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Amy Coney Barrett is singing from the same hymn sheet as they get ready to dismantle what’s left of Roe. Don’t be fooled.
A year after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, they’re racing to overturn Roe v. Wade, while pretending they’re not and speaking out against the partisan hackery they’re engaged in.
It’s an ironic turn of events, if a sadly unsurprising one, as first Amy Coney Barrett and now Clarence Thomas delivered speeches asking Americans to trust them—speeches that just happened to come before the Supreme Court’s next session when they’ve agreed to hear the Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that’s teed up for the high court’s Trumpy new majority to end abortion as we’ve known it.
They’re coming for your uterus, and that’s not hyperbole. The central tenet of Roe is viability, that “a person may choose to have an abortion until a fetus becomes viable, based on the right to privacy contained in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Viability means the ability to live outside the womb, which usually happens between 24 and 28 weeks after conception.”
Since 1973, American women have had the right to end a pregnancy before viability. Now, the Supreme Court has allowed that right to be subverted in the state of Texas. Women there are already driving hundreds of miles to Colorado and New Mexico to get abortions. Three out of four abortion clinics in San Antonio are no longer performing the procedure.
Now the justices who used the shadow docket to let that happen are begging to be themselves judged on their shtick and not on their actions. On Thursday, speaking at a Catholic university, Thomas said that “when we begin to venture into the legislative or executive branch lanes, those of us, particularly in the federal judiciary with lifetime appointments, are asking for trouble.”
You'll remember Thomas as someone who said in 1992 that Roe v. Wade was “plainly wrong.” In 2020, Thomas upped that to “grievously wrong for many reasons, but the most fundamental is that its core holding—that the Constitution protects a woman's right to abort her unborn child—finds no support in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
In his speech this week, Thomas also warned that “we have lost the capacity” as leaders “to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don't get the outcomes that we like.” Hmmm, didn’t his wife Ginni try to “manipulate our institutions” when she didn’t get the outcome she liked? She was a big Jan. 6 cheerleader, telling a group of election-denying insurrectionists on Facebook that “GOD BLESS EACH OF YOU STANDING UP or PRAYING.” Two days later, she added “[Note: written before violence in US Capitol]” and a few days after that she ended up having to write to her husband’s former clerks that “I owe you all an apology. I have likely imposed on you my lifetime passions.”
I guess her “lifetime passion” is overturning elections?
As to venturing into the executive branch’s lane, that didn’t seem to be an issue for the Thomases during the Trump administration when, according to Slate, “Trump has rewarded Thomas with an extraordinary amount of access to the Oval Office. Her advocacy group Groundswell got an audience with the president in early 2019. According to the New York Times, the meeting was arranged after Clarence and Ginni Thomas had dinner with the Trumps.”
Clarence Thomas’ speech about court overreach came a week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett told a group at the University of Louisville, “My goal today is to convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks,” since “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.” She was introduced at the McConnell Center by her patron and the center's namesake, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who some might say is the very definition of a partisan hack.
I understand the temptation of these justices to lie to the American public. They want to have it both ways, to serve the Republican agenda and overturn Roe while also maintaining what’s left of the court’s reputation for transcending ideology.
But, unfortunately for Thomas and Barrett, most of us will judge them on their actions and not ridiculous speeches about them. I expect that as the Republican agenda gets ever more batshit, these Trumpy justices will give more speeches pleading with people not to see them as the partisan hacks that they are.
The American people are not morons, and while these justices may abuse their power to decide the law, they can’t spit on us and make us believe that it’s raining.
The Web services company Epik, which has hosted websites that promote QAnon theorists and other extremists, was hacked. Now its files are being perused by extremism researchers. (photo: Saul Loeb/Getty)
Researchers say it will allow them to gain important new insights into how extremists operate online
But that veil abruptly vanished last week when a huge breach by the hacker group Anonymous dumped into public view more than 150 gigabytes of previously private data — including user names, passwords and other identifying information of Epik’s customers.
