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.
States versus cities on transportation: States are passing laws and making moves to preempt city preferences on transportation policy that lean toward less driving. The states of North Carolina and New York have both tightened transit money and curtailed congestion policies in opposition to cities’ will, while heaping money on road and highway expansion. Some states help achieve driving-reduction goals, while others stand in the way of city efforts to stem the tide of climate change. (Sarah Wesseler | Yale Climate Connections)
Saudi Arabia’s $25 billion metro system: Saudi Arabia is finishing up a $25 billion metro network for the capital Riyadh, expected to open before the end of the year. When the system opens, the six metro lines — providing access to 84 stations, combined with the 80 bus routes and 2,860 stops — will be capable of carrying 1.7 million people a day. Upon opening, the Riyadh expansion will be the largest single-phase metro project in the world. (Joe Edwards | Newsweek)
The climate policies that work best: A new study evaluating the efficacy of 1,500 climate policies implemented across 41 countries over 24 years suggests the strategies are only meaningfully effective when combined. Carbon pricing as both a tax and cap-and-trade measure was determined to be effective in cutting emissions and in layering with other pollution-limiting policies. However, from 1998 to 2022, the study found just 63 instances of significant reductions in emissions. (Kate Yoder | Grist)
Olmsted’s Texas hill-country influence: Fredrick Law Olmsted, the father of modern landscape architecture, made a trip through Texas to the hill country in 1853 before designing Central Park in New York City. While it’s just a theory, Clayton Maxwell wonders if that trip inspired Olmsted’s design theory, as well as some of the park’s most famous features such as Sheep Meadow. (Clayton Maxwell | Texas Monthly)
Chicago could open its own grocery chain: Chicago is considering opening three grocery stores of its own to support neighborhoods where national chains have recently shut their doors. This program would mark the first time a city has operated a publicly owned grocery store. Community and nonprofit groceries have done similar things, but it’s a tough road when they lack the purchasing power of large chains and must operate at low margins to stay alive. (Patrick Sisson | Fast Company)
This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next center at the University of Oregon. We chat about his new book with Kaarin Knudson, “The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook,” as well as about how most U.S. sustainability initiatives seem to be Band-Aids for a lack of urban density.
Quote of the Week
“Those of us who care about climate change need to see the surface-transportation reauthorization as the next big climate bill.”
— Kate Zyla, executive director, Georgetown Climate Center, in a Slate article discussing how the U.S. could break its addiction to highways