The Diverse Fandom of E-scooters

Three of Bird’s scooters were parking on N. Milwaukee St. on the morning of July 9th, 2018. Photo by Dave Reid.

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. At the end of the 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.

Designing in the driverless age: With many experts predicting a shift from human driven to autonomous vehicles over the next several decades, the task of building homes and offices that will support today’s needs as well as the future will be in the hands of architects and designers. Designing parking garages, regulating curb space, and relating buildings to the street will be of the utmost importance. (Patrick Kiger | Urban Land Institute)

Can one corridor solve a housing crisis?: If you haven’t heard by now, housing in California and especially the Bay Area is hard to come by. Using new mapping and data analysis software Peter Calthorpe and Joe DiStefano look at the carrying capacity of El Camino Real corridor parcels between San Jose and Daly City. If all low density potentially redevelopable parcels built housing there is a potential for over 249,000 units. (Peter Calthorpe & Joe DiStefano | Urban Footprint)

Betting on the future of transit: Autonomous vehicles that can compete with other transportation options may be decades away, but the simple promise of thier existence is enough to convince some to push away from existing transit in hopes of better future options. While some believe they can solve every problem, others aren’t so optimistic. (Emily Badger | New York Times)

A new generation reviving small town Texas: As more urban places in Texas get expensive, smaller towns with good bones are renewed as a destination by younger residents looking for a more affordable place to live. Younger transplants are testing out big ideas are changing the makeup of smaller places by opening hip restaurants and cool bars while speeding up local economies. (John Nova Lomax | Texas Monthly)

The diverse fandom of e-scooters: Once thought to be the transportation of “tech bros”, new research from Populus is showing that scooter riders are diverse in race and income. The 7,000 person survey conducted in 10 cities also found that women were seeing scootering in a different light than cycling, though the particular reasons for the difference are elusive. (Aarian Marshal | Wired)

Quote of the Week

Mid-ride, he swerved across four lanes of traffic and took us to eat fried chicken neck tacos in East L.A. We were sitting there, gnawing at bones, next to a family whose kids were doing their homework while eating those tacos, and he was beaming. He loved the entirety of the landscape of L.A.

–Peter Meehan talking about his longtime friend and recently passed LA food critic Jonathan Gold. (CityLab)

On the podcast this week I’m joined by Mikael Colville-Andersen of Copenhagenize

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