Five articles curated by the Wagner Planner staff: Here’s what the Wagner Planner staff is reading. This week: open streets by the citizens in DC, the efficiency of subsidized transit, riders representation in transit boards, Paris votes for SUV’s fees, and Phoenix’s preparation for a brutally hot 2024 summer.
How D.C. Neighbors Closed a Dangerous Street in Front of an Elementary School (Next City) “Bancroft Elementary in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Northwest D.C. is carving a new path to make the street in front of the school safe for students and closed to traffic during arrival and departure times. Here’s how we made this happen and what we learned. Every neighborhood school with dangerous streets out front should consider it.”
Study: Subsidizing Transit Actually Makes it More Efficient (Streetblog USA) “The first thing that most researchers get wrong about the impacts of subsidies on efficiency, Newmark explains, is that they tend to measure that efficiency at the level of the individual transit agency — even in metros with multiple operators that riders move seamlessly between.
“That is not how any rider sees their transit system,” he added. “The Bay Area, for example, has 26 transit agencies; if you transfer from a bus to a BART train using the same fare media, you’re not super sensitive to the fact that those are two separate operators. You see it as one unified system, which is the way it should be.”
Riders Reps Could Be Coming Soon to Some Washington Transit Boards (The Urbanist) “I see that there are many transit agencies that do not realize the full potential of their ridership,” Judy Jones, who serves on the Skagit Transit Advisory Committee, told the House Transportation Committee on Monday. “Many on these boards of authority have never experienced mass transit in a personal way, making decisions without understanding the ramifications to the ridership in their daily lives in the communities they serve.”
Parisians vote for rise in parking fees for SUVs (BBC) “Environmentalists argue that SUVs consume more fuel than other cars and that their construction and use produce more harmful emissions. Supporters of the move also note that tall vehicles are deadlier than lighter cars when they are involved in accidents.”
How Phoenix is preparing for its next brutally hot summer (Yale Climate Connections) “We’ve come to a pretty good agreement in the urban climate community that there are three key drivers of the urban heat island effect. One is the materials that we use to build our cities: asphalt for roads, bricks for buildings, non-reflective roofing are some examples. Many of those materials tend to have more heat-retaining properties than the natural landscape. Then they slowly release that heat into the environment, raising our nighttime temperatures.”