City Life

Archived link: https://archive.ph/BdFwc

In an unbelievable hit piece, the Atlantic's deputy executive editor blamed "progressives" for the death of American Dream, blaming Jane Jacob, an advocate for mixed use building in urban environments, for the lack of housing in the US.

Somehow the editor completely failed to account for various obvious reasons that housing became unaffordable, such as NIMBYism, financialization of housing, speculative purchases, loose monetary policies, etc. and put all the blame on "progressives".

Insane paragraph below:

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

Why hasn’t Oakland and the urban East Bay’s public transit system been improved, even as city gets more congested with population growth? Why does Oakland have significantly worse bus service in 2025 than it did in 1990, despite having 40,000 more residents today? Why has San Francisco been building out new subway lines and streetcar routes in areas they’re redeveloping for the last 40 years, while Oakland — whose population increased by 12% in the last decade alone — hasn’t added a single new rapid transit station or line since 1972? Why does Oakland have basically zero plans in the works to expand fast, rapid transit in its city — except for a regional rail plan that mostly is about passing through West Oakland?

San Francisco benefits from having its much superior public transit system organized by one agency (Muni / SFMTA), funded by one powerful organ (the Board of Supervisors) and managed by one person (the Mayor-appointed manager). This is why public transit plays such an influential role in San Francisco politics: the Supervisor and Mayor you elected directly run on issues pertaining to Muni service.

In contrast, East Bay transit is comically disorganized. Most residents have no idea who their AC Transit representative is or if they even have one, so they complain to their local city councilmember. The city council then has to formally communicate to their AC Transit representative requesting service improvements. However, the ACT board director does not run AC Transit but oversees it. Attempts by directors such as director Sarah Syed to communicate to AC’s general manager about improving service (such as not eliminating bus service on Broadway in Downtown Oakland after-hours) has been sanctioned and criticized by other board members. This leads to a political culture of indifference and laziness where there’s no imperative to improve service because AC Transit races are noncompetitive and nobody holds them accountable or even knows they exist.

State transportation officials on Friday narrowed down the designs being considered for the reconstruction of Interstate 94 between Minneapolis and St. Paul, eliminating options with strong community support that would have removed the highway.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) is recommending that four of 10 designs, which were first introduced in 2023, move forward into an environmental review process. That review will determine the future of the 7.5-mile stretch of I-94 between Hiawatha Avenue in Minneapolis and Marion Street in St. Paul.

Notably absent were designs that considered replacing the highway with an at-grade roadway, an option supported by several environmental activists and the nonprofit, Our Streets. Several elected officials who sit on an advisory committee for the project and who were in attendance at the Friday meeting with MnDOT criticized that absence.

The connection between transportation and health may not be obvious. But how people get around communities is interconnected with physical and mental wellbeing. Easy access to public transit is linked with direct health impacts, like increased levels of physical activity. Transportation also opens doors to other factors that contribute to health — as Sylvaine found with her health care appointments.

“It’s the linkage between you and all of these other things that impact your health,” says Amanda Grimes, an associate professor of health sciences at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. “Access to food itself is a social determinant of health. But how do you get access to food? It usually takes transportation.”

Advocates for zero-fare systems say that the increased mobility they offer supports health, but now, researchers in Kansas City are working to understand just how much. A project led by Grimes and colleagues at the University of Missouri–Kansas City is looking at the immediate and indirect health impacts. (Sylvaine works as an assistant on the research project.)

The researchers are finding a clear health benefit: physical activity.

People who use the bus in Kansas City take more steps per day than the average American, according to Grimes.

A walk to the bus station may not seem like a lot, but Grimes explains that incorporating more movement into daily life is linked to benefits when it comes to health factors like obesity, blood pressure and heart disease. “Every minute we can add really translates into improved health outcomes.”

One of the main selling points of congestion pricing, besides reducing traffic, is improving air quality. Fewer cars on the road means fewer cars emitting exhaust in the nation’s most densely populated city — and less traffic also means that less time spent idling.

An environmental assessment of congestion pricing published in 2023 estimated the impact tolls would have on a number of air pollutants, including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, and benzene. These chemicals have been linked to health problems including heart disease, respiratory issues, cognitive impairment, and increased risk of cancer. The assessment also looked at the impact tolls would have on greenhouse gases. It analyzed these impacts at a regional level, looking at 12 different counties across New York and New Jersey, and projected how big or small the change in pollutants would be by 2045.

The report found that, with congestion pricing, Manhattan would see a 4.36 percent reduction in daily vehicle-miles traveled by 2045. This would lead to sizable reductions in air pollutants in Manhattan, especially in the central business district (the area drivers must pay a toll to enter). For example, per the environmental assessment’s modeling, the central business district would see a 10.72 percent drop in carbon dioxide equivalents by 2045, as well as a similar drop in fine particular matter, and slightly lower drops in nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide (5.89 percent and 6.55 percent, respectively).

