Can School Buses and Waymo Robotaxis Share School Zones?

School bus. (Pixabay License)

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.

A look into an accessible future: Emily Flores was in Milan for the Paralympics and found a rare instance of accessible design, the Olympic Village. The experience included provisions for easy wheelchair and prosthetic repair as well as accommodations for all different people’s needs. The space was designed from the beginning with accessibility in mind and shows what can happen when everyone’s needs are included. (Emily Flores | Teen Vogue)

Economic security lacking: A new report from the Urban Institute suggests that 49% of Americans lacked the resources to be economically secure. This meant that they weren’t able to save for future needs or emergencies or have the resources to engage fully in society. Households that didn’t own their own homes or had three or more children were more likely to be insecure, but the report found that security was in reach with just a 13% increase in resources for most insecure households. (Jule Pattison-Gordon | Governing)

Waymo not stopping for school buses: Austin officials allege that Waymo robotaxis have failed to stop for school buses on 19 occasions. In December the company instituted a recall but even after fixes the incidences continued to occur. An open records request even showed that school officials were trying to help the vehicles learn how to stop for school buses even as they have continued to fail. Until the problem is fixed, experts like Missy Cummings believe Waymo vehicles shouldn’t be allowed in school zones. (Aarian Marshall | Wired Magazine)

Don’t need another dashboard: Cities all over the country have created reams of data and many different types of data dashboards to organize it across departments and programs. But Komal Goel argues that the dashboards and data observations are burning out staff and obscuring stories that can’t be told with collected data alone. Human insight is an important input and should be cultivated to get positive outcomes. (Komal Goel | Route Fifty)

Texas renewable future stifled: Texas has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Biden to invest in renewable energy. Ranchers in West Texas have used the funds to build solar and wind facilities to pick up the slack while oil revenues have been spikey. Many of these projects also provide much needed local tax revenue. But the Trump Administration’s all out assault on renewables could take revenue away from parts of the state that need it the most. (Laura Mallonee | Grist)

Quote of the Week

What appears as a neutral storage facility is in fact part of a broader ecological system shaped by energy consumption, land transformation, and mobility.

–Ananya Nayak in ArchDaily discussing the long tail impacts of warehouses on the built environment.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Stephen Crim, Director, Policy & Analytical Reporting, Central Business District Tolling Program (CBDTP) at the NYMTA.

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