Extremism researchers and political opponents have treated the leak as a Rosetta Stone to the far-right, helping them to decode who has been doing what with whom over several years. Initial revelations have spilled out steadily across Twitter since news of the hack broke last week, often under the hashtag #epikfail, but those studying the material say they will need months and perhaps years to dig through all of it.
“It’s massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I’ve seen and, as an extremism researcher, it’s certainly the most interesting,” said Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism. “It’s an embarrassment of riches — stress on the embarrassment.”
Epik, based in the Seattle suburb of Sammamish, has made its name in the Internet world by providing critical Web services to sites that have run afoul of other companies’ policies against hate speech, misinformation and advocating violence. Its client list is a roll-call of sites known for permitting extreme posts and that have been rejected by other companies for their failure to moderate what their users post.
Online records show those sites have included 8chan, which was dropped by its providers after hosting the manifesto of a gunman who killed 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; Gab, which was dropped for hosting the antisemitic rants of a gunman who killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018; and Parler, which was dropped due to lax moderation related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Epik also provides services to a network of sites devoted to extremist QAnon conspiracy theories. Epik briefly hosted the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer in 2019 after acquiring a cybersecurity company that had provided it with hosting services, but Epik soon canceled that contract, according to news reports. Epik also stopped supporting 8chan after a short period of time, the company has said.
Earlier this month, Epik also briefly provided service to the antiabortion group Texas Right to Life, whose website, ProLifeWhistleblower.com, was removed by the hosting service GoDaddy because it solicited accusations about which medical providers might be violating a state abortion ban.
An Epik attorney said the company stopped working with the site because it violated company rules against collecting people’s private information. Online records show Epik was still the site’s domain registrar as of last week, though the digital tip line is no longer available, and the site now redirects to the group’s homepage.
Epik founder Robert Monster’s willingness to provide technical support to online sanctuaries of the far-right have made him a regular target of anti-extremism advocates, who criticized him for using Epik’s tools to republish the Christchurch gunman’s manifesto and live-streamed video the killer had made of the slaughter.
Monster also used the moment as a marketing opportunity, saying the files were now “effectively uncensorable,” according to screenshots of his tweets and Gab posts from the time. Monster also urged Epik employees to watch the video, which he said would convince them it was faked, Bloomberg News reported.
Monster has defended his work as critical to keeping the Internet uncensored and free, aligning himself with conservative critics who argue that leading technology companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and YouTube have gone too far in policing content they deem inappropriate.
Monster did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. But he said in an email to customers two days after hackers announced the breach that the company had suffered an “alleged security incident” and asked customers to report back any “unusual account activity.”
“You are in our prayers today,” Monster wrote last week, as news of the hack spread. “When situations arise where individuals might not have honorable intentions, I pray for them. I believe that what the enemy intends for evil, God invariably transforms into good. Blessings to you all.”
Since the hack, Epik’s security protocols have been the target of ridicule among researchers, who’ve marveled at the site’s apparent failure to take basic security precautions, such as routine encryption that could have protected data about its customers from becoming public.
The files include years of website purchase records, internal company emails and customer account credentials revealing who administers some of the biggest far-right websites. The data includes client names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and passwords left in plain, readable text. The hack even exposed the personal records from Anonymize, a privacy service Epik offered to customers wanting to conceal their identity.
Similar failings by other hacked companies have drawn scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, which has probed companies such as dating site Ashley Madison for failing to protect their customers’ private data from hackers. FTC investigations have resulted in settlements imposing financial penalties and more rigorous privacy standards.
“Given Epik’s boasts about security, and the scope of its Web hosting, I would think it would be an FTC target, especially if the company was warned but failed to take protective action,” said David Vladeck, a former head of the FTC’s consumer protection bureau, now at Georgetown University Law Center. “I would add that the FTC wouldn’t care about the content — right wing or left wing; the questions would be the possible magnitude and impact of the breach and the representations … the company may have made about security.”
The FTC declined to comment.
Researchers poring through the trove say the most crucial findings concern the identities of people hosting various extremist sites and the key role Epik played in keeping material online that might otherwise have vanished from the Internet — or at least the parts of the Internet that are easily stumbled upon by ordinary users.
