Every day, The Overhead Wire collects national and international news about cities and sends the links to their email list. At the end of the week they post some of the most popular stories to Greater Greater Washington, a group blog similar to Streets.mn that focuses on urban issues in the D.C. region.
Care infrastructure: In Flint, Michigan, a program called Rx Kids gives expecting mothers $1,500 during pregnancy and $500 per month for a year after birth. Researchers found the program saved millions of dollars in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) costs, in addition to improving infant outcomes and lowering rates of maternal postpartum depression. (Cecilia Nowell | The Guardian)
Desire paths: A desire path is a term used to describe the dirt walking paths worn into grass or landscaping, created when people choose to step off a designated route such as a sidewalk or paved walkway. Taylor Slavens believes these paths show human adaptability; planners create walkways, but people have preferences and habits that exist outside of the limits of a designed path. (Taylor Slavens | Arrow)
Blue/green traffic lights: Despite a treaty signed by 35 countries in 1968 to require traffic control devices to use red for stop and green for go, Japan has blue-ish go lights. The reason is language: traditionally, Japanese had one word for both blue and green (ao, 青). This word was the one used to describe traffic lights in Japan’s 1960 Road Traffic Act, and to minimize confusion after several years of calling green traffic lights ao, Japanese officials installed “blue-green-ish” lights. (Shane Schmid | Jalopnik)
Reduced fare usage: A new report from the Regional Plan Association in New York reviews 35 transit programs with free or reduced fares for residents, finding that many of the programs were not well-utilized by eligible participants. They suggest some possible solutions including better outreach, increasing eligibility, and promoting automatic enrollment. (Dan Zukowski | Smart Cities Dive)
Rent eats income: New research from the Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that rents are an increasing cost burden for households, eating away at modest incomes. 65% of working households are now burdened by rent, spending over 30% of their household income on it; this is an increase from the 50% burdened pre-pandemic. Researchers believe that subsidies that cap housing costs at 30% would be beneficial, but would not completely alleviate budget pressures given other non-housing cost burdens. (Whitney Airgood-Obrycki, Alexander Hermann, Sophia Wedeen | Joint Center for Housing Studies)
Quote of the Week
“Right-to-Build Zones would see the federal government create a model zoning code that is intentionally much, much less restrictive than that in most cities; cities and towns could choose to adopt these codes, but only for specific neighborhoods if they want; the municipalities would then receive payments for each new home built under the code. Developers could then exploit these much simpler legal regimes and concentrate their building in the designated special zones.”
— Dylan Matthews in Vox discussing the ROAD to Housing Act that has bipartisan support on some housing reforms.
This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re sharing two parts of a discussion we had with Sam Sargent of the Valley Transit Authority (VTA). We talk about VTA’s future, transporting Caltrain’s old diesel vehicles to Peru, and how transit leadership like Randy Clarke’s is effective.
Find Part 1 at this link, and Part 2 at this link.