. It’s a very young city, a lot of young people there. And one of the great things about Joensuu is that it claims to have the second-highest per-capita concentration of metal bands in the world.

Aaron: Nice!

Doug: [laughs] What a claim to fame! What is the first?

Sarah: The first is another Finnish—a very small Finnish town called Lemi, which is very near Joensuu. But …

Doug: I’m sorry. I’m just imagining the rivalry between these two cities of, like, “Fuck those guys. We’re number two? We’re gonna get—who wants to start a metal band? We’re gonna be number one next year!”

Sarah: No, but what was really amazing was all of these middle-aged guys who were a major part of organizing this congress, when they told us this, one of them said to the other, “Oh, Matti, you used to be in a metal band, didn’t you?” And, “Oh, yeah, yeah.” “Well, Marku, you were in a metal band, too, weren’t you?” “Uh-huh, yeah.” “Oh, Temo, were you in a metal band?” “No, I was in a rock band.” “Oh.” Like, that’s, like, really shameful to be in a rock band.

Aaron: What is it about Finland that makes it, you know, so friendly to metal?

Doug: 22 hours of darkness during the winter.

Aaron: Is that it? That’s what does it?

Doug: Yes. That might be it.

Sarah: Anyways, so when we arrived in Joensuu on the train, it was night time. It was very cold—five, 10 degrees Fahrenheit. There was snow everywhere. It was a completely different landscape from Helsinki. And it was very quiet. And frankly, I was pretty skeptical that there was gonna be a whole lot of biking going on there. It looked like, right guys, we’re having this Congress here, but there’s not gonna be any biking.

Aaron: Did you just bring, like, all of your long underwear, and gloves and hats?

Sarah: Yeah. Oh, yeah. I had a lot of gear. But then when I woke up the next day and started walking over to where the event was gonna start, there were people riding bikes everywhere, like everywhere you looked.

Aaron: And not just conference goers. Like, regular people.

Sarah: No, no, no. This was just—I didn’t see any of the conference goers at this point. It was just regular Joensuu people: kids, old women, college kids. Like, everybody just riding back and forth like it was totally normal to be cycling when it was 10 degrees and there was snow on the ground, and the bike lanes had snow in them. But the snow was rolled and had grit on it. And some people had studded tires, but a lot of people were riding these, like, ’70s bikes that apparently are really fashionable in Finland, that sort of just kids’ bikes that, you know, didn’t have any special features or anything.

Doug: Whenever I think about places like this that have figured this out, where everybody’s biking, even though it’s freezing cold and there’s snow on the ground, I tend to think of how we as Americans like to see ourselves: as rugged, as tough, as individualistic, we can do and survive anything. And yet the very thought of biking in the cold terrifies most Americans. They are such wimps, that if it’s drizzling, even, it’s like, “Oh, I can’t bike. I can’t show up wet or sweaty or cold. I can’t go to the grocery store. How do you expect me to do that?” And so instead, we spend $60,000 on an SUV that looks really tough, and yet on the inside has very nice plush leather seats, and you can set the temperature at whatever you want. So this idea of rugged American individualism falls apart the minute we talk about transporting ourselves outside when the weather is bad.

Aaron: We’re very rugged, but we need a lot of cup holders around us at all times.

Doug: [laughs] Yes. And in-car entertainment.

Aaron: So how rugged are you guys? Do you guys bike in the winter?

Doug: So I do bike in the winter, but I will not generally bike if there’s snow or ice on the ground, because I like to say, like, I can deal with the laws of nature—temperature—but I can’t really deal with the laws of physics. If I’m cold, I put on a jacket, but if I slip and I’m hit by a truck, you know, there’s no coming back from that. So I tend to not ride that much in the winter if there’s snow on the ground.

Sarah: If there’s snow on the ground in New York, I won’t ride because the snow gets plowed into the bike lane and creates hazards. And you can’t—you know, there’s no place to ride when it’s really snowy here. It’s just there’s no accommodation whatsoever.

Aaron: Yeah, same. I also have issues with salt. We salt our roads so much that even when it’s not snowing, but if they’ve just salted everything, it becomes sort of unbearable now to …

Sarah: Yeah, you can’t breathe.

Aaron: You can’t really breathe.

Sarah: You can’t breathe. It’s just all in the air. And they actually talked about different kinds of—using brine instead of salt is one of the ways that they deal with roads there in Finland. And I think it’s a lot less impact on the air. And I mean, look, as many people as I saw cycling in Joensuu in the winter, there are 10 times as many cycling in the summer. But, you know, they have excellent infrastructure everywhere, so it just becomes integrated into people’s lives. And even if there’s a drop-off, it’s nothing like what the drop-off is …

Doug: And it’s not so significant that it’s gonna affect that many people. I mean, for me, another factor that goes into why I don’t ride as much during the winter is because I know there won’t be a lot of other cyclists out there.

Sarah: Right.

Doug: And I know that I’m safer if I’m on a street where there are lots of people riding bikes.

Sarah: Yeah. So I mean, I don’t think there’s any question that it’s always gonna be a heavy lift to get people to cycle in the winter, but if you can do it and if you’re successful in doing it, it shows that you have sort of a functioning, healthy ecosystem for bicycles there. I talked with Timo Perälä, who is the president of the Winter Cycling Federation, about what he does to encourage people to get out on the bike in winter.