“The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive,” said Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism. “Without Epik, many extremist communities — from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis — would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the Jan. 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy.”
The breach, first reported by the freelance journalist Steven Monacelli, was made publicly available for download last week alongside a note from Anonymous hackers saying it would help researchers trace the ownership and management of “the worst trash the Internet has to offer.”
After the hackers’ announcement, Epik initially said it was “not aware of any breach.” But in a rambling, three-hour live-stream last week, Monster acknowledged there had been a “hijack of data that should not have been hijacked” and called on people not to use the data for “negative” purposes.
“If you have a negative intent to use that data, it’s not going to work out for you. I’m just telling you,” he said. “If the demon tells you to do it, the demon is not your friend.”
Several domains in the leak are associated with the far-right Proud Boys group, which is known for violent street brawls and involvement in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and was banned by Facebook in 2018 as a hate group.
A Twitter account, @epikfailsnippet, that is posting unverified revelations from the leaked data, included a thread purporting to expose administrators of the Proud Boys sites. One man who was identified by name as administrator of a local Proud Boys forum was said to be an employee of Drexel University. The university said he hasn’t worked at Drexel since November 2020.
Technology news site the Daily Dot reported that Ali Alexander, a conservative political activist who played a key role in spreading false voter fraud claims about the 2020 presidential election, took steps after the Jan. 6 siege to obscure his ownership of more than 100 domains registered to Epik. Nearly half reportedly used variations of the “Stop the Steal” slogan pushed by Alexander and others. Alexander did not reply to requests for comment from the Daily Dot or, on Tuesday, from The Post.
Extremism researchers urge careful fact-checking to protect credibility, but the data remains tantalizing for its potential to unmask extremists in public-facing jobs.
Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit whistleblower group, said some researchers call the Epik hack “the Panama Papers of hate groups,” a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed a rogue offshore finance industry. And, like the Panama Papers, scouring the files is labor intensive, with payoffs that could be months away.
“A lot of research begins with naming names,” Best said. “There’s a lot of optimism and feeling of being overwhelmed, and people knowing they’re in for the long haul with some of this data.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at the Capitol yesterday. (photo: Francis Chung/E&E News)
“The White House, the House and the Senate have reached an agreement on a framework that will pay for any final negotiated agreement. So the revenue side of this, we have an agreement on,” Schumer announced at a joint press conference with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Schumer briefed reporters on the details of the agreement after the press conference.
"We had a meeting with Secretary Yellen and White House people," he said. "And we reached an agreement on a framework, menu of options that will pay for any final negotiated agreement."
Pelosi called it “an agreement on how we can consider, go forward in a way to pay for this.”
The deal does not include a top-line revenue number or a top-line spending number, said a senior Democratic aide familiar with the agreement.
The aide explained it's an understanding between Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (D-Mass.) about what revenue-raising proposals are on the table for the upcoming negotiations.
Wyden and Neal will use the House Ways and Means Committee’s tax proposal combined with a few “Senate ideas” that were left out of Neal’s bill, which his committee passed last week.
Neal, for example, did not include a proposal favored by Wyden to increase tax revenue from capital gains by eliminating stepped-up basis when calculating the tax obligations on inherited assets.
The House tax bill also left out a proposal championed by Wyden and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to implement a 2 percent excise tax on stock buybacks as well as an idea endorsed by the White House to end the 1031 “like-kind exchange” tax break for real estate investors.
The proposed Senate language on ending the “carried interest” loophole, which allows investment fund managers to be taxed at capital gains rates instead of income tax rates, is stronger than in the House’s proposal.
Neal also left out a Biden-backed proposal to require financial institutions to provide more information to the IRS about bank accounts.
Wyden told reporters the menu of tax proposals can be dialed up or down to raise any amount of money needed to cover the full cost of the reconciliation package, which has yet to be agreed to — but is unlikely to go above the $3.5 trillion figure currently on the table.
“We are ready with options that are on what I call this menu to pay for the choices that Congress makes,” Wyden said.
