The Brightline’s Shocking Death Toll

Brightline train at Fort Lauderdale station. Photo by Patrickhamiltonbrightline / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0).

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.

Race the L8: Transit advocates in Seattle showed up in droves to race walk the 8 bus, one of the busiest and consistently late in the system. The race segment they chose is scheduled to take 7 minutes by bus and 13 minutes walking, but on time performance drops to 30% due to traffic from cars. The race resulted in the crowd beating the bus in 15 minutes along with another bus that was bunched five minutes behind. (Michael Smith | Seattle Transit Blog)

Death toll on Brightline tracks: 182 people have died after collisions with Brightline passenger trains in Florida. A detailed interactive piece by the Miami Herald looks at the death toll on the rail line and how the transportation company has failed to improve safety along the tracks and turned to victim blaming. Local regulators and the feds are also on the hook for silencing train horns and slowing procurement of fencing and mental health crisis signage. (Brittany Wallman et al. | Miami Herald)

China’s 8D magical city: Chongqing China is built on many hillsides and its buildings and drastic street level elevation changes reflect that geography. For this reason, people have been flocking to what some call China’s 8D magical city, which has many centers connected by transit built to be self sustaining due to longer commutes. The city is at the center of the largest metro region in China at 32 million people, just slightly more people than Texas, and was the country’s capital during WWII. (Aw Cheng Wei | Straits Times)

Flood zones ignored: Federal regulators granted appeals to get 30 Camp Mystic buildings along the Guadalupe River in Texas out of the 100 year flood plain on FEMA maps. In 2011, the camp was in a special designated flood area which would require higher levels of flood insurance and more regulations for future projects. The recent flooding that killed 27 campers and councilors was likely a larger event than a 100 year flood, but many of the buildings at the camp were at obvious risk to floods. (Ryan Foley and Christopher Keller | Associated Press)

A way back for stone buildings: A new startup is creating intricate stone carvings using robots and precision programming. The owner hopes that improvements in the technology and a new facility will lead to a low cost way to again build buildings out of structural stone and create more stone details. In addition to more traditional architecture, stone lasts longer and has less embodied carbon than concrete. (Nate Berg | Fast Company)

Quote of the Week

It might be hard for someone who has never used public transportation to understand — going halfsies on the jet to Sun Valley doesn’t count — but despite Uber’s best efforts to replicate and privatize the exact same services while spending billions to undermine more effective taxpayer-funded solutions, Uber will never be public transportation.

–Alissa Walker in Torched discussing the Los Angeles Olympics claiming to be transit first while taking sponsorships from car companies.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Chris Berdik to talk about his book Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take it Back. We discuss the impacts of road noise on health and wellbeing, how our brains process sound, and creating positive urban soundscapes.