内容摘要：“I think we’re living in an anti-gravity moment where people are able to say, ‘I’m not concerned about my first, personal carbon footprint. Collective action matters the most,’” she said. In the future, though, “there will be a moral and social cost to bear by those individuals.”

“I think we’re living in an anti-gravity moment where people are able to say, ‘I’m not concerned about my first, personal carbon footprint. Collective action matters the most,’” she said. In the future, though, “there will be a moral and social cost to bear by those individuals.”

Kansas City saved some money when it converted 31st Street in 2022 because a gas line was going in anyway. It reopened with one lane in each direction instead of two, a shared turn lane near the signalized intersections, betterand protected on-street parking spaces.

Road diets are now an almost automatic part of the process in Kansas City whenever a street is up for repaving. For years,said lane reductions were usually appropriate on roads carrying fewer than 25,000 vehicles a day. Most of the city’s four-lane roads don’t meet that threshold.Bobby Evans, an urban planner at the Mid-America Regional Council who has worked on Kansas City’s road diets, calls the strategy “a smashing success” and one of the most effective tools at reducing speed, crashes and injuries.

“In the architectural world you’d call it environmental determinism,” Evans said. “You want to make it so they don’t feel comfortable going too fast. You’re really not slowing them down. You’re bringing them back to the speed limit.”A motorist drives on 31st Street in Kansas City, Mo., where the city implemented a “road diet” reducing the street from four lanes to two in an effort to reduce speeding and accidents, Thursday, April 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

A motorist drives on 31st Street in Kansas City, Mo., where the city implemented a “road diet” reducing the street from four lanes to two in an effort to reduce speeding and accidents, Thursday, April 17, 2025. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)

Numerous other cities have credited road diets with improving safety.That uncertainty has been hitting U.S. households and businesses, raising worries that they may freeze their spending and long-term plans in response, which would hurt the economy. The latest reading in a survey of U.S. consumers by the University of Michigan showed

, though the pace of decline wasn’t as bad as in prior months.Perhaps more worryingly, expectations for coming inflation keep building, and U.S. consumers are now bracing for 7.3% in the next 12 months, according to the University of Michigan’s preliminary survey results. That’s up from a forecast of 6.5% a month before.

When everyone expects inflation to be high, it could kick off a vicious cycle of behavior that only worsens inflation.To be sure, only some of the University of Michigan’s survey responses for the preliminary May reading came after the United States and China announced their 90-day truce.