What Parts of the US Sprawl the Most?

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.

New Orleans should start managed retreat: Sea level rise, the gradual subsidence of coastline, and stronger storms mean that New Orleans and much of the Louisiana coast is likely to be inundated by the end of the century says a new research paper from Tulane University. Researchers believe that planning for relocation should begin immediately even if that is politically hard. Over 120 years by 2050, the state will have lost 5,000 square miles of land to the Gulf of Mexico, a space the size of the state of Connecticut. (Oliver Milman | The Guardian)

We can plan for a lower cost of living: Even though the United States has a high GDP, it lacks the ability to provide many with health and happiness. Many families feel stressed because their incomes aren’t enough to keep up with expenses which leads to more work and less happiness. Todd Litman believes that’s because of policies which increase housing and transportation costs at the expense of alternatives that reduce costs and stress. (Todd Litman | Planetizen)

Sprawl in the USA: A new study from Johns Hopkins has collected time series data that shows how much 233 metropolitan areas have sprawled since 2014. San Francisco and New York are the most compact in the United States while Atlanta Georgia and Riverside California are the most sprawling. The researchers also found that more compact communities have lower energy costs, better connected social lives, and better health outcomes. (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health)

$350m committed to bike infrastructure around the world: Bloomberg Philanthropies announced at CityLab in Madrid that the organization will be making $350m in investments in road infrastructure geared towards bikes around the world. The programs will create mentor cities that share information and knowledge with peer cities on road safety. The funding will bolster the organizations goals of reducing road deaths by 1 million lives over the next five years. (Ron Johnson | Momentum Magazine)

Privatizing the post office would be a disaster: Plans to privatize the United States Postal Service by selling the package delivery service and land it owns would be a disaster. First, no other company has the same Universal Service Obligation that USPS has, nor do they have the infrastructure to deliver on it. Additionally, any privatization would impact communities that rely on the post office to connect to health care and other necessities. Americans should be proud of the unparalleled logistics network that literally binds this country together. (Benjamin Fong | Phenomenal World)

Quote of the Week

All of this is a clue to why the road design problem in America is bigger than one-way streets, bigger than the absence of sidewalks, bigger than motorists traveling at excessive speeds. It is a problem that tracks directly to the question of what a street is for in the first place. At this point in the 21st century, we are running out of places where we can gather outside our homes to relax and cultivate social contacts. Odd as it may sound at first, the street used to be one of those places.

–Alan Ehrenhalt in Governing discussing how cities are trying to make streets for more than just cars.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Arizona State Professor Benjamin Fong to discuss an item he wrote in Urban Omnibus entitled Where’s My Package? We discuss his work trying to suss out how e-commerce companies like Amazon have built their logistics systems and the difficulties of last mile deliveries.

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