Building H #60: Spinning Wheels

While public health has often looked to public policy as primary tool for tackling major health challenges, we’ve generally taken a different tack with Building H. Our focus is on the product environment – how the product and services of everyday life shape the behaviors that affect people’s health. We seek to catalyze innovation in products and services that make it easier to lead healthier lives and create transparency and accountability for the impacts that businesses have on their customers. But while we don’t focus on policy, there is often an important interplay among technological innovation, policy and infrastructure and nowhere is this more evident than in the field of mobility. The development of automobiles led to the paving of roads, setting aside of parking spaces, and, quite generally, public policy that prioritized automobile travel over other modes. This interplay – and the positive feedback loop that emerges – is well described in this visual explainer by Culdesac (a development company that actually ranked #1 in our Building H Index).

We see the need for the coherent intertwining of technology, product, infrastructure and policy in the emergence of e-scooters and now e-bikes. Dropping scooters into cities without infrastructure, in the form of safe lanes, or clear rules about where riders should or shouldn’t ride or where to leave them led to predictable confusion and backlash. In some ways they became a hazard to be managed rather than an opportunity, when paired with proper infrastructure and appropriate policy, to replace short car trips with a mode that offers both health and environmental benefits. 

The key is whether leaders have both the vision and the collective will to bring the strands together to enable the social benefits that could come from innovations that offer such opportunities. As one article in our focus below notes, federal policy to support e-bikes (in the form of a subsidy) is mired in the dormant Build Back Better Act. (And that doesn’t offer much in the way of creating the infrastructure to make riding e-bikes a reliably safe proposition.) Shifting the emphasis away from automobile transport in the US is a monumental task and is clearly being met with resistance – and yet we’re at a remarkably opportune time that features a confluence of innovation, new, highly popular products, models of what desirable change can look like in different parts of the world and the urgency of major societal challenges that require this shift. It’s so exciting. And so important.

-Steve & Thomas

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