What is the Happiest Way to Commute?

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.

Happiness in a transportation choice: Yingling Fan at the University of Minnesota wanted to know through research whether happiness can be one of the emotions you feel on your trip to work. Using a smart phone app to survey 400 people, they found biking and walking is best with short transit trips next while longer car trips are stressful and definitely don’t make people happy at all. (Andrew Hazzard | MPR News)

A tale of two skylines in North Carolina: After four decades the results of two paths for two North Carolina downtowns has become clear. Charlotte, now a banking center, and its skyline were influenced by an architect mayor and bank owner and have a tall skyline while Raleigh, the state capital, stayed low and grew more organically and targeted eight centers outside of downtown in a plan spearheaded by former planning director Mitchell Silver. Whether Raleigh will follow Charlotte’s height remains to be seen. (J Michael Welton | The Assembly)

Importance of pink in Latin American architecture: Pink is an important color in Latin America and especially Mexico with Rosa Mexicano seen in crafts and textiles and even taxis. But also because buildings were mostly built out of stucco they were given color to make them more lively and elicit emotion. Local materials play a huge part in how places create their own identity and as things become more mass produced the local character can fade. (Sandy Sanchez | Architectural Digest)

A city’s footprint: How big is a city’s footprint and how much regional planning is necessary to create sustainable systems that keep people fed, the power on, water flowing, and emissions down? Specifically, planning efforts like Northern Manhattan Climate Action Plan (NMCA) need bigger plans to be a part of, because creating a bioregional governance system could be the answer to all these questions and more. (Lena Greenberg | Earth Island Journal)

75 years of development made Hurricane Ian worse: Hurricane Ian is shaping up to be a devastating storm, wiping out houses and infrastructure all along Florida’s coast. Making that problem worse was the specific way that southwest Florida was developed through wetland reclamation and engineering. Over decades the area was reformed by man and machines into a dangerous area that will likely flood more often with stronger storms. (Zeke Baker | Washington Post)

Quote of the Week

Maybe there’s a tiny bit more delay for a few drivers during peak time, but when you stack that up against the more than 10,000 people who ride the bus routes on this corridor, we’re perfectly happy to accept a little bit more delay for private cars if it means that 10,000 people have a few more minutes back in the day.

-Boston’s chief of streets Jascha Franklin-Hodge discussing in Governing the changes the city kept after the Orange Line shut down.

This week on the podcast, Broward MPO Executive Director Greg Stuart talks about Broward County, its connections to the rest of South Florida, the historic MAPS transportation plan, sea-level rise and the effects of the pandemic.

Want more links to read? Visit The Overhead Wire and signup.