What Makes Cities More Walkable?

A view of Jefferson Street looking south. Photo courtesy of Cathedral Square Friends.

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.

Even the critics love (de)congestion pricing: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been trying to end New York City’s congestion pricing program but every week that passes it gets more popular. Even lawyers advising the secretary believed he didn’t have a case in a memo that mistakenly was submitted to the court. But as travel times improve and delays are reduced for drivers and buses in addition to large reductions in noise, the only reason to keep trying to kill it is national politics. (Gabrielle Gurley | The American Prospect)

Dutch climate strategy changing: In order to promote the use of electric vehicles which have heavy battery packs, the Dutch government is proposing a new tax on vehicles based on size rather than weight. The Netherlands is behind on reaching climate goals and this would be one of a package of policies to reduce emissions over the long term. The current right-wing administration’s plans to increase speed limits and scrap measures to curb auto use was part of the problem according to the government’s own environmental assessment. (Dutch News)

What makes cities more walkable: An machine learning model trained on Hong Kong’s streets combined a survey of more than 100,000 people and Google Street View to help determine the variables that make places more walkable. It turns out simple things like more street trees, benches, windows, and streetlights were present in places where people liked to walk more. (Nate Berg | Fast Company)

Dallas’ makes building code changes: Dallas is the first city in the country with new rules for buildings under 7,500 square feet after a building code change was passed by city council. The change was made after a local developer saw that duplexes had less barriers to construction than missing middle buildings with between 3 and 8 units. The International Building Code, mainly a United States construct was to blame and Dallas decided to go with the more flexible International Residential Code used around the world instead. (Henry Grabar | Slate)

The ABC of mobility: New research modeled data from 800 cities in 61 countries to look at car use compared to income. Findings suggest that longer distances and more congestion are tied to less transit use and that driving is tied to higher incomes. Though different regions are likely to have different outcomes, with North America and Australia having more car trips and Eastern Europe and Asia using more transit while Western European cities are higher in active transportation. (Rafael Prieto-Curiel and Juan P. Ospina | Environment International Journal)

Quote of the Week

It is the unsustainable costs of our highway system that is bankrupting the Highway Trust Fund, and this leads to an ever-increasing share of general public funding to bail it out if nothing changes. Highways are a costly use of land, with one study finding that the costs of highway expansion outweigh the benefits by 3 to 1,even without factoring in external social harms like health impacts from added traffic pollution. It’s clear we should be rethinking the status quo of never-ending road expansion. Because the politics of dealing with the actual problem of funding our highway system is hard, there’s a desire to find a scapegoat. In this case, politicians have turned their attention to how much more efficient our vehicles are.

–Dave Cooke at the Union of Concerned Scientists discussing congress’ recent move to tax electric vehicles.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Kelly Porter, Assistant Director Transportation & Public Works for the City of Fort Worth. You can find a full unedited transcript here as well.

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