Dark Cars Contribute to the Urban Heat Island Effect

Cars parked along a street in Bay View. 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. 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.

MPO’s rarely represent constituent makeup: Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs) are tasked with stewarding federal transportation money to regions from the federal government. They are often made up of boards of local elected or appointed officials. But many of them are not representative of their constituents with cities often having less voting representation based on population than suburban jurisdictions. (Yonah Freemark and Lydia Lo | Urban Institute)

Disgust for density: New research from the University of British Columbia has found that one reason why some people might be incredibly against new housing density is that psychologically they are more prone to disgust. The findings suggest that common framing of for or against progress ignores historical reasons why humans might be repelled by certain design, but also gives a path forward for finding common ground. (Michael Hooper | NextCity)

Cars as part of the heat island: New research shows that dark colored cars contribute to the urban heat island effect, making the air around them 3.8c warmer than nearby asphalt roads. Cars can cover up to 10% of a city meaning the dark or lightness of a vehicle can shift the heat. Some mitigation strategies could including restricting parking location for certain color vehicles and incorporating shade elements into parking. (CarbonCopy)

Designers history forgot: Frederick Law Olmsted is one of the most well known landscape architects and designers of our time, but as his portfolio grew and expanded geographically, his firm grew as well. But it wasn’t just him drafting drawings to show people the potential for parks and private spaces. Many of his draftsman were super talented, and some like Alexander Joseph Scholtes are just becoming recognized for their amazing design skills. (Yaniv Korman | Landzine)

Privatization of public engagement: Cartoonist Andy Singer of St. Paul Minnesota laments the increase in consultants doing outreach for public agencies doing urban and transportation planning. At a recent event he found that many of the people who were representing different projects didn’t even know much about them. This he believes is a part of the larger trend of shrinking government and privatizing functions which is leading to worse project implementation and constituent frustration. (Andy Singer | streets.mn)

Quote of the Week

Think about it this way: it might be fine to drink one glass of wine per day, but some of these wildfire smoke events are like drinking four bottles of wine in an evening, which can overwhelm the body’s defense and harm health.

–Joan Casey in the Los Angeles Times discussing what urban fire smoke can do to public health.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Adie Tomer of Brookings to discuss a paper he and his team wrote about the idea of regional block grants.

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