Do Cities Use Too Much Road Salt?

Salt at the Port of Milwaukee. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

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.

Paris’ new aerial cable car: A new aerial cable car system has opened in Paris connecting an underserved neighborhood with the city. The almost 3 mile line is now the longest in Europe and will carry an estimated 11,000 people a day. And a trip previously covered by bus or car in 40 minutes now takes just 18. The €138 million project was also cheaper that a subway which officials say would have been hard to finance. (Sophie-May Williams | Metro)

Speed matters: The recent performance of the new Finch LRT in Toronto’s suburbs has rekindled the discussion about what matters most about planning new transit projects. Marco Chitti says some people believe some goals are in conflict or more important than speed but he vehemently disagrees. People’s time is important and there’s precious few minutes, hours, years in our lives that getting places by in a reasonable amount of time by building layered transit networks shouldn’t be too much to ask. (Marco Chitti | Italian (urban) Letters)

Quiet streets have higher home values: New research out of UC Berkeley finds that housing values are higher when road noise is reduced. Researchers looked at nearly 600,000 properties from before and after sound barriers were built on busy highways. They also model how noise has reduced values across the United States by $110B. With a switch to electric vehicles, they believe another increase of $77B could be possible. (Lisa Ward | Wall Street Journal)

The great downtown renaissance: While many cities have tried to invest in infrastructure and roads to bring economic development, the real key is creating a “robust public life”. Now cities across the country are trying to remake their urban cores as livable communities to do just that as they also get hit by multiple trends including work from home after the pandemic, and increases in housing costs. (Diana Budds | Dwell Magazine)

Too much road salt: New research from Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania finds that road salt used for de-icing has longer term impacts than previously realized. The amount of road salt used has double since 1975 and has a huge impact on aquatic systems and drinking water as well as infrastructure. But there are other solutions including educating businesses on how to use less salt or other methods to keep the ice at bay. (Susan Phillips | WHYY)

Quote of the Week

We’re talking about 2 million people who will be paying less each month to get to work, to get home or to do their day-to-day stuff. That’s what governing is about: making the important things easier for ordinary people.

-Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez discussing in The Guardian a new €60 monthly universal transportation pass.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Benjamin Schneider to talk about his book The Unfinished Metropolis: Igniting the City-Building Revolution.

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