The menu of revenue-raisers will be used as the template for negotiations with moderates such Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) on the reconciliation package and how to pay for it.
Chuck Marr, senior director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, hailed the framework as a “big step forward.”
“They’re implying that they have agreement on a menu of revenue options that can be sized to fit any package, and obviously paying for it is always the hardest part, so that’s very good news,” he said.
“The House bill can be dialed up,” he added, noting that Neal’s proposed 3 percent surtax on people who earn more than $5 million can be adjusted to raise more money.
The announcement appeared to catch some senators by surprise, as key players said Thursday morning they didn’t know what was in the framework.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), a senior member of the Finance Committee, said he didn’t have “the foggiest idea” of what it included.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) also said he wasn’t familiar with the details.
A little girl holds her stuffed animal high above the water as migrants, many from Haiti, wade across the Rio Grande river from Del Rio, Texas, to return to Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, Monday, Sept. 20, 2021, to avoid deportation. (photo: Felix Marquez/AP)
Daniel Foote excoriates Washington in letter addressed to Antony Blinken for deporting hundreds from a border camp
Daniel Foote’s angry resignation letter is a serious blow for an administration which came to office promising a more humane approach to immigration in the wake of Donald Trump’s policy of child separation. The state department rejected Foote’s criticism and said he had given a misleading account of his resignation.
The Biden administration has been struggling to deal with a recent surge of Haitian migrants and refugees fleeing the implosion of the country’s society after the assassination in July of its president, Jovenel Moïse, triggered chaos that was then compounded by a powerful earthquake in August.
Foote, who has previously served as deputy chief of mission in Haiti and ambassador in Zambia, was appointed special envoy after Moïse’s killing, which remains unsolved.
After some 14,000 migrants gathered in an impromptu camp under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) bureau started flying hundreds out on multiple flights every day, without the opportunity for asylum appeals or hearings.
“I will not be associated with the United States’ inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the danger posed by armed gangs to daily life,” Foote said in his letter to the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, that was leaked on Thursday.
“Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my policy recommendations have been ignored and dismissed, when not edited to project a narrative different from my own.”
“The people of Haiti, mired in poverty, hostage to the terror, kidnappings, robberies and massacres of armed gangs and suffering under a corrupt government with gang alliances, simply cannot support the forced infusion of thousands of returned migrants lacking food, shelter and money without additional avoidable human tragedy,” Foote said, arguing that the deportation policy was self-defeating as it would only fuel more migration.
“The collapsed state is unable to provide security or basic services, and more refugees will fuel further desperation, and crime. Surging migration to our borders will only grow as we will add to Haiti’s unacceptable misery.”
The deportations are being carried out under a previously obscure public health law, Title 42, which was used for summary expulsions by the Trump administration and has been continued under Joe Biden. The head of the UN refugee agency, Filippo Grandi, has said the use of Title 42, without any due process or screening for potential peril faced by deportees might violate international law.
Responding to Foote’s letter, the state department spokesman, Ned Price, said: “There have been multiple senior-level policy conversations on Haiti, where all proposals, including those led by Special Envoy Foote, were fully considered in a rigorous and transparent policy process.
“Some of those proposals were determined to be harmful to our commitment to the promotion of democracy in Haiti and were rejected during the policy process. For him to say his proposals were ignored is simply false,” Price added.
“It is unfortunate that, instead of participating in a solutions-oriented policy process, Special Envoy Foote has both resigned and mischaracterized the circumstances of his resignation.”
The publication of Foote’s letter comes just days after shocking pictures were published showing US border patrol agents on horseback using their reins on desperate Haitian refugees by the banks of the Rio Grande. The administration has been assailed from both human rights groups for the deportations and the treatment of migrants, and from the right for the decision to release thousands of the Haitians into the US in order to alleviate the conditions in Del Rio.
The administration is also making preparations to reopen a migrant detention centre on Guantánamo Bay, close to the prison camp for detainees picked up in the “war on terror” and has asked private contractors for tenders for a contract to supply guards who speak Creole and Spanish.
The Democratic congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez called the plan “utterly shameful”.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Ice, said on Wednesday it had deported 1,401 migrants from the Del Rio camp to Haiti and taken a further 3,206 into custody.
