Author: Jeff Wood

Jeff Wood

Jeff Wood

Jeff Wood is an urban planner focused on transportation and land use issues living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jeff's news archives can be found at The Overhead Wire and he tweets @theoverheadwire. You can also listen to his Talking Headways podcast episodes at Streetsblog USA

Photo by Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz), CC 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

National Links: New Data

• November 4, 2025

Community land trusts keep homes affordable, transit advocates push better storytelling, Waymo faces accountability questions, and Norway proves EV success needs long-term policy.

Campus Martius in Detroit - A Great Urban Park

National Links: A Large Urban Park

• October 27, 2025

Mayor, carbon, safety, and parks: Houston’s controversial leader, city meat emissions, vehicle safety warnings, and a massive Mexican park restoration.

manually operated signalling tower, this is one of the later ones. By this time they had dispensed with signs and flags and were using lights exclusively,

National Links: Signal Timing

• October 10, 2025

Cities face transit delays, housing-linked sleep issues, climate and air challenges, halted Phoenix growth over water rights, and renewed BRT expansion.

Bicycles parked at café, Shoreview, mn
People increasingly want to live around others who want a similar healthy lifestyle. They want local eateries that do well serving a variety of quality healthier portion-appropriate food options rather than a token healthy option among huge servings of unhealthy heart killing gook and giant donuts (reasonably small sweets are quite welcomed though). One realtor once told me that there’s nothing that sells Shoreview like a customer seeing lots of people walking and bicycling on Shoreview's paths. More recently another said “lots of bikes parked outside of a local café is turn-on for prospective residents while a place filled with overweight people eating large portions of unhealthy food is a turn-off”.

National Links: Care Infrastructure

• October 6, 2025

Care infrastructure, income and access, and unexpected variations in language and distance are all touched on in this week’s National Links.

Equal Earth projection of global map. Imagery is a derivative of NASA’s Blue Marble summer month composite with oceans lightened to enhance legibility and contrast.
By Strebe - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72769307

National Links: Equal Projection

• September 25, 2025

An updated global map projection, using ancient technologies to combat rising temperatures, rainbow crosswalk outside of Pulse Night Club removed twice and more stories.