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.
Apartment living and transport preferences: A new research paper takes a look at how apartment living might influence travel decisions. Through 20 interviews with apartment dwellers, five themes emerged including self selection, the built environment conditions shaping walking access, transit service provision, subjective experiences with safety. The fifth theme of pragmatism and necessity revealed how attitudes evolve through accumulated experience and exposure suggesting that people don’t choose a mode because they prefer it, but rather because it works best for their situation. (Mehdi Alidadi et al. | Transport Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives)
Cheated by car dependence: Car dependence has widespread ramifications for people across the United States whether they own a car or note. By looking at national polling, census microdata, and doing interviews, the Climate & Community Institute and its partners found that 74% of people feel like they have no choice but to drive their car as far as they do and that low income drivers often spend up to 40% of their income on transportation while non-drivers spend just 7%. (Emmett Hopkins, Kira McDonald and Ruth Rosas | Climate & Communities Institute)
Mo Babies, Mo Transit?: USDOT has unveiled plans for a scoring bonus for transit capital projects that would give more federal funding share to corridors with high birth and marriage rates. The idea has been criticized by former DOT officials and current Senators as dystopian and ideological. In a previous item looking at this topic, the Urban Institute’s Yonah Freemark notes that this type of policy would steer funding to communities that have more homeowners, have higher shares of driving, and are mostly white. (Sam Ogozalek | Politico)
Coach of Cities: Former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has shared that in an attempt to bond with his children and do something relaxing to offset the stress of football, he has spent 12 years building an intricate city in the computer game Minecraft. The result is a detailed residential neighborhood and buildings with lots of aquariums. (Nora Princiotti | The Ringer)
A new approach to public safety: Cities all over the country are moving towards creating public safety departments separate or adjacent to police that address crisis response and violence prevention. The idea is to have specially trained experts connect vulnerable residents to needed existing services before a crisis. The move is being hailed as innovative and a way to think differently about solving a number of social issues impacting communities. (Tahir Duckett | The New Republic)
This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by recent USC PhD graduate Wendy Zhou to discuss her dissertation, which focuses on dynamic accessibility. We talk about how static maps without a time based dimension don’t tell the whole story on access and the idea of a people based accessibility.
Quote of the Week
“The societies that prevail are those that can construct infrastructures, train people, build institutions and reorganize production around new technologies. This is the painstaking work of decades, rather than the one-time boost that comes from inventing a new frontier technology.”
—Simon Curtis and Ian Klaus in Noema Magazine discussing how the United States is falling behind on long term thinking.