Chicago Considers Opening its Own Grocery Stores

Grocery store shelves. Photo by Sophie Bolich.

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.

States versus cities on transportation: States around the country are passing laws and making moves to preempt city preferences on transportation policy that lean towards less driving. States like North Carolina and New York have limited transit money and congestion policies that cities want, while heaping money on road and highway expansion. Some states are helpful in creating driving reduction goals, but more are needed to stem the tide of climate change. (Sarah Wesseler | Yale Climate Connections)

Saudi Arabia’s $25B metro system: Saudi Arabia is finishing up a $25B metro network for the capital Riyadh expected to open before the end of the year. When the system opens, six metro lines and 84 stations in addition to 80 bus routes throughout the city will be capable of carrying 1.7m people. The contracts for the projects were signed in 2013. (Joe Edwards  | Newsweek)

The climate policies that work best: A new study that looked at 1,500 climate policies across 41 countries over 24 years suggests that the ones that work best at reducing emissions are used best in combination with others to create synergy. The study only found 63 instances of drastic reductions in emissions but also found that pricing was a major component whether that was carbon pricing or cap and trade programs. (Kate Yoder | Grist)

Olmsted’s Texas hill country influence: Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of modern landscape architecture, made a trip through Texas to the hill country in 1853 before designing Central Park in New York City. While just a theory, Clayton Maxwell wonders if that trip left a mark that inspired some of the famous park’s features including Sheep Meadow and many of Olmsted’s design theories he took with him the rest of his life. (Clayton Maxwell | Texas Monthly)

Chicago could open its own grocery chain: Chicago is considering the possibility of opening three groceries of its own to support neighborhoods where national chains have recently shut their doors. The program would be the first time a city tried to operate a publicly owned grocery store. Community and non-profit groceries have done similar things but it’s a tough road when they don’t have the purchasing power of large chains and must operate at very low margins to stay alive. (Patrick Sisson | Fast Company)

Quote of the Week

“Those of us who care about climate change need to see the surface-transportation reauthorization as the next big climate bill.”

Kate Zyla, the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center in a Slate article discussing how America could break its addiction to highways.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Nico Larco, Director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon. We chat about his new book with Kaarin Knudson, The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook as well as a realization about how most of what we do in the United States seems to be bandaids for a lack of urban density.

Want more links to read? Visit The Overhead Wire and signup.