People gather in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, in support of abortion access and for a candlelight vigil to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Saturday, September 19, 2020. (photo: Michael Laughlin/Getty)
“This isn’t a joke. This is our lives.”
The new bill in Florida would prohibit abortions after a “fetal heartbeat” is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks into a pregnancy, before many people even know they’re pregnant. At least 11 other states have passed laws with similar statutes, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
The 40-page bill filed by Republican Webster Barnaby, a member of Florida’s House of Representatives, would also allow for “private civil enforcement” by allowing anyone to sue abortion providers or people who provide aid to those seeking abortions for up to $10,000—effectively outsourcing enforcement of the abortion ban to people who may have no connection at all to the patient.
In Texas, the ban—which the Supreme Court decided not to take action on earlier this month, paving the way for enforcement—is already wreaking havoc on access to reproductive rights. The private action lawsuits have also begun: One abortion doctor in Texas has already been sued by a man in Arkansas who has no connection to the patient and has admitted he’s only doing it for the $10,000 reward he could receive if the lawsuit is successful.
Unlike Texas’ bill, however, the Florida bill would allow for exemptions for rape, incest, domestic violence, or human trafficking, or if the life of the person carrying the pregnancy is threatened.
The Florida bill immediately drew outrage from Democrats and abortion advocates. “It mimics the most extreme anti-abortion bill in the country,” state Rep. Anna Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat who spent six years working for Planned Parenthood, told VICE News Thursday.
Even prior to Barnaby’s bill, Florida legislative leaders had already indicated they were interested in similar legislation following the Texas ban. In response to a question from a reporter about this subject earlier this month, Senate President Wilton Simpson sent a Tampa Bay Times reporter a smiling sunglasses emoji, which Eskamani referenced as evidence of Republicans’ cavalier attitude about their constituents’ reproductive health.
“It’s like, what the fuck are you doing, bro?” Eskamani said. “This isn’t a joke. This is our lives.”
Beyond effectively banning abortions in the first trimester, Florida passing such a bill would have ramifications beyond the state’s borders. Surrounded on all sides by anti-abortion strongholds, many people travel to Florida for abortions.
“The ramifications of a six week ban are horrifying,” Eskamani said. “You’re setting this tone that is anti-women and at the same time you’re destroying people’s lives.”
Eskamani said she expects multiple abortion bills to be filed during the upcoming legislative session starting in January, as there’s “tension” among Republican legislators on how extreme they want their abortion bill to be. “The Republican legislature does this all the time: They’ll bring forth the worst version of a bill, and then bring forth a lesser worst version and act like we’re supposed to be grateful,” Eskamani said. “It’s so manipulative.”
She added that she believes the GOP wants the outrage against Barnaby’s bill to “dissipate” between now and January, when the session starts, so legislators have an easier time passing new abortion restrictions in some form.
“No ban is appropriate. We don’t support any new restrictions on abortion,” Eskamani said. “So it’s really about holding this long-term opposition between now and the start of session.”
Taliban fighters at a lake near Kabul, Afghanistan, days after the last American troops left the country. (photo: Jim Huylebroek/The New York Times)
Members of the ethnic group, seen by China as potential extremists, are afraid they will be sent there as part of a deal for economic aid.
Ibrahim was born in Afghanistan. But now he, too, is trying to escape the clutches of Chinese authoritarianism.
He and his family have been afraid to leave their home in Afghanistan since the Taliban, the country’s new rulers, took control last month, venturing outside only to buy essentials. “We are extremely worried and nervous,” said Ibrahim, whose full name is being withheld for his safety. “Our children are worried for our safety, so they have asked us to stay home.”
A person rides a Citi Bike in Kips Bay on March 19, 2021, in New York City. (photo: Noam Galai/Getty)
It’s about climate change, public health, and economic development.
He did it all the time when he lived in Albuquerque, and thought he’d try the same when he moved to Dallas five years ago. Moffitt says he lasted six months before he threw in the towel.
