Lessons Learned from Eight Years of Scooter Sharing

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.

Lessons from 8 years of scooter sharing: The sharing economy promised to change how we moved around cities, especially with the proliferation of electric scooters. But years later, research is showing that the benefits of scooters to mobility and climate action are related directly to how companies deploy and manage fleets from construction to disposal. On the whole scooters reduce emissions, but walking trips replaced by scooters increase emissions. (Syris Valentine | Grist)

Pitfalls of moving away from big cities: A new paper from Enrico Moretti at UC Berkeley followed workers whose jobs had been lost between 2010 and 2017 and found that those who stayed in large labor markets were able to get another job much faster than those who didn’t. Workers in smaller markets often took a year or longer to find similar work, and over the last year after the big work from home boom, the importance of labor market size looms over many decisions to leave them. (Aki Ito | Business Insider)

Mortgage rates too good to give up: Homeowners with low interest rates on their mortgages are unlikely to sell and move to a new house because their rates are so much lower than what is available in today’s markets. Between 1998 and 2000, there was never a time when more than 40% of mortgage holders had a rate 1 percentage point below existing conditions. But in 2023, 70% of mortgages are a full 3 percentage points lower than the going rates. (Emily Badger and Francesca Paris | New York Times)

Car exhaust and Alzheimer’s: New research from the University of Technology Sydney found a connection between vehicle exhaust and Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice. One of the particles found in exhaust, brake pad friction, and coal fired power plant emissions, magnetite, is small enough to pass through the brain blood barrier and has been found in Alzheimer’s cadaver’s brains in large amounts in the UK and Mexico. The particle elicited an immune response in the mice as well. (David Waterworth | Clean Technica)

Zoning reform for transportation funding?: State legislators in Colorado are trying to promote housing density along transit corridors and employment districts and will give municipalities funding for technical assistance and studies to promote development if House Bill 1313 is passed. The catch however is that places that don’t comply will forfeit funding from the state’s Highway Users Tax Fund. (Marianne Goodland | Colorado Politics)

Quote of the Week

There is something a little odd about effectively taxing new housing to pay for societal needs that should be paid generally by taxpayers — by the entire community.

-California State Senator Scott Weiner in the Los Angeles Times responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sheetz vs. El Dorado County related to impact fees.

This week on the podcast, we’re featuring a one to one conversation between Billy Terry, Executive Director of the National Transit Institute at Rutgers University, and India Birdsong Terry, General Manager and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. They discuss leadership, hiring, and culture change at Ohio’s largest transit agency.

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