Want Fewer Traffic Deaths? Start by Reducing How Much We Drive

Interstate 94 and 27th Street bridge construction in May 2026. Photo by Urban Milwaukee staff.

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.

The end of more crash deaths is less cars: New research shows that on a per capita basis, more driving means more crashes. But safety discussions from highway departments or the Department of Transportation often leave out this information. The authors also note that officials would rather focus on outlier driving behaviors such as drunk driving than say that more cars and driving as a requirement instead of an option will lead to more collisions and deaths. (Kea Wilson | Streetsblog USA)

Chicago transit’s new found development powers: Illinois’ recent reorganization of Chicago area transit into NITA has created more power to build transit oriented development around its station areas. The agency now has the power to buy land near stations, offer development financing, and issue debt for development if given municipal consent. But the agency likely will start with land agencies already own while staff capacity is built up to achieve the potential of these new powers. (David Struett | Chicago Sun Times)

Destination policy impacts of ride hailing: Using travel survey data from 2008 and 2018, researchers examined household trip distances before and after the introduction of ride hailing in Chicago. What they suggest is that trip distances to certain non-work destinations have fallen by two miles and car ownership has been reduced in the specific cohort they studied. The trip length reduction and changes in destinations for users could have policy implications for land use planning and travel demand studies. (Shubhayan Ukil & Aditi Misra | Case Studies on Transport Policy)

Fixing economic development subsidies fixes everything: Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno has proposed a bill that would tax data centers 100% of the subsidies they receive from state and local tax breaks which would essentially end the practice. Pat Garofalo suggests that this solution would also be useful for all the ridiculous corporate subsidies that cities and states use to attract businesses and sports teams that is shown to only benefit corporations. (Pat Garofalo | Boondoggle)

Bats show up on doppler radar in Texas: After a spring migration from Mexico, Texas’ bat population can swell to 20 million, many of them calling central Texas caves and underpasses home. At dusk, the bats leave their homes in search of food and the movement gets picked up by doppler radar as moving masses that could be mistaken for thunderstorms. The amount of animals reveals huge civilizations and movement corridors that typically go under our “radar”.  (Ryan Huling | Nautilus)

Quote of the Week

If you’re at the same time [offering economic development incentives and] making it impossible to build housing, your policy is somewhat schizophrenic.

–Timothy J. Bartik, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute, in Governing discussing why economic development incentives for companies don’t work.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re sharing Part 2 of our discussion with Reece Martin in Toronto at the Mpact Transit + Community Conference. We discuss projects getting picked apart in the media, The gap between talent and passion in transit agencies, high speed rail, and the threat of AVs to bad transit.

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