What Can be Learned From Montreal’s New, For-profit LRT Line?

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.

Montreal’s new LRT line a model?: Montreal opened its latest transit expansion last week, the first section of a 67 km (41.5 miles) light rail network by a private company. The line has been lauded for its quick construction timeline and opening and some hope it’s seen as a model for the rest of the country. But the process will be hard to replicate given an existing freight right of way and special laws passed to limit land owner contests that don’t exist in the rest of Canada. (Thomas MacDonald | Toronto Star)

Borrowing cooling design from Middle East: In the United States, 88% of housing units have air conditioning to cool the building down. But in historically hot areas, designs have been repurposed to provide cooling to new buildings using wind while allowing natural light. Wind towers called barajeels can cool buildings up to 50 degrees depending on the prevailing winds. And dome ceilings can help keep heat from rooms in the building. We could learn from these designs and build more passive cooling into our buildings. (Anna Gordon | Time Magazine)

Dallas soon will finish bike loop: After $90m and 10 years of planning and construction, Dallas is getting closer to completing a 50 mile hike and bike trail around the city. The program was spearheaded and pushed forward by business leaders in Dallas who saw a need to connect trails together in the city. They’ve kept a low profile but hope that in the next 10 years the trail system will be a symbol of the city. (Christine Perez | D Magazine)

Miyawaki method for reforestation: A method of quick reforestation developed by Japanese professor Akira Miyawaki has the potential to speed up city greening around the world. The method includes planting native trees and plants in close proximity to each other so they grow faster in competition for resources in their early lives. The Miyawaki method supports greater biodiversity and carbon capture than single species plantings which makes it possible for a faster regeneration process. (Chermaine Lee | Fair Planet)

Dan Doctoroff reckons with his legacy: From 2002 to 2008 Dan Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor in the Bloomberg Administration, had a hard charging attitude to get things done that he believed would improve the city. His ambition led to other projects but also failures including Sidewalk Toronto. But after an ALS diagnosis in 2021, he’s had to rethink some of the ways he approached city change and people. (Justin Davidson | Curbed)

Quote of the Week

It was mostly populated by Black people. I-70 came through in 1967 and bisected the neighborhood. And what we’re doing is looking at the impact of these urban highways on these communities, how they divided and damaged them.

-Ohio State geography professor Harvey Miller discussing in WXVU how they used old fire insurance maps and machine learning to show disappeared neighborhoods.

This week on the podcast, Paula DiPerna joins the show to talk about her book Pricing the Priceless: The Financial Transformation to Value the Planet, Solve the Climate Crisis, and Protect Our Most Precious Assets.

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