Who Will Be Responsible When an Autonomous Vehicle Causes a Death?

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.

Giving up equity for long term community: The Douglass Community Land Trust in Washington DC has put together a program that allows home sellers to keep homes affordable into the future. In order to achieve that, homeowners will need to sell homes to the land trust below market value up to 25%. But once the home is sold to the land trust, new buyers purchase under a new structure that creates a 99 year ground lease and keeps it more affordable long term. (Allaire Conte | Realtor.com)

Communicating the value of transit: Public transit provides a multitude of benefits that are not always easily explained or often overlooked. People that understand these benefits need to get better at communicating them to the public and to decision makers who are often stuck believing the stories they are being told about the value of automobile related mobility. To do this, advocates should collect and share stories that demonstrate the benefits as they find them. (Todd Litman | Planetizen)

Future traffic deaths by autonomous vehicles: In a surprisingly candid moment for a technology CEO, the head of Waymo admitted she believes that society will accept when one of their vehicles kills someone as part of the tradeoff for what many believe are safer vehicles in the long run. But after a Waymo vehicle illegally passed a school bus in Georgia without receiving a $1,000 ticket, the question of who is responsible when something happens still lingers. (Sharon Adarlo | Futurism)

Better census data on housing: The U.S. Census Bureau’s new Address Count Listing Files now provide the most accurate, timely, and granular data ever on the nation’s housing stock. The data which is available from January of 2023 is released every six months and offers jurisdiction level numbers on change in housing units. Previous to the ACLF, incomplete local surveys and reporting gaps led to inaccurate data. (Alex Armlovich | Niskanen Center)

Secret to Norway’s electric vehicle success: Norway’s success at getting more people to adopt electric vehicles has been a rousing success, with over 80% of new cars sold in 2022 being electric. The success is due to a clear and long term policy strategy starting in the 1990s that focused on making polluting vehicles pay more taxes, creating more economic incentives such as reduced road tolls and bus lane exemptions. With the success of passenger vehicles, now the program will move along to other vehicle types. (Georgia Collins | Energy Digital)

Quote of the Week

I don’t mean to discount all the intangible things that make cities great, like block clubs and schools. But also I think it’s important to remember that the city is a thing we build. And that investment, bold investments, are an important part of that.

–Angie Schmitt writes in The Love of Place wondering what legacies this generation will leave their cities.

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon of the War on Cars podcast join the show to talk about their new book: Life After Cars – Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile.

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