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.
Car insurance rates could jump: According to insurance rate data, car insurance premiums will continue to rise next year with three states estimated to have increases of over 50% in some instances. The increases are coming from rising costs for labor and parts as well as increasingly severe and more frequent weather events, with hail claims up almost 3% since 2020. (Aimee Picchi | CBS News)
Sydney opens new downtown metro line: Sydney, Australia, has opened five new stations on its driverless metro line after starting construction back in 2017. Transit enthusiasts woke up early to get the first train and were blown away by some of the station designs. The train will come every 4 minutes at rush hour and can carry up to 40,000 passengers per hour. (Elias Visontay | The Guardian)
Making indoor climates the same everywhere: Air conditioning has changed the way we build. It allows people to live in deserts and expect climates that match much cooler places around the world as people expect a room in Phoenix to feel the same as one in Maine. The problem, however, is that as the world warms and we use more AC, the energy needed to cool spaces leads to more fossil fuel combustion, exacerbating the problem. (Emily Badger | New York Times)
Redlining maps didn’t affect neighborhoods like you think: The infamous Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps created in the late 1930s have been singled out as showing one of the biggest connections between disparities today and decisions made in the past. But Allan Mallach argues that those neighborhoods would have been rated negatively unrelated to race and that economic flight made them worse. But also that racist practices of private lenders should be blamed for influencing the government, not the other way around. (Allan Mallach | Shelterforce)
Four story buildings at the sweet spot: Four-story buildings are the sweet spot of affordability and sustainability, according to Michael Anderson of the Sightline Institute. He argues that four-story buildings are more affordable to families that want a wider range of housing choices, but comparatively less expensive to build than other multifamily buildings with elevators. These buildings also tend to have unit densities high enough to save energy but low enough to fit in many different zoning areas. (Michael Anderson | Sightline Institute)
This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re sharing a conversation about public transit to the Great Outdoors featuring Corrie Parrish of Kittelson & Associates, Andrea Breault of Cascades East Transit and Amy Schlappi of Columbia Area Transit.
Quote of the Week
“The trees themselves don’t create any problems, in fact they solve a lot of problems for us in cities. The problem is cars and fossil fuel combustion in cities that can essentially start to negate or take away some of the benefits that trees are providing us.”
— Andrew Reinmann of the City University of New York in the New York Times discussing how auto emissions are negating the benefits of urban trees