Every day, The Overhead Wire collects news about cities and sends the links to their email list. At the end of the week they 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 D.C. region. They are national and international links, sometimes entertaining or absurd but often useful.
Less traffic, more superblocks: Streets make up much of the publicly owned space within cities in the United States and are constructed and used primarily for vehicles. To give people more public space, and to improve health and well being, some cities have turned to the concept of the superblock: a planning structure which pushes traffic to the periphery of an area to open up internal spaces for people. Barcelona is most well known for this concept, and Amanda Shendruk believes it can work here as well. (Amanda Shendruk | Washington Post)
Is your commute harming your health?: Numerous studies have shown the harmful mental and physical health detriments of long commutes driven in cars. Commutes which expose people to noise pollution and toxic air have negative effects on mood and increase stress in durations over 30 minutes. On the flip side, commutes which include active transportation such as walking or biking are shown to have health benefits, promoting the release of nuerochemicals such as serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. (Nikita Luke | The City Fix)
Federal lands for affordable housing: The White House and Republicans have found something they can agree on: public lands can be opened up for development of housing. However that’s where the agreement ends as Republican sponsored bills would open up land without guaranteeing housing construction, while the Democratic administration wants only the land in development zones near cities made available for new housing. As home shortages and construction are extremely local issues, any program would have to be targeted to make a difference. (Katy O’Donnell | Politico)
Cities heating up at night: Growing cities such as Las Vegas, which are known for their daytime heat, are getting increasingly hotter at night. The growth in population and supporting infrastructure have intense heat island effects on cities and their surrounding areas. In Las Vegas 50 years ago, roughly 20 nights a year measured temperatures above 79 degrees – now it’s 60 nights a year. Night heat is be dangerous in that the people exposed never get a chance to cool down. (Ronda Kaysen and Aatish Bhatia | New York Times Upshot)
Chennai finds savings in redesigning metro stations: The city of Chennai in India, with a population of 12 million people, has begun design work on stage two of it’s metro network, which will cover 72 miles. To save costs, engineers have redesigned the ventilation systems to reduce the size of stations by 40%. The change has already saved roughly $240 million in procurement costs. Total costs are projected to be reduced from around $12 billion to $8.5 billion by the addition of these and other cost-saving measures. (U Tejonmayam | Times of India)
This week on the Talking Headways podcast, Chris Redfearn of USC and Anthony Orlando of Cal Poly Pomona discuss why “pro-business” Texas housing markets are catching up to “pro-regulation” California and what it might mean for future city growth everywhere.
Quote of the Week
“Local government associations would be wise to engage proactively and early in this innovation process so that the new tolling systems capture granular local road use data. Otherwise, they will be stuck with nothing more than hand-me-down state dollars assigned to them by conventional population and road-mile formulas. Now is the best time for cities, towns and counties and their finance teams to start staking a claim on the revenue stream and make reasonable demands for granular data capture that can be used to assess user fees to fund local streets and roads.”
— Girard Millar in Governing discussing opportunities for cities to get out front on reimagining road funding as the gas-tax era closes.