Congestion pricing cuts traffic and pays for transit
Rivera 24, Urban Mobility Review
Cities that priced congestion saw downtown traffic fall 18 percent in the first year. Revenue, roughly 2.1 billion dollars, went to transit, and air quality improved in eleven of the cities.
Sharpen your debate.
The arsenal the national champion preps with. Cut the card, find the evidence, take theirs apart.
Used by the Public Forum Nationals winner
Try it, no account
Cut a card right here.
Edit the article, set the tag, press Cut. Underline is what you read, highlight is the emphasis, bold is the power word.
Your cut card shows up here
underlined = read aloud, highlighted = emphasis, bold = power words
This demo runs in your browser with a simple rule. The real cutter reads any article link and picks the passage for your tag.
The Arsenal
Every step of prep, faster than the other team.
Search, cut, attack, block, practice. One login. Here are the three moves you will make in your first five minutes.
01 / Search
Type the claim. Get the cards.
Cardinal searches the web and opencaselist, then cuts ready-to-read cards from credible sources with the cite already written.
- Web + opencaselist in one query
- Every result comes back cut and highlighted
- Sources you can defend in cross
Carbon pricing cut emissions 11 percent in the first two years
webOkafor 25, Nature Climate
The authors find a significant effect across the sample.
41 words read aloud
Revenue recycling made the policy progressive for the bottom quintile
opencaselistLindqvist 24, JPE
The authors find a significant effect across the sample.
37 words read aloud
Border adjustments neutralized leakage to unpriced markets
webGhosh 25, Brookings
The authors find a significant effect across the sample.
52 words read aloud
Firms under a carbon price invested 14 percent more in clean capital
webMartin 24, AER
The authors find a significant effect across the sample.
44 words read aloud
02 / Cut
Paste a link. Read the card.
Drop in any article and a tag. Cardinal finds the strongest passage and marks exactly what you read aloud: underline, highlight, bold. Verbatim, always.
- Link first: no walls of pasted text
- Two-pass highlighting like a real cut
- Your highlight color, your word count
Source
Tag
Congestion pricing cuts traffic and cleans the air
Rivera 24, Urban Mobility Review
The analysis covered 31 cities over three years. Cities that priced congestion saw downtown traffic fall 18 percentin year one, and air quality improved in eleven of the cities, with particulate levels down nine percent on average. The authors caution that transit alternatives must exist first.
03 / Attack
Their best card, taken apart.
Paste an opponent's evidence and Cardinal exposes power-tagging, dated data, missing causation and contradictions, plus the cross-ex questions that land.
- Flags you can read in prep time
- Turns and CX questions included
- Works on PF, LD and Policy cards
Their card
"Congestion pricing collapses downtown retail"
Patel 19, City Journal
Two cities reported lower foot traffic in the year after a charge was proposed, which the author attributes to pricing pressure on retailers.
Power-tagged
The tag says 'collapse'; the card says 'pressure'.
Dated
2019 data, before the policy took effect.
No causal link
Correlation across two cities, no control.
Cross-ex
"Does your author study any city after the charge began?"
Now free for everyone
Free prep: the Sep/Oct topic.
The whole Public Forum archive for the September/October resolutions is unlocked, no Pro needed. Both the Data Center Moratorium and Emissions Trading (ETS) topics: hundreds of contentions and blocks, thousands of cut cards, ready to read.
Opening sale
Founder pricing, while it lasts.
Your first month of Pro for $5
FIRSTMONTH5A full year of Pro for $65
SEASONPASS65
Enter the code at checkout. Limited spots, first come first served.
From source to card
Watch a card get cut.
01Raw article
Paste a link or the text. Nothing marked yet, just the source.
02Underlined
03Cut
04Ready for round
Raw article
urbanmobilityreview.org/2024/congestion-pricing-31-cities
Congestion charges have been debated since the first London scheme in 2003. A 2024 analysis of 31 cities that adopted congestion pricing found that downtown traffic fell by 18 percent within the first year. Revenue from the charge, roughly 2.1 billion dollars across the sample, was directed to transit expansion and road maintenance. Air quality improved measurably in eleven of the cities, with particulate levels falling by an average of nine percent. The authors caution that results depend on reliable transit alternatives being in place before the charge begins.
Before and after
Prep by hand, or walk in prepped.
- Find a sourceTwenty tabs, a paywall, and a PDF you skim at 1 a.m.Type the claim. Cards from the web and opencaselist, already cut.
- Cut a cardCopy, paste, underline, highlight, bold, re-check the cite.Paste a link and a tag. Highlighted, verbatim card in seconds.
- Answer their caseGuess what they will run, write blocks from scratch.Every contention and block for the PF topic, with the cut cards.
- Pressure-test evidenceHope you spot the power-tag in cross-ex.Attack a Card flags it in prep time, with the CX questions.
- PracticeNeeds a partner, a judge, and a free Saturday.Timed rounds with an AI judge and a written ballot (Pro).
- CostBriefs and camps run hundreds of dollars a topic.Core tools free forever. Pro $10 a month or $75 a season.
The Arsenal
One arsenal. Every round.
Every tool a debater needs to walk in sharper than the other team. The free tools come first; Pro unlocks the rest.
