Chicago Remains Trapped By Bad Parking Meter Deal

Parking meter fail. 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.

Switching to red lights: A suburb of Copenhagen is replacing white street lights with red ones on a road known to be home to seven different species of bats. Research has shown that red lights do not impact the feeding patterns of bats or their ecolocation capabilities in the same way that whiter shorter wavelength light can. An additional benefit to the switch are reduced maintenance and costs associated with LED lighting. (Arezki Amiri  | Daily Galaxy)

New York really is unique on housing shortage: Most housing markets around the United States, including hot spots like Miami and San Francisco, have at least plateaued from pandemic inflation, but New York is the only city that is an outlier according to data collected for Components.news. The findings shows demand is truly unwavering in the face of a lack of supply as the lowest third of home prices in the city have increased in every six month period since 2020. (Andrew Thompson, Chris Good, Kyle Paoletta | Components)

No deal on parking meters: After looking into the possibility, the Mayor of Chicago will not buy out of the 75-year private equity parking meter contract that is seen as one of the worst municipal decisions in recent history. The deal made in 2008 allowed a private equity company to operate the meters by offering the city a one time cash infusion of $1.2B but has already made the companies twice that in just the first 18 years. Buying back the meters would likely cost the city over $2.4B. (Alice Yin, Jake Sheridan, A.D. Quig | Chicago Tribune)

A housing crisis born from ugliness: The growth and the construction of new buildings has slowed such that we’re now faced with a housing crisis in many cities around the country. One theory of how we got there is that concerns about the aesthetics of new buildings are driving opposition to new construction. In a new paper, researchers find that people will oppose new buildings if they are seen as out of scale with existing development, no matter the density. (Marina Bolotnikova | Vox)

Transportation’s demographic time bomb: The number of people around the world over 60 years old will double in the next 25 years. That growth in aging population presents a problem for transportation systems dependent on individual drivers who may no longer be mentally or physically able to do so. Unless active transportation modes are made more robust, more seniors will become isolated from care infrastructure and support systems needed to live healthy lives as they age. (Kea Wilson | Streetsblog USA)

Quote of the Week

Now this new legislation will require that all e-bikes, even the lowest speed e-bikes that don’t have throttles, would require licensing and registration, and there is no system and no funding to implement that across the state there.

–Debra Kagan, executive director of the New Jersey Bike Walk Coalition in Government Technology via the Philadelphia Inquirer wondering how New Jersey is going to enforce its strict new e-bike laws.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Jake Berman to talk about his book, The Lost Subways of North America: A Cartographic Guide to the Past, Present, and What Might Have Been.

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