MIT Team Creates New Model of Pedestrian Traffic in NYC

Crosswalk. (Pixabay license).

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.

A new walking model: A new model for New York City created by a team at MIT led by Andres Sevtsuk is the first to map foot traffic in a US City. A pedestrian based model for each city could change how they plan for transportation infrastructure and the impacts of new development. It also models pedestrian safety and can determine per pedestrian crash data showing more realistic risk scenarios. (Peter Dizikes | MIT News)

Giving cities more transportation money: A new bill would allow metro areas to get more federal money for transportation than previous formulas that favored state DOTs. The bipartisan sponsored bill would reorganize a system that gives just 16% of funds to areas that contain 75% of the roads. Local roads are also more likely to be in poor condition and have poor safety records. (Kea Wilson | Streetsblog USA)

Self surveillance: A Superbowl commercial for Ring Cameras has backfired spectacularly on the company. What they presented was a way to find lost dogs through the camera network using AI, what they actually showed was a dystopian future of neighborhood human surveillance. Ring, now owned by Amazon, received backlash early on due to police partnerships and continues to be problematic when it comes to privacy issues. (Jason Koebler | 404 Media)

Growth changing states: Texas and Florida are no longer the top states when it comes to in migration as North Carolina has usurped them in growth. The Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee are now making up 60% of net domestic migration. Bill Fulton believes Texas and Florida are also slowing due to a sharp decrease in international immigration but the weather might also be a factor, with temperature highs increasing over the last few decades. (Bill Fulton | Future of Where) 

The high cost of throwing things away: Garbage is a $67B industry in the United States and Americans throw away five pounds of trash per day per person. But reduced space for waste and the potential for leaching from food and toxic items are showing the need for alternative solutions. Additionally our recycling network isn’t as robust as it should be as plastics overwhelm the system. The solution is zero waste, but it will take a lot of work to achieve. (Jill Ettinger | Ethos) 

Quote of the Week

In Amsterdam alone, over 124,000 parcels are delivered daily by various delivery services, 80% of which are delivered to people’s homes. Parcel vans then stand still on the street 80,000 times. This causes congestion and unsafe situations.

-Amsterdam alderman Melanie van der Horst in an NL Times article discussing the increases in urban deliveries in the Netherlands and the need to regulate package locker locations.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Professor Scot Danforth of Chapman University to discuss his book An Independent Man: Ed Roberts and the Fight for Disability Rights.

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