Rush Deliveries Travel Further, Pollute More

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.

The wealthy are leaving cities? Good riddance: There are a number of times in America’s past when high income earners left the big city for the outskirts in search of more space. But the potential for their permanent evacuation leaves questions about why city budgets and resources depend so heavily on them when sustainability should be the ultimate goal. If we structure our cities right, we won’t need those who don’t want to take part. (Aaron Gordon | Motherboard)

Jane Jacobs and using data for public good: With extensive data collection platforms planners now have more information at their fingertips than ever before. But there’s an uneasy relationship with the technology that can be used also for exclusion. During the urban renewal period, Jane Jacobs argued against using data to make the case for wiping out whole neighborhoods and instead collecting the qualitative data that strengthened social ties. (Sarah Williams | Fast Company)

First electric car charging station opens in the UK: A new first of its kind service station in the UK is serving up only electrons for vehicles. The company Gridserve expects to build 100 of them in the next five years. The station has 36 chargers and will collect £0.24 per kWh and estimates it will cost around £10 to go from 20% to 80%. Funny enough it still looks like an auto oriented waste of land. (Jon Porter | The Verge)

Same-day shipping is clogging roads: With the holiday season also comes a surge in package delivery and traffic. Same day shipping has an extremely detrimental effect not just on congestion but also emissions and the climate as an hour delivery creates seven times more vehicle miles traveled than a 24 hour one. A potential remedy for the situation would be a slower more local online retail that would reduce VMT, congestion, and emissions. (Kea Wilson | Streetsblog USA)

Future of staying at home: Our homes have transitioned from just a place to sleep at the end of the day to a full time fortress against all perils; germs, fires, flooding, heat and more. And in the future with more intelligent features and design, our homes will also become more personalized to our individual needs but perhaps a bit more antisocial and unequal as well. (Max Holleran | The New Republic)

Quote of the Week

We’ve known for three or four years now that the only thing that was killing coho salmon was little bits of tire rubber and water. That was the only chemical source we looked at, from vehicle fluids and things like that, that could actually kill the fish.

-Researcher Edward Kolodziej in Inverse discussing finding out that a chemical in rubber tires was responsible for killing Salmon in the Pacific Northwest.

This week on the podcast, Former Austin Energy General Manager Roger Duncan talks about his co-authored book The Future of Buildings, Transportation and Power.

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