The first step to meaningful action is recognizing the problem. With mass deportations and political persecution looming, cities that provide protection will experience an influx of new residents, especially migrants and others who are politically oppressed. These newcomers may challenge our infrastructure, housing market, and public services. What can we do to ensure that our future neighbors thrive alongside us?

The response to these challenges must be to provide, not to exclude. To avoid conflicts about whose basic needs get met, we must create abundance: enough homes for everyone, a reliable public transit system, functioning social services, funded schools and libraries, and well-maintained parks. As one of the world’s wealthiest cities, Seattle can make these things happen. By embracing abundance we can overcome our greatest challenges, whether it be skyrocketing housing costs, displacement and homelessness, worsening traffic, or insufficient tax revenue.

Councils are increasingly making space for wildflower meadows in cities in a bid to tackle insect decline, but their role in helping pollinating insects was unclear. Researchers working in the Polish city of Warsaw wanted to find out if these efforts were producing good results.

They found there was no difference in the diversity of species that visited sown wildflower meadows in cities compared with natural ones, according to the study published in the journal Ecological Entomology, and led by researchers from Warsaw University. The researchers said: “In inner-city areas, flower meadows can compensate insects for the lack of large natural meadows that are usually found in the countryside.”

This study confirmed that small areas of urban wildflowers have a high concentration of pollinating insects, and are as valuable to many pollinators as larger areas of natural meadow that you would typically find rurally. “In this way, we can alleviate the hostile environment of urban space for wildlife,” the researchers wrote

Five months after Gov. Hochul tried to kill congestion pricing under the guise of a "temporary pause," she threw herself a celebratory press conference on Thursday to announce the toll's return early next year at $9.

As Hochul told it, in June she "stood up on behalf of hard working families and simply said, 'No, no to a new $15 congestion toll.'" As for the "working families" who rely on the train and the bus to get to work — also known as 90 percent of commuters into the Manhattan central business district — Hochul declined to brag about how she said "yes" to traffic in front of those buses and "no" to new subway elevators, trains and upgraded train signals.

She argued that a $15 toll is too high for drivers, so she gave them a 40-percent discount. And Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North customers? No such discount — those suckers are still paying roughly $15 per day in fares.

Highway construction is a very big business. Nationally, the United States spends nearly $150 billion per year on road and highway construction, an amount that has increased by almost 50 percent in the past five years. The highway-building bureaucracy has created a powerful and well-organized political machine that mobilizes construction companies, engineering firms, truckers, and local business boosters. Politicians are always keen to take credit at ribbon-cuttings. Highway departments routinely shortchange maintenance to cobble together funding for massive empire-building highway and bridge projects.

In pursuit of these goals, highway agencies depend on traffic models. These models are bewilderingly complex, their results are offered with false certainty, and when they are challenged in court, judges routinely defer to “agency expertise.” To understand how these impenetrable models work, let alone contest their accuracy or validity, is a daunting task. The models thus serve as powerful technocratic weapons in securing funding, dismissing environmental concerns, and blocking outside scrutiny. Concrete keeps pouring into new highway lanes, regardless of their utility for drivers or their damage to the world around them.

Without the ability to interact with one another, we also lose the ability to care for one another. Seeing your neighbor on a run at the park or the neighborhood convenience store; bumping into friends at the local coffee shop; the casual conversations that happen while waiting for the bus, the library, or even the neighborhood bar. These moments of interaction, though seemingly small, are key to our wellbeing, or lack of it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21083492

tl;dw they made some sensible cost cutting measures to create a nice tram system cheaply in a small city.

tldw Hamburg wanted to build an urban highway network, but it wasn't complete and they built some nice things in the space left over.

Published in Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, the study analyzed data collected among riders in three metropolitan regions — the San Francisco Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles and Orange counties — between Nov. 2018 and Nov. 2019. The data set consisted of 7,333 ride-hailing trips by 2,458 respondents.

About 47% of the trips replaced a public transit, carpool, walking or cycling trip. An additional 5.8% of trips represented “induced travel,” meaning the person would not have made the trip were an Uber or Lyft unavailable. This suggests ride-hailing often tends to replace most sustainable transportation modes and leads to additional vehicle miles traveled.

We predicted the amount, share, and value of land dedicated to roadways within and across 316 U.S. primary metropolitan statistical areas. Despite the amount and value of land dedicated to roadways, our study provides the first such estimate across a broad range of metropolitan areas. Our basic approach was to estimate roadway widths using a 10% sample of widths provided by the Highway Performance Monitoring System and apply our estimates to the rest of the roadway system. Multiplying estimated widths by segment length and netting out double counting at intersections provided estimates of land area. We also matched roadway segments and areas to existing land value estimates and satellite-based measures of urbanized land. We found that a little less than a quarter of urbanized land—roughly the size of West Virginia—was dedicated to roadway. This land was worth around $4.1 trillion in 2016 and had an annualized value that was higher than the total variable costs of the trucking sector and the total annual federal, state, and local expenditures on roadways. Conducting a back-of-the-envelope cost–benefit analysis, we found that the country likely has too much land dedicated to urban roads.