Every day at The Overhead Wire we collect news about cities and send the links to our email list. At the end of the week we take some of the most popular stories and post them to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the DC region. They are national links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.
Reporting cars behaving badly: The Portland Oregon alt-weekly newspaper asked locals to report electric scooter riders behaving badly. In turn they responded with stories of automobiles almost running them over instead. (Willamette Week)
How America uses its land: There are 1.9 billion acres of land in the lower 48 states. How we use that land for recreation, farming, and living has been laid out in a set of maps. Unfortunately it doesn’t include how much land we devote to parking. (Bloomberg)
Austin’s code rewrite on thin ice: The mayor of Austin is calling for work to end on the code rewrite the city has spent $8 million on and been working on for a number of years. Citing toxic discourse, he’s looking to start over again from scratch. (Austin Chronicle)
A tax on bikes and buses: Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania has proposed a program for eshewing the gas tax by 2028. But before the gas tax is phased out, he is proposing to raise it while putting in place battery taxes, bicycle wheel taxes, and transit fuel taxes that had previously not existed. Per mile taxes will be tested in the mean time to see if they are viable as a replacement. (Planetizen)
Charlotte’s car free future: Charlotte is planning long term for a downtown without cars and a different idea about the city should be. If the NASCAR Speed Street festival which closes down streets for 90,000 visitors each year is any indication, it is certainly possible. (Next City)
Quote of the Day
You can’t ask [these apps] to change their entire business model, but you can ask them to take other things into consideration when designing their apps. They can’t fix gentrification, but they can help us find businesses to live out our values.
–Will Payne in a piece on whether smart phone apps are accelerating gentrification. (Governing)
This week on the podcast, we’ve got Patrick Siegman, the first Shoupista