Utah Legislature Takes Street Planning Power From Salt Lake City

Main Street in Salt Lake City. Photo by Tamanoeconomico, (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.

Utah legislature steals street planning power: The Utah Senate passed a bill that would steal multimodal street design and planning power from Salt Lake City. In a last minute addition to legislation, Sen. Wayne Harper added language that precluded cities from designing roads that “may increase congestion for motor vehicles or discourage motor vehicles from driving on a particular street”. State preemption on city street design has been increasing over the last several years. (Taylor Anderson | Building Salt Lake)

Minnesota legislature moves to kill commuter rail line: A bill in the Minnesota legislature is looking to end commuter rail service on the Northstar line. The line which has been hit hard by the pandemic and never reached its intended final destination is now just seeing a fraction of the ridership it once had. Legislators would ask the government to exempt the line from a rule that requires agencies to pay back the federal government if service ends before a certain time. The local agency is also considering a bus replacement. (Trains Magazine)

An innovative street grid: Traditional street grids began disappearing in the 1950s, replaced by sprawling road networks that increased fatalities and increased public health issues. In his book Urbanism for a Difficult Future, Korkut Onaran proposes a new way of building street grids as a response to climate change with more pedestrian focused layouts and shared streets. The Adaptation Village model could be an alternative to conventional sprawl. (Robert Steuteville | CNU Public Square)

Why construction is so expensive: Recently updated research in Yale Law & Economics Research Paper find that there are two major issues driving infrastructure costs; a lack of capacity of the DOT procuring the project, and the lack of competition for infrastructure contracts. Using data from California, they show that “higher quality engineers deliver projects at a lower cost, while retirement shocks slow project timelines and increase costs”. (Liscow, Norber, and Slattery | Yale Law & Economics Research Paper)

Are California housing laws working? An analysis of five California Housing laws passed since 2021 in California have found that they have had little impact on housing production in the United States. YIMBY Law, which authored the report, would love to see them work but just hasn’t found the evidence yet. They suggested that a lot of the requirements in the bills including using union labor, affordable housing minimums and others were holding them back. (Ben Christopher | CalMatters)

Quote of the Week

When you get off the cramped tube, at somewhere like Tottenham Court Road, and emerge into these huge platforms and 250-metre long trains, this completely different world … If only we could have three or four lines like that the whole city would be transformed. We don’t quite have the imagination or the money to make it happen.

–Christian Wolmar on in The Guardian on how great the newer Elizabeth Line feels to riders in London.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Mike Eliason of larch lab to discuss his new book Building for People: Designing Livable, Affordable, Low-Carbon

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