The Overhead Wire Daily

Episode 193: Mondays at The Overhead Wire - Henry George's Urbanist Army

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:02:50 GMT

This week on the Mondays show we’re joined by Kate Gasparro of the Building Better Cities podcast. We talk about the potential for land value taxes, research on car commutes from the Pottsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, 15 minute cities and the importance of destinations, and big Japanese megadevelopments.

Listen in at The Overhead Wire or on your podcatcher of choice.

Main Stories

A potential for land value taxes - Sightline Institute

A new approach to planning with less driving - Pottsdam Insitute for Climate Impact Research

15 minute cities and proximities to jobs - Florida Atlantic University

Rise of the managed city - Japan Times

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Episