Sydney Opens New Metro Line

Sydney. (CC0 Public Domain).

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.

Car insurance rates could jump: According to insurance rate data, car insurance will continue to rise next year with three states estimated to have increases of over 50% in some instances. The increases are coming from increases in the cost of labor and parts as well as increasingly severe and more frequent weather events with hail claims up almost 3% since 2020. (Aimee Picchi | CBS News)

Sydney opens new downtown metro line: Sydney Australia has opened five new stations on its driverless metro line after starting construction back in 2017. Transit enthusiasts woke up early to get the first train and some folks have been blown away by some of the designs. The train will come every 4 minutes at rush hour and can carry up to 40,000 passengers per hour. (Elias Visontay | The Guardian)

Making indoor climates the same everywhere: Air conditioning has changed the way we build. It allows people to live in deserts and expect climates that match much cooler places around the world as people expect a room in Phoenix to feel the same as one in Maine. The problem however is that as the world warms and we use more AC, the energy needed to cool spaces contributes more to the problem. (Emily Badger | New York Times)

Redlining maps didn’t affect neighborhoods like you think: The infamous Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) maps created in the late 1930s have been singled out as showing one of the biggest connections between disparities today and decisions made in the past. But Allan Mallach argues that those neighborhoods would have been rated negatively unrelated to race and that economic flight made them worse. But also that racist practices of private lenders should be blamed for influencing the government, not the other way around. (Allan Mallach | Shelterforce)

Four story buildings at the sweet spot: Four-story buildings are the sweet spot of affordability and sustainability according to Michael Anderson of the Sightline Institute. He argues that four story buildings are more affordable to families that want choices and less expensive to build with a bonus ability of having elevators. The density of these buildings are also high enough to save energy, but also low enough to fit anywhere. (Michael Anderson | Sightline Institute)

Quote of the Week

The trees themselves don’t create any problems, in fact they solve a lot of problems for us in cities. The problem is cars and fossil fuel combustion in cities that can essentially start to negate or take away some of the benefits that trees are providing us.

–Andrew Reinmann of the City University of New York in the New York Times discussing how auto emissions are negating the benefits of urban trees.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re sharing a conversation about public transit to the Great Outdoors featuring Corrie Parrish of Kittelson Associates, Andrea Breault of Cascades East Transit and Amy Schlappi of Columbia Area Transit.

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