Sarah: What are some of the ways that you think it’s possible to get people to get out of their comfort zone?

Timo Perälä: Like in cycling, for example, when you make it fast, easy and convenient, then people will start doing that. And now we build our cities in such a way that driving the car is the most easiest thing to do. So of course, it then dominates the city. So I think it’s about planning, basically. And the people who are doing the planning should be aware of these things, and that they have a huge power. Somebody said years ago that traffic planners have had too much power. They shouldn’t be given that power planning the cities.

Aaron: Yeah, so if not the traffic engineers, then who should have the power to design the city?

Sarah: Well, I asked Timo that question.

Timo Perälä: Well, I would give it to moms. They would, like, probably plan the cities in a better way because they run many times the practical life of the families. So they might have really good ideas. Or the kids are the other thing. Like, kids can come up with the best ideas. Their way of thinking is straightforward. Adults will kind of make things difficult, like, in their minds. Like, they have all the barriers, “Oh, we can’t do this because of that or that. We can’t offend the rights of the car drivers because …” And there’s always obstacles. I think that’s the future that gets us so much smarter than adults. They’re always interested to try new things, but when they get older and they become adults, then they—the people are harder to reach.

Doug: So moms and kids. Let moms and kids design the city is what he’s saying.

Sarah: If you think about it, when moms run their family errands and their family life, they have to think about functionality all the time. They’re not thinking about ideology. They’re not thinking about impressing people. They’re thinking about how the fuck can I get all this shit done? And that’s one thing. And then balancing that with the sort of playfulness and open-mindedness of kids is very interesting, also.

Doug: I also think that gets back to what we were talking about before, which is designing a city for the people who live there and live their lives there, as opposed to the people who are just commuting in in the morning to get to their office job, and they’re just leaving at the end of the day to go home. If you’re designing the city for that person—usually a mother—who has to get the kids to school, and then after getting the kids to school, go to the grocery store. And then after that, go pick up the kids later after she’s dropped off the groceries, and then take them to soccer practice. That’s a very different neighborhood than the one in which there’s a massive parking lot to serve the suburban commuters.

Sarah: And also, it’s one that has to be functional in all weather. And to get back to the thing of what winter tells us about ourselves, the things that people have to do, families have to do, getting to school, getting the groceries, that is an all-year-round thing. And if you can make that functional and nice all year round for people—to the extent that that’s possible—you’re gonna have a better city.

Aaron: I just really like how they’re so focused on the practicality, you know, and the functionality, and they’re, like, taking transportation completely out of this realm of, like, this for-profit industry of automakers. They’re taking it out of the realm of ideology and virtue, and it’s not about any of that. Seems like they’re just very focused on, like, how do we make this work better for moms and kids and families and people who live in a city? Which seems like it should be obvious, but is not something that we do for the most part.

Doug: Well, we ask how can we make it better for cars?

Aaron: Yeah.

Doug: And they just say, how can we make it work better? Period.

Aaron: Yeah. For the people who live here.

Doug: And that’s a much better way of living, yeah.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: So okay. So whenever I go away, I think about, like, what would I want to take back with me, not just as a souvenir but, like, what lessons can I take back with me and apply as an activist to my own city? So you were in places that are not completely analogous to New York City but, like, what would you take back from Joensuu?

Sarah: I would take back the idea that a city in which people of all ages can ride bicycles easily is a more pleasant city to be in. And that making a city more functional reduces everybody’s stress and unhappiness. And there’s a lot of stress and unhappiness in the world, and I think some of it in our case is self-inflicted. And that if we just thought in terms of how can we make this all work better together, how can we rely on the cars, how can we all rely on each other to see each other more, to take care of each other more—I know that sounds kind of impossible in the United States of today but, like, that’s—like, how could we all just try to work together to make it work? That’s what I would like to bring back from Finland.

Aaron: Wow, Sarah, I thought you were just going to give us some tips for nice winter cycling gear. You went way, way bigger.

Doug: That was super inspiring.

Aaron: Yeah. And I think that’s a good place to wrap up. So thanks everybody for listening to this episode of The War on Cars.

Sarah: We will post links to other reports that other journalists did about the Winter Cycling Congress. There’s a little video that shows you what it was like at thewaroncars.org. I want to say thank you so much to Oskari, to Timo, to Matti Hirvonen, to Tony Desnick, and to all the people who are part of the Winter Cycling Congress—it’s a really inspiring group of people. And next year they’re gonna be doing it in Belgium. So, you know, who knows?

Doug: Please write and review us on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast—that helps people find us. Also, we want to hear from you. Write in with comments, questions or suggestions to [email protected].

Aaron: As always, we’d like to thank our top Patreon sponsors: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, the law office of Vaccaro and White New York City, Huck and Elizabeth Finne, and of course, our new sponsor, Spin Scooters.

Doug: Just a reminder that on Monday, March 16, we will be doing a live show at the League of American Bicyclists’ National Bike Summit. You can find out more at bikeleague.org/summit.

Sarah: This episode was recorded by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. It was produced and edited by Ali Lemer. Our theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our logo is by Dani Finkel of Crucial D. Designs. I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Doug: I’m Doug Gordon.

Aaron: I’m Aaron Naparstek. And this is The War on Cars.