National Links: Cars Behaving Badly

Each week we write a piece with the most interesting articles of the week for Greater Greater Washington and syndicate it to Urban Milwaukee and Streets.mn. We take the most clicked posts of the week from The Overhead Wire daily and write about the most interesting ones. Follow beyond the crease to read up on some of this week’s most interesting pieces.

Reporting cars behaving badly: The Portland Oregon alt-weekly newspaper asked locals to report electric scooter riders behaving badly. In turn they responded with stories of automobiles almost running them over instead. (Willamette Week)

How America uses its land: There are 1.9 billion acres of land in the lower 48 states. How we use that land for recreation, farming, and living has been laid out in a set of maps. Unfortunately it doesn’t include how much land we devote to parking. (Bloomberg)

Austin’s code rewrite on thin ice: The mayor of Austin is calling for work to end on the code rewrite the city has spent $8 million on and been working on for a number of years. Citing toxic discourse, he’s looking to start over again from scratch. (Austin Chronicle)

A tax on bikes and buses: Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania has proposed a program for eshewing the gas tax by 2028. But before the gas tax is phased out, he is proposing to raise it while putting in place battery taxes, bicycle wheel taxes, and transit fuel taxes that had previously not existed. Per mile taxes will be tested in the mean time to see if they are viable as a replacement. (Planetizen)

Charlotte’s car free future: Charlotte is planning long term for a downtown without cars and a different idea about the city should be. If the NASCAR Speed Street festival which closes down streets for 90,000 visitors each year is any indication, it is certainly possible. (Next City)

Quote of the Day

You can’t ask [these apps] to change their entire business model, but you can ask them to take other things into consideration when designing their apps. They can’t fix gentrification, but they can help us find businesses to live out our values.

–Will Payne in a piece on whether smart phone apps are accelerating gentrification. (Governing)