“It was really just scary,” Moffitt told Vox. “Driving is pretty much the only option I have.”
One of the largest cities in Texas, Dallas doesn’t have much in the way of street biking infrastructure. According to city officials, it currently has 74 miles of bike facilities, including painted guidance on streets, buffered bike lanes, and just 5.3 miles of on-street protected bike lanes (which include a physical barrier that shields riders from car traffic). As a point of comparison, Austin has more than 50 miles of on-street protected bike lanes and Houston has at least 22 miles.
“Dallas’s street infrastructure is still woefully behind and inadequate,” says Heather McNair, president of the advocacy group BikeDFW, who attributes this lag to a lack of political will.
The gap is evident to many cyclists in Dallas, including Moffitt, who said there simply wasn’t a way for him to get from home to the office by bike without fearing for his safety.
“If you want to commute, you gotta be hyper-vigilant or have nothing to lose,” he told Vox. Another local biker echoed this sentiment in a Reddit post: “In a former life I would ride for coffee, beer and groceries, but here that feels like a death wish.”
Dallas and other cities, however, are facing increasing pressure to change. As interest in biking has grown — due in part to the pandemic and climate concerns — demand for better infrastructure and safer routes has surged across the country.
The benefits of better biking systems are evident: Cities like Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado, which have built out expansive biking networks, are poised to see big boosts for public health outcomes and economic development. Well-developed biking infrastructure could also prompt larger-scale lifestyle shifts that lead people to become less dependent on cars and more open to different modes of transportation, spurring reductions in congestion and pollution. And better biking networks mean that the activity is safer for those who already do it and more accessible to those who have yet to try.
Replicating the success of a place like Portland, however, will take a lot of investment — the sort of money many cities and states don’t have to spare. Congress’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill doesn’t provide the funding needed for such a transformative change, but it does offer support that could help cities — including Dallas — cover some of the costs.
For any federal infrastructure funding to make a significant difference, though, the city, and others like it, will have to treat these plans as a priority — something that hasn’t necessarily been done in the past.
Dallas’s on-street infrastructure is lagging
One of the biggest challenges that cyclists in Dallas face is a lack of street infrastructure.
The city’s trail system is robust and growing, but the presence of bike lanes on the road is sill relatively rare. Much of what exists now was only built in the past decade: Until 2012, Dallas didn’t have a single dedicated or shared bike lane, former bike transportation manager Jared White told Bloomberg.
The city has made some strides since then, according to officials. It’s put in a handful of protected bike lanes and is developing a new comprehensive plan for revamping its on-street bike facilities.
Still, it’s very much behind — even compared to other car-centric places in the state.
“Dallas was later than most cities with even starting with a bike lane network,” says Robin Stallings, head of the advocacy group BikeTexas.
Local advocates hope the city’s new proposal will see more success than a similar effort in 2011, which would have expanded bike infrastructure significantly — establishing 833 miles of on-street facilities — but suffered from slow and halting implementation. According to Philip Kingston, a former city council member and supporter of more bike infrastructure, the 2011 proposal and subsequent efforts were never given the investment required to be fully effective.
“City management never took it seriously and it was never funded properly,” Kingston told Vox. As of 2021, McNair estimates that only about 20 percent of that plan has actually been completed.
Without enough on-street bike lanes, the city has serious issues of connectivity, meaning it doesn’t have a network of safe bike routes extensive enough to allow people to get where they need to go. Many advocates stressed that the need for more protected bike lanes, in particular, is huge, since the added physical barrier helps make cycling a more secure and welcoming experience.
Under current conditions, cyclists say that navigating the city by bike can often be anxiety-inducing. “It’s really, really hard [to ride] from my side of Dallas without having to come into contact with cars,” says Alexandra Sizemore, a project manager in sports marketing and a local cyclist. “If you can plan it out and you’re in the right part of the city, you could ride to a [Dallas Area Rapid Transit] station and do a combined commute.”
Such infrastructure gaps are exacerbated in low-income parts of the city, a dynamic evidenced in a 2019 review on walkability. “A study by George Washington University’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis found Dallas to have only a handful of sufficiently walkable areas, comprising less than 0.2 percent of the metro region. These areas—affluent neighborhoods like Uptown and Oak Lawn—are 37 percent more expensive than the regional average,” Bloomberg’s Mark Dent reported.
Overall, Dallas trails most other US cities when it comes to the accessibility of resources like public transportation, schools, and grocery stores via bike, according to rankings done by the advocacy group PeopleForBikes.
Dallas’s infrastructure gaps stem from a lack of funding and prioritization. McNair says the budget for bike funding could soon get bumped to $2 million a year, up from the $1 million per year that’s currently allocated. She says, however, that it took time for lawmakers to recognize this need. For years, just $500,000 of the city’s more than $3 billion annual budget was put toward this issue, an amount that would barely cover a few miles of protected bike lanes, says Stallings.
McNair believes it would cost the city tens of millions of dollars to develop a comprehensive network of protected bike lanes. City officials declined to provide an estimate for what the total expenses might be, but agreed that this characterization was likely fair. Initial estimates indicated that Austin would spend about a third of the $151 million — or roughly $50 million — allocated for its biking plans on 200 miles of on-street needs, for example.
Money from Washington has been instrumental to the progress Dallas has made so far — and it’s typically central to many cities’ efforts to expand their biking systems. In the 2020-2021 fiscal year, Dallas received about $22 million in federal money related to projects that included biking facilities like shared-use paths and buffered bike lanes.
Officials say they plan to pursue additional resources in the bipartisan infrastructure plan as well. “This funding helps bolster city funds, especially on higher-cost projects that are comfortable for all ages and abilities,” they noted.
The infrastructure bill boosts funding for transportation alternatives but won’t revolutionize biking in the US
One of the biking boosts in the infrastructure bill is more funding for “transportation alternatives.”
The Transportation Alternatives Program, also known as TAP, was established in the 2010s as a way to get federal money to states and other regional authorities to use for biking and pedestrian projects. As it stands now, different entities including states and metropolitan planning organizations receive annual TAP funding, which they then dole out to localities that apply for it. This program currently represents the largest proportion of federal funding for biking and pedestrian needs.
Currently, there’s $850 million allocated for TAP per year, and the infrastructure bill increases that by a sizable 60 percent for the next five years. In total, the legislation includes $7.2 billion for TAP over five years, compared to the $4.25 billion that would have otherwise been dedicated in that time frame.
The entirety of this money is not dedicated to biking infrastructure, but a hefty chunk of it is typically used in this way: TAP projects in the past have included everything from protected bike lanes to pedestrian walkways to preservation of historic sites. According to an analysis by Rails to Trails, biking and pedestrian needs have accounted for about 85 percent of the money allocated via TAP between 2014 and 2020.
In 2020, the North Central Texas Council of Governments, which is in charge of distributing TAP funding to Dallas and other cities in the area, allocated more than $25 million in TAP funding to 12 projects, some of which mentioned bike lanes explicitly.
Although advocates welcomed the increases in funding for TAP, they note that allocations for certain provisions in both the program and the broader bill could have been more robust. The Recreational Trails Program — an effort that helps cover maintenance of trails — did not get any boost in annual funding, for instance, and will continue to receive $84 million a year. (Advocates had pushed for it to receive upward of $200 million given a recent review of its funding sources.)
Another provision included in the bill establishes the Active Transportation Connectivity Program but leaves the actual funding up to congressional appropriators, meaning it’s not guaranteed. This program would dedicate money to connecting disparate bike trails and lanes in cities and towns, so that places could build out networks for residents to use. It’s authorized at $200 million a year, though advocates had pushed for $500 million annually.
The omissions to these two programs are significant since they focus on strengthening different aspects of cities’ biking systems, including major trails and connections that would offer more continuity across neighborhoods.
According to Caron Whitaker, the deputy executive director for the advocacy group the League of American Bicyclists, money from several other programs could be applied to biking infrastructure, too, though they are more expansive in what they cover. The Surface Transportation Block Grant Program, the Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Program, and the Highway Safety Improvement Program, which will respectively be allocated $72 billion, $13.2 billion, and $15.6 billion over five years, are among those that could also be leveraged for biking needs. All of these would be distributed by state- or regional-level bodies as well, and will likely be more competitive than TAP since they cover other transportation areas in addition to biking.
Separately, there are some provisions of the budget bill — including commuter benefits for cyclists, an e-bike tax credit, and grant money that could be used to fund biking infrastructure — that would promote and incentivize biking.
All in all, advocates note that the bipartisan legislation is an improvement on existing funding for biking infrastructure, which had been neglected by the federal government entirely until the 1990s. It doesn’t take a bolder approach to making biking more accessible, though. Historically, biking funding has only constituted about 1.5 percent of federal transportation funding, and though it’s increased in this legislation, it still makes up a very small proportion of the bill.
“The overall funding for bike infrastructure is far from transformational and far from what’s needed to match the level of biking that’s growing across the country,” says Noa Banayan, the federal affairs director for PeopleForBikes, adding that she believes the federal funding required to properly expand biking infrastructure across the country is likely in the “hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Biking investments are about mode shifts
The payoffs from investing in biking are wide-ranging and include everything from reduced carbon emissions to public health benefits.
Many places across the country and world have already seen how expansions to biking infrastructure can dramatically shift how people approach the activity and the dependence that individuals have on cars.
In Seville, Spain, the number of bikes used daily grew from 6,000 to 70,000 after the city established an expansive network of protected bike lanes, the Guardian reports. In Davis, California, which had one of the country’s first bike lanes, bikes outnumber cars on the roads, Wired reports.
A recent study found, too, that European cities that expanded their biking infrastructure during the pandemic — when interest in the activity soared — saw up to 48 percent more people taking up biking than those that did not, according to the New York Times. Cities with better biking infrastructure also have much higher proportions of commuters who bike in general: 62 percent of Copenhagen’s workers commute by bike, for instance; domestically, over 20 percent of Davis’s do, compared to just 0.6 percent of commuters in the US overall.
Key infrastructural changes can help residents move away from cars as their sole means of transportation, and help address a major source of pollution. As Gabby Birenbaum explained for Vox, curbing this dependence is important, as cities like Dallas are outsize contributors to the pollution that causes climate change:
According to a 2021 study published in Frontiers, Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles have some of the highest per-capita emissions totals in the world. The study broke down cities’ emissions based on sector, using the most recently available data (from 2009 and 2010), and found a large portion of those emissions come from transportation.
Data from the EPA shows that the transportation sector is actually the biggest source of pollution in the US, and that light-duty vehicles (or passenger cars) are responsible for 58 percent of those emissions. Overall, the EPA’s research — and the 2021 study — reinforce the fact that the transportation systems of American cities over-rely on cars in ways that are not sustainable should the US actually want to approach its stated greenhouse gas reduction goal of 50 percent by 2030, a number it has to reach in order to limit global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius or less.
Researchers have found that switching from a car-based commute to biking for one trip a day can cut down an individual’s transportation-related carbon emissions by 67 percent, Bloomberg reports. Additionally, there’s evidence that biking commutes are associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular illnesses and could help reduce pressure on cities’ health care systems.
To change their reliance on cars, cities and towns need biking infrastructure designed to make the activity more available to people as both a recreational option and a practical one. Many advocates see infrastructure investments as opening up biking to more people, making them view it as an easier and safer way to get around than they currently might.
Additional infrastructure will also make the practice safer for those who already bike regularly: According to Pew, biking fatalities have increased in recent years, especially in urban areas; government data shows they’ve grown 49 percent since 2010, with 846 deaths in 2019. Expanding the number of protected bike lanes would help cut down this figure and bolster resources for many people — including low-income individuals who rely on biking as their primary form of transportation.
“It gets people out of cars when they have this mode shift, when they have a safe route to get from point A to point B,” says Rails to Trails vice president of policy Kevin Mills.
Moffitt agrees, saying he’d definitely bike the 12 miles to the office as long as he had a safe way to do it: “I would only drive if I absolutely had to.”
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