Philadelphia’s Green Street Projects Promote Walkability

Philadelphia. Photo by Dough4872, (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons

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.

Philly green corridor projects: A series of street projects in Philadelphia along major corridors are being designed to support green infrastructure and city culture. Major streets such as Market and Broad street are being rethought to include more space for pedestrians and cyclists while also supporting street trees and greened medians. Taken together with a Washington Avenue and Penn’s Landing Park revitalization, the projects represent a future template for city street programs. (Meredith Lindemon | Architect’s Newspaper)

Popular trains, limits of capital: Brightline in Florida has showed that there is interest in quality commuter trains in the United States but their recent bankruptcy proceedings should make private and public officials alike question how to build such infrastructure in the United States. A Brightline project that would connect the suburbs of Los Angeles to Las Vegas is looking for public funding, making the argument for that project and in the future that government has a role to play in rail infrastructure expansion. (Benton Graham | Grist)

New understanding needed: Transportation policy in the United States is currently focused on two things argue Ben Swedberg and Adie Tomer, accelerating interstate commerce and supporting large lot housing on the periphery of cities. But that focus has made people spend more money to move themselves, made them less safe, and require continued increasing allocations of resources. To change this, we need to understand how governments can work together to achieve stated goals and then support those initiatives that work. (Ben Swedberg and Adie Tomer | Brookings)

Florida could need city hospice: Floridians will consider an ballot measure that will increase the homestead property tax exemption and gut property tax revenue for the cities and towns around the state. Jeff Brandes argues that could mean that some cities could decide not to be cities anymore or the state creates a law creating a “limited viable city”. The worst outcome he believes is that cities stick around too long, creating maintenance backlogs and staff loses that become hard to recover from long term. (Jeff Brandes | Florida Politics)

Repurposing road space: A year after Zurich residents voted to repurpose road space to active transportation uses and greening, the city has accomplished one third of the transition. By 2035, the city hopes to repurpose 148 acres of road space by building bike lanes, bus lanes, more pedestrian paths while also creating more green space and planting trees that narrow the right of way. (Swissinfo.ch)

Quote of the Week

High-speed rail has great potential to reshape the way people move in Canada, and supports Alberta’s economic growth, productivity and regional connectivity.

–Steven MacKinnon, the Canadian federal minister of transport, in CBC News discussing plans for a new high speed line between Edmonton and Calgary.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Sofia Navas and James Nix of the NGO Transport & Environment to talk about their recent report: Ever Bigger? Car Size at a Crossroads.

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