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.
Utah Legislature steals street-planning power: The Utah Senate passed a bill that would steal multimodal street design and planning power from Salt Lake City. In a last-minute addition to legislation, Sen. Wayne Harper (R-Taylorsville) added language that precluded cities from designing roads that “may increase congestion for motor vehicles or discourage motor vehicles from driving on a particular street.” State preemption on city street design has been increasing over the past several years. (Taylor Anderson | Building Salt Lake)
Minnesota Legislature may kill commuter rail line: A bill in the Minnesota Legislature (HF 269) is looking to end commuter rail service on the Northstar Line. Hit hard by the pandemic, the Northstar never reached its intended final destination in St. Cloud, and the line is now seeing a fraction of the ridership it once had. Legislators would seek to exempt the Northstar from a rule that requires agencies to pay back the federal government if service ends before a certain time. Metro Transit, the local agency, is considering a bus replacement. (Trains Magazine)
An innovative street grid: Traditional street grids began disappearing in the 1950s, replaced by sprawling road networks that increased fatalities and increased public health issues. In his book “Urbanism for a Difficult Future,” Korkut Onaran proposes a new way of building street grids as a response to climate change, with more pedestrian-focused layouts and shared streets. The Adaptation Village model could be an alternative to conventional sprawl. (Robert Steuteville | CNU Public Square)
Are California housing laws working? An analysis of five California housing laws passed since 2021 have found them to have little impact on the state’s housing production. YIMBY Law, which authored the report, said that opposition from local governments is one factor. The report also suggested that requirements in the bills —including stipulations for union labor and affordability mandates — were reducing or preventing their effectiveness. (Ben Christopher | CalMatters)
Why construction is so expensive: A recent Yale Law & Economics research paper finds that two major issues drive infrastructure costs: a lack of capacity of the Department of Transportation (DOT) procuring the project and a lack of competition for infrastructure contracts. Using data from California, the researchers show that “higher quality engineers deliver projects at a lower cost, while retirement shocks slow project timelines and increase costs.” (Liscow, Norber, and Slattery | Yale Law & Economics Research Paper)
This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Mike Eliason of larch lab to discuss his new book, “Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon Communities.”
Quote of the Week
“When you get off the cramped tube, at somewhere like Tottenham Court Road, and emerge into these huge platforms and 250-metre-long trains, it’s this completely different world. … If we could have three or four lines like that, the whole city would be transformed.”
— Christian Wolmar in The Guardian on how the Elizabeth Line feels to riders in London.
Photo at top by Thomas Konings on Unsplash