How Environmental Law Is Being Misused

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.

Stanford hospitals mode share rules broken: In order to expand its hospital, Stanford University had to agree to strict limits on single occupancy vehicle (SOV) commuting into Palo Alto. But after the pandemic, the amount of car commuting has risen and the university is likely to argue extenuating circumstances due to the pandemic in order to not pay a $4m annual penalty. From 2012 to 2019, the non SOV mode share ranged from 38.1% to 33.4%. (Gennady Sheyner | The Almanac)

Can cities foster serendipity with workers at home?: Knowledge spillovers, chance encounters, and collisions are seen to be the benefit of cities. The sharing of information and innovation that happens when people bump into each other at random is important, but what happens when many of the workers that used to work in urban centers now work from home? We may not know for some time the impact of the pandemic, but clusters of AI jobs popping up in San Francisco could give us a clue. (Emily Badger | New York Times)

US most vulnerable at the zip code level: People living in the United States are suffering from a number of major social issues, from family disintegration to shootings to deaths of despair. And while overall wealth is increasing, social ties and organically grown organizations are disappearing, replaced by professional advocacy groups. The disintegration of social ties Seth Kaplan argues, is the worst he’s seen anywhere in the world impacting moral authority and our overall wellbeing. (Seth Kaplan | Bloomberg CityLab)

Cruise license revoked by CA DMV: Cruise has been told that effective immediately they are not to operate self driving vehicles in California by the CA Department of Motor Vehicles. The news comes after the DMV accused the company of hiding footage of a Cruise vehicle dragging a pedestrian during an investigation. Cruise has denied the allegation. (Aaron Gordon | Motherboard)

Weaponizing environmental law: When they were enacted, pollution control laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or the Minnesota Environmental Rights Act (MERA) were not intended to block residential and transportation development. But that’s exactly how they are being used today, most recently MERA to block a wide ranging pro-environment urban plan called Minneapolis 2040. In these rather loosely written statutes perhaps judges should seriously consider the “original intent”. (Alan Ehrenhalt | Governing)

Quote of the Week

Walking down the road, you see truck after truck after truck going into these facilities. Those neighborhoods live with day-to-day air pollution. It doesn’t take Canada being on fire for them to suffer.

–Nedra Sims Fears who leads the Greater Chatham Initiative in NASA discussing pollution sources.

This week on the podcast we’re joined by Abby Thorne-Lyman, former director of Real Estate at BART, to talk about BART’s development projects and priorities, and the importance of real estate to BART’s future.

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