Barcelona’s New E-Bike Subsidies

E-bike. (CC0 Public Domain).

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.

Bringing back buried streams: Many cities have covered their urban waterways in concrete in order to develop a city. In many instances people have no idea that there was once a stream there. But Luna Khirfan suggests there are a few ways that cities can potentially daylight urban streams if it makes sense. One way is through big projects like Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon project which removed a highway and others include small projects that will result in a larger program over time. (Luna Khurfan | The Conversation)

Transit scope creep: The benefits of transit are many, including environmental, social, and financial, yet we burden our transit systems with too many goals that impede the ability to transport a lot of people. Miriam Pinski argues that providing better transportation which gets people to change behavior in tiny measures will have a much larger benefit than requiring transit to fulfill a lot of other social, economic, and environmental goals. (Miriam Pinski | Works in Progress)

New e-bike subsidies: The City of Barcelona in Spain is putting four million euros towards e-bike subsidies that support the city’s climate and bike plans. The subsidy will cover 400 euro for city pedal assist bikes and 800 euro for freight bikes. The subsidies will add to an already booming bike infrastructure ecosystem with 270km of bike lanes and 1,200km of bike friendly routes. (City of Barcelona)

Carbon waves: In an excerpt published in MIT Press Reader, Professor Leah Stokes discusses how she came to the title of her new book “The Carbon Wave”. By creating waves through systemic change, people can wash away all the individual (carbon) footprints that came before. She discusses her understanding of climate change from her earliest memories as part of the movement and why she changed her mind away from small decisions to bigger ones. (Leah Stokes | MIT Press Reader)

Feedback loops: We have engineered driving into our housing policies, our transportation infrastructure decisions, and it impacts now at a deep level the decisions lawmakers and people make on a daily basis. In ArchDaily, Olivia Poston discusses these feedback loops and their impacts on our health. She calls it “the spatial consequences of our urban form” which reward further investment into more unhealthy systems. (Olivia Poston | ArchDaily)

Quote of the Week

Connecting cities that previously had no connection was a very big deal. Adding a lane to a highway that has run through town since the Eisenhower administration is less of a big deal. You just can’t squeeze much extra juice from that lemon.

–Stephanie Nakhleh in We Can Have Nice Things

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re chatting with Dallas Developer, DART Board Member, and urban designer Patrick Kennedy about his recent publication, An Atlas of Intercity Highway Impacts (Available Free Here).

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