Do Speed Cameras Make Streets Safer?

Speed Camera. Photo by David Bleasdale from England, (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Land for a new city: A who’s who of silicon valley rich kids has purchased almost a $1B worth of land near Travis Air Force Base between Sacramento and the Bay Area in order to build a new city. For four years a group called Flannery Associates has been buying up farmland at above market rate prices, but incorporating into a city would require a vote in Sonoma County and the group has already upset local politicians and residents. (Karen Breslau, Tom Giles | Forbes via Bloomberg)

Australian town where people live underground: Coober Pedy, an Australian opal mining town 500+ miles from the coast, is known for it’s sandstone and siltstone rock. The soft rock is easily excavated and the resulting caves are used for housing and entertainment to avoid the region’s hot summer days, which can regularly reach above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Digging underground to avoid the heat is not new, but it also might be a glimpse into the future of a warming world. (Zaria Gorvett | BBC Future)

Don’t call it public housing: Montgomery County Maryland has been quietly building public housing by owning a large stake in private development then using the “profits” as a way to lower rents for lower and moderate income residents. It’s the first building built with $100m the county raised for such projects and is a way to try and address the multiple housing issues that face the region and the country as a whole without calling it public housing. (Conor Dougherty | New York Times)

Drivers slow down with cameras: New York City rolled out speed camera enforcement 24 hours a day last year and has seen some positive results thus far. Speeding violations are down 30% and 80% of people caught for their first speeding ticket haven’t been ticketed again. On some streets, speeding has been reduced 96%. (David Meyer | Streetsblog NYC)

Rise of the eco-village: Around the world more and more people are wanting to live sustainably, and to do so they are joining eco-villages. 10,000 of these eco-villages exist globally and their numbers are increasing every year. They are also increasingly tied to a type of spirituality that connects people back to nature and other people but often get mistaken for cults. As climate change impacts increase, more people might try to find their eco-village. (Mélissa Godin | Noema Magazine)

Quote of the Week

We’ve known that the major cities in the United States, cities with more than 1 million people, have high levels of (nitrogen dioxide). It’s a product of combustion. …That’s a concern. (Nitrogen dioxide) gets turned into ozone. It also can play a role in making fine particulate matter.

-NASA program scientist Barry Lefer in Houston Public Media discussing the preliminary findings from their new air pollution monitoring satellite.

This week on the podcast we’re joined by Yvonne Yeung to talk about the Urban Land Institute’s recent report, Building 15 Minute Communities: a Leadership Guide.

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