AI Card Cutter
FreePaste an article and a tag, Cardinal finds the strongest passage and highlights the exact words you read aloud.Card Search
FreeType a claim. Cardinal searches the web and opencaselist, then cuts ready-to-run cards from credible sources.Attack a Card
FreePaste an opponent's card and Cardinal exposes its contradictions, power-tagging, shaky assumptions, and turns, plus cross-ex questions.Rhetoric Mode
FreeTurn any card into a smooth spoken sentence, the evidence stays word-for-word, only the delivery gets polished.PF Archive
FreeFree for the Sep/Oct topic. Cardinal shows the contentions people ran and the blockfiles (premade rebuttals) to answer them, with the cut cards, sorted by category and side.Word Count
ProUpload a doc and count only the highlighted words you actually read aloud, know your speech length.The Archive
ProPre-made kritiks, topicality, theory, framework, spark and wipeout, ready to browse, copy, and run.Blockfile GEN
ProBETA. Paste a block outline and Cardinal fills every block with real cut cards (and analytics where no card fits), on your side, formatted like a hand-cut file.My Cases
ProOrganize cards into files and contentions, then export a whole case to a single Word doc.Practice Rounds
ProRun live rounds with synced timers, prep clocks, chat, and an AI judge that hands back a rubric ballot.Judge Prep
ProPaste a paradigm for a cheat-sheet, or look up a judge's Tabroom record, how often they vote Aff vs Neg across their history.AI Coach
ProA conversational coach that pulls real cards from your library and Archive to build cited blocks.
Reviews
Debaters talk.
5.0 out of 5 from 5 reviews, every one written by a debater.
Cardinal is my go to app to use for debate. I cannot stress enough how much this tool has helped me. During a debate the opponent had a piece of evidence that I just could not refute. So In-between rounds I used Cardinals attack a card tool to counter the piece of evidence, it worked great. Next round our opps were using the same evidence but this time we were able to counter it.
Cardinal is a great app to use, it genuinely saves me hours of finding cards and helps me prep way faster than before. Everything else like the card cutting tool works great as well. I'm looking forward to a great season using cardinal!
I just had a huge tournament, and between rounds, I needed to prep frontlines, and I used Cardinal which helped me find the perfect card, and I won that round, which led to me getting 2nd speaker.
In my 4 years of doing debate, I have never seen a tool as good as this, not to mention most tools are completely free! This does everything I would want a card-cutter tool to do and more. I highly recommend this to anyone doing debate, no matter their age or experience level. Thank you Cardinal!
As someone who has placed at multiple debate tournaments and earned top speaker awards, I can honestly say that Cardinal has been one of the biggest upgrades to my prep. It makes finding strong sources, cutting clean cards, and organizing evidence insanely fast, which gives me way more time to focus on strategy and actually winning rounds. The platform feels like it was made by people who genuinely understand what competitive debaters need. Cardinal has helped me prep more efficiently, build stronger cases, and find responses that I probably would have missed on my own. Whether I am preparing weeks before a tournament or doing emergency prep right before a round, it consistently comes through. The card-cutting tools are smooth, the sources are useful, and the entire process is way less stressful. I have used a lot of debate resources, but Cardinal is easily one of the most valuable. It is not just a convenience—it gives debaters a real competitive advantage.
Ambassadors
Bring your team. Earn Pro.
Every debater gets an invite link. Teammates who sign up with it count toward free Pro time, and at 15 referrals you become a Cardinal Ambassador: named on this page, badged in the app.
- Tier 15referrals3 days of Pro, free
- Tier 220referrals1 month of Pro, free
- Tier 330referrals3 months of Pro, free
Current ambassadors
1- 1Antong Li 0
Our mission
I built Cardinal for my own team.
“Cardinal exists so no debater ever walks into a round unprepared just because they couldn't afford help. The whole arsenal, the sharpest prep and the best evidence, should belong to everyone willing to work for it, not only the teams with the biggest budgets.”
I'm a high school debater. At Nationals I froze in a round with nothing prepped, and I never wanted that feeling again, so I spent months building the tool I wish I'd had: one place to cut cards, find evidence, flow rounds, and answer arguments.
The core tools are free, and they're staying free. Card cutting, Search, Attack a Card and Rhetoric Mode don't cost anything. Pro exists for one reason: the AI and servers cost real money, and Pro is what keeps the whole thing running so the free tools can stay free. I'm a debater, not a company trying to cash in on debate.
Anvith Ankinapalli, founder & debater
Where it stands
- debaters
- 0
- reviews
- 0
- free tools
- 0
Pro is $10 a month and pays for the servers so the free tools stay free.
Universal pre-K pays back seven to one by age thirty
Heckman 24, Journal of Human Resources
Following the cohort to age thirty, every dollar returned 7.3 in earnings and avoided costs, with the largest gains for the lowest-income families.
Our Ambassadors
Debaters we've called up for spreading Cardinal to their teams and communities.
- 1Antong LiAmbassador
Demo
See Cardinal in action.
A short walkthrough of the Arsenal. Click to play.
Walk in sharper than the other team.
Start with the free tools. Swap strategies, share cards, and get help from other debaters in our Discord.