How to Stop Big Tech’s Takeover of Our Streets

Waymo self-driving car. Photo by Daniel Ramirez from Honolulu, USA, (CC BY 2.0), 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.

Omaha growing parking to pay for streetcar: To make room for development along the new streetcar route and pay the rail line’s bonds, Omaha has been building paid parking garages. The city has spent almost as much money on the garages as the streetcar and will depend on people moving away from a deeply ingrained free parking mindset. Critics wonder if the city is creating competing interests by supporting driving as the streetcar seeks riders. (Jeremy Turley | Flatwater Free Press)

Congestion and carbon pricing: The success of NYC’s congestion pricing program has lessons for a potential carbon pricing scheme in the future. The first is that consistent messaging works and transparency of language helps people not feel like they are being coerced. Second matching the actual costs with the benefits as soon as possible. Support for pricing went up when people could see the difference. And finally, the use of existing systems can make implementation much easier and faster. (Jia-Shen Tsai, Danny Barden | Niskanen Center)

Stopping a tech takeover of streets: A new report from the Open Markets Institute discusses the potential impacts of robotaxis and autonomous vehicles being run by companies that control other parts of the operating environment such as Google Maps or Amazon Web Services. With these companies as gatekeepers to many different spaces, the authors suggest that transportation choice, city management of streets, and public transit could suffer. (Arnav Rao | Open Markets Institute)

Government by jury duty: Stephanie Nakhleh proposes testing a jury duty type system to create plans. Currently, only a small amount of legislators come from the working class and most public meetings include a certain type of commenter. But a jury or community assembly type system would increase the diversity of people reviewing and making important decisions that impact everyone. (Stephanie Nakhleh | We Can Have Nice Things)

Overturning Euclid vs Ambler Realty: This is the 100th year of Euclid vs. Ambler Realty, a Supreme Court case which enable zoning to cast many of our cities in amber. Pushing back on the ruling, Aaron Lubeck considers three ways that the case could possibly be reversed through the courts. The first is in the 5th Amendment where single family zoning should be seen as a taking. The second rests on the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. And the last being that it could be seen under the Due Process Clause as arbitrary and capricious. (Aaron Lubeck | Southern Urbanism)

Quote of the Day

Addressing rapid urbanisation requires a broad set of approaches, which may also include new master-planned cities. But recent new city projects promise a lot, have a poor track record, and are often compromised by shadow interests. Such projects therefore risk wasting significant public and private resources – precisely at a time when there is an urgent need for more effective urban investment.

–Michael Roll / Nicholas Goedeking / Lena Gutheil at the German Insitute of Development and Sustainability pushing back on the idea of new cities.

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast, we’re joined by Jon Nouchi, Director of Transit at the City and County of Honolulu. At the Mpact conference in Toronto, we discussed the idea of iconic transit systems, time as a performance metric, humanizing transit systems, and the Skyline rail line.

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