First before I share today’s thoughts, just wanted to let everyone know we passed 100,000!! links in the news archive. Since 2013 we’ve been collecting and tagging the links we share in the newsletter and now it is over 100,000 items tagged by topic and city in our archive that’s available to subscribers. We’re working

This week we’re Han Solo but have a lot of news to cover including items on skateboarding, new types of segregation, third places, and some ancient ways to cool cities and streets. Check out the show notes below for more information.

An interesting paper about growth in big cities compares housing construction and prices between Texas and California. What researchers found is that housing construction costs are much cheaper as cities continue to sprawl, as California did up until the 90’s and Texas continues to do now, but once that is constrained either by distance to

This week we’re joined by Megan Kimble to talk about her book City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways. We chat about the folks fighting back against highways, the history behind building big roads, and what the future looks like for advocacy. To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA or our

First let me offer a super congrats to Elaine Clegg on getting nominated to the Amtrak Board! Very exciting. Second, today a piece in Grist jumped out at me, especially after sharing yesterday’s article about a new way to measure GDP around health and happiness by Lloyd Alter. The Grist article discussed the use of

Back in August we shared a paper on state capacity that was written up in The American Prospect that basically said when transportation departments are looking to resurface roads, the places with more public sector capacity are likely to have more bids and lower construction costs. I thought at the time it’s something that likely

This week were sharing part 2 of our discussion with Jim Kumon. We chat about the challenges of development, how to crowdfund a building, coming to the end of an 80 year economic cycle, how the built environment is an outcome of how we structure capital, and how more information can make it harder to

One of the things we’ve been thinking about a lot is the idea of transportation infrastructure as a public utility. Now more than ever I believe streets and rights of way are public utilities considering the value of this urban space we use for human transportation and goods movement, water management, and electricity and internet

This week on Mondays at The Overhead Wire we’re joined by Tracy McMillan to talk about aging in place, Nashville’s big transit plan, potential Alzheimer’s causes in car exhaust, Milan’s famous weeks, and the Colorado legislature’s search for more housing and TOD. Show note links below:

This week we’re joined by Jim Kumon, Principal at Electric Housing, to discuss his work as a developer and urban policy educator in the Twin Cities. We chat about his sustainable development project, what St. Paul learned from Minneapolis 2040 and how zoning reform and transportation intersect. Some websites of note from this episode: Electric