Delivery Hubs Could Change Urban Cargo Delivery

An Amazon delivery truck in Milwaukee. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

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.

First Nations become Canada’s largest developer: The Squamish Nation will build 6,000 housing units for their community on 10.5 acres just outside of downtown Vancouver BC. The parcel came to the Nation after court battles allowed them to regain the land title on a small portion of land that was expropriated from them from by the Canadian Pacific Railway. The project is one of several First Nations developments that makes them the largest developers in all of Canada. (Linda Baker | Fast Company)

What does a city get from hosting the Olympics: With the opening ceremonies to the Olympics coming up in just a few days, the New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman wonders what cities get back from hosting these events in even numbered years. Barcelona got a lot out of the games it hosted in 1992 but cities since then have seen spending rise beyond means as they believe benefits will come in the form of improved infrastructure. (Michael Kimmelman | New York Times Magazine)

Urban delivery hubs could change cities: Urban delivery hubs allow long haul truckers to drop their cargo on the edges of urban areas which in turn reduces unpaid idling and urban trips. The system has been in use for a few decades by the largest shippers, but it depends on large volumes that only companies like Amazon or Target can muster. Other benefits include a reduced need for highway lanes and the ability for final mile deliveries to be done with more efficient electric vehicles. (Dan Calabrese | Transport Topics) 

Ownership burden of cars and homes: While often touted as paths to independence, our dependence on the ownership of cars and homes can be impossible to achieve for people with low incomes. Greg Shill asks how policy prescriptions can create a society where owning a home and a car aren’t necessary for creating a good quality of life. (Greg Shill | Infra/Structures) 

A moral philosopher’s perspective on sustainable urban mobility: For over half a century cities in the United States have been developed around automobiles, but with automobiles, their environmental impacts, and the costs of operating them being so expensive is there an ethical imperative for planners to plan for the greater good of society? In this piece, Mustafa Haque discusses the ethical dimensions of car dependency through the lens of moral philosophy as seen on the television show The Good Place. (Mustafa Haque | Planetizen) 

Quote of the Week

“To be fair, architects don’t bear all the blame for the unremitting ugliness of the Great Fright North; they share responsibility with the misguided planners, politicians, both cowardly and corrupt, along with the venal developers who, by default, have become the nation’s city-builders. Thanks largely to this unholy cabal, communities across Canada have been turned into an endless blur of nearly identical subdivisions and concrete, steel and glass towers, most of them clumsy, unadorned and wholly indifferent to their context as well as those who inhabit them.”

Christopher Hume in The Hub discussing why Canada’s cities have become so boring and bland. 

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Adriana Rizzo of Californians for Electric Rail. We chat about freight and warehousing growth in California’s Inland Empire, the benefits of train electrification and a new California CEQA exemption push for overhead wires, and why hydrogen trains are getting more attention than perhaps they should.

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