How to Regulate Dockless Bike-Share?

A LimeBike dockless bike share bicycle in Milwaukee. Photo by Dave Reid.

Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. At the end of the week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful.

Street network representations: Geographer Geoff Boeing has taken street networks from cities around the world and distilled them into a simple histogram where they can be compared to each other. They are super fun to look at and compare in addition to giving cities a bit of history. (Henry Grabar | Slate)

Regulating bike share in Seattle: After becomming the first testing ground for dockless bike share, Seattle Department of Transportation has been looking at other cities seeking out ways to write appropriate regulations. Figuring out parking location, operations fees, and enforcement will be key to ensuring sustainability of the mode and the program. (David Gutman | Seattle Times)

The footpath of the future: Footpaths are super low tech, but face the same pressures from disruption as other transportation modes. Often cluttered with utility poles and other obstacles, the advent of lower speed electric mobility devices and innovations such as delivery robots are making these spaces complicated and endangered. (David Levinson | Foreground)

The space beneath our cities: Under our cities are any number of utilities, tunnels, and other items of importance. But who owns the spaces above and below the land? In the United States and England its owned by the land holder unless separated and sold. In many countries the answer isn’t so simple but programs to map out what can’t be seen is underway. (Bradley L. Garrett | Guardian Cities)

California emissions lowered: In California climate pollutants have fallen to levels not seen since 1990. The goal of the state’s ambitious AB32 was to get below 1990 levels by 2030 which seems possible now but there’s still a lot of work to do. The next big target are transportation emissions which make up 41% of all emissions and increased 2% in 2016. (California Air Resources Board)

Quote of the Week

There are more than 100 students on my [architecture] course, and only three of us are black. Initially, it was a shock to feel so under-represented. I grew up in London, where three in 10 people aren’t white.

-English architect Helen Taiwo discussing diverty in the profession. (Guardian)

This Week on the Talking Headways Podcast: Tom Madrecki of UPS