Are Americans Rethinking Car Ownership?

Cars. Photo by EveryCarListed P.(CC BY-SA 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

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. Each 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.

Americans losing interest in buying a car: The rising costs are making some people reconsider car ownership and are pushing them to instead think about possible alternatives from car sharing to transit and micromobility. Rising insurance rates and prices for new and used cars will only be exacerbated by tariffs on cars and car parts manufactured outside of the United States. Unpredictability only makes cost uncertainty worse and could drive more people to alternatives. (Giulia Carbonaro | Newsweek)

Reversing climate apathy: Scientists have found that there is some messaging that breaks through the climate apathy that occurs when people are shown long term impacts in charts and graphs. If given a more binary choice people can understand on a more basic level such as whether a lake will freeze or not, people are likely to respond more urgently to the crisis. The key is highlighting clear concrete shifts rather than slow moving trends. (Kate Yoder | Grist)

Why are skyscrapers so short? New technology development often follows a typical trajectory of physical possibility, economic viability, and finally regulatory constraints. This is true for tall buildings as the current restrictions on overall size is economic feasibility followed by regulations such as zoning laws and building codes that keep them short and rare in cities. Because of these restrictions, Brian Potter suggests we see more underutilized land, higher housing costs, and reduced economic productivity. (Brian Potter | Works in Progress)

Florida’s housing market not responding to climate impacts: After every hurricane and natural disaster, housing prices have gone up in Florida despite rising risks from natural disasters and insurance rates. Real estate agents and experts suggest that the market is a long way off from responding to the threat, but when it does happen it will be a slow leak rather than a fast exit. And buyers believe they’ll be gone before the worst happens, taking the risk anyways. (Alex Harris | Miami Herald)

Subaru’s exterior airbags in Japan: Subaru’s new Forrester model to be released in Japan will have exterior airbags to protect pedestrians and cyclists from directly hitting the windshield after an impact. Because of less stringent safety rules in the United States the feature won’t be part of packages sold here. The airbag however won’t protect vulnerable road users from pulled under the SUV. (Rain Noe | Core 77)

Quote of the Week

Indeed, when one shops at a national chain instead of a local business, less than 40% of those dollars stay in the communities where they were spent, roughly half of what would be the case if the business were locally owned. Instead of the small business owner using profits to stimulate the local economy, those dollars are corporatized and sent out into the caprices of the global winds of capital. There’s no vested interest in the success of a community for a given chain that has 1,000 other locations, just an extraction of as much value as possible.

–Coby Lefkowitz in Southern Urbanism discussing why main streets all look the same.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re listening in on a conversation hosted by Seamless Bay Area about the 2024 update to the California State Rail Plan. Adina Levin of Seamless Bay Area hosts Shannon Simonds Chief, Office of Rail Planning & Implementation at Caltrans, Eric Goldwyn of the Marron Institute of Urban Management, and Adriana Rizzo of Californians for Electric Rail in discussion.

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