The Benefits of Portland’s E-Bike Program

E-bike. (CC0 Public Domain).

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.

Overperforming downtowns: Using data collected through a diagnostic tool called Urban Vital Signs, Dallas urban designer Patrick Kennedy was able to determine the traits of downtowns that overperformed their regions on health and vitality. The result is a list of five traits including cities that didn’t hollow out post war, kept highways from the core, have downtown job growth, growing disposable income, and are getting more walkable. (Patrick Kennedy | Medium)

E-bike town: Portland Oregon offers rebates on e-bikes through its Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund (PCBF). The rebates are offered through a lottery system for low income residents makes rebates available that must be used in 60 days. Taylor Griggs of the Portland Mercury caught up with a few of the recipients and shared how the new e-bikes purchased changed their lives for the better. (Taylor Griggs | Portland Mercury)

People mover drama: LAX is building an almost $2B people mover at the airport which is getting close to completion, but the number of disputes between the airport authority and the contractors was adding up, leading local producer and transit YouTuber Nick Andert to investigate. What he found was an LA County grand jury report that found $880m in change orders and he’s not sure if the project will actually be complete by the Olympics in just two years. (Oren Peleg | The Hollywood Reporter)

West Africa’s growing cities: NPR took a two week trip along the West African coast between Nigeria and Ivory Coast to see the formations of a megaregion that could see 50 million people living there by 2050. But an economic downturn is impacting the future of the cities along the route and uncertainty about the future abound. This interactive piece takes you on a journey along the coast and shows the stagnation and progress of the corridor. (Emmanuel Akinwotu | NPR)

Urbanism polls well: A survey of voters which asked about sustainable infrastructure found there is strong support for sustainable transportation, local energy policies, and green infrastructure investments. The barriers respondents stated, are funding and political will for making these changes. The responses also were different between urban and rural areas, but with everyone saying affordable housing was at the top of the list of issues that need to be addressed. (Ayseli Karabekmez | Data for Progress)

Quote of the Week

They may not feel like getting up to go to a cooling center and think, ‘I can just tough it out at home’. Another challenge is, honestly, swallowing your pride, and there are people who think that they don’t need a cooling center.

–Vanessa Corson, public information officer for Maine’s emergency management agency in the Guardian discussing the difficulties of getting people to come to cooling centers during extreme heat.

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by SFMTA Director of Transportation Julie Kirschbaum.

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