How One-way Streets are Inefficient

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.

Sticks not carrots to get people out of cars: In a new study published in Case Studies on Transport Policy, climate scientists ranked 12 different methods for reducing car use from 800 different studies. What they found was that sticks, not carrots yielded the best results. Policies such as congestion pricing make the cost of driving more visible unlike the costs that are often unseen like air pollution, traffic violence, and public health impacts. (Carlton Reid | Forbes)

Rethinking one-way streets: In designing for vehicle movement, civil engineers build roads that favor speed and throughput as the middle class suburbanized and wanted to drive faster to reach downtown destinations. The result was the conversion of many two way streets to one way streets, which led to economic disinvestment in core cities and worse safety and health outcomes. But new research shows that distances traveled are actually improved by two way streets. (Geoff Boeing, William Riggs | Transfers Magazine)

Cooling centers underused: As climate change creates more extreme heat events, more and more cities are focusing on strategies to keep people cool. One of those solutions is the cooling center where people can go and get access to air conditioning. But the cooling centers are often underused because they don’t meet people’s needs or requires transportation that people don’t have or can’t access on extremely hot days. If the cooling center is going to work, it needs to be a part of people’s regular routine. (Jake Bittle | Grist)

Colombian activists want better sidewalks: In Bogota, 33% of trips are walking trips. But because of the often rainy weather, the infrastructure for walking is damaged and pose a hazard. Colombian activists upset at the bad sidewalks and pavement conditions have started painting a pink x on damaged concrete. They hope that shame will lead to fixes to necessary infrastructure. (Manuel Rueda | PRI’s The World)

Increased state capacity lowers costs: New research takes a look at how state capacity impacts road paving projects and finds that when there are less public employees at State DOTs, costs increase due to having to outsource work to consultants. The consultants increased and the number of paving companies decreased leading to higher bids and higher cost projects. This suggests that hiring more public sector workers in many different sectors could lower overall costs of projects. (David Dayen | The American Prospect)

Quote of the Week

We turned into a city of cynics who measured every project with a standard formula: take the announced budget and schedule, multiply by 2.5 — then expect worse.

–Josh Freed in Montreal Gazette discussing the feeling the population of Montreal had before completing its latest big project faster and better.

This week on the podcast, we’re sharing part 1 and 2 of a one-to-one conversation between David Longoria of LISC in Phoenix and Ryan Winkle of RAIL CDC. They discuss the community work they are doing in Mesa along the light rail line and the impact their work has on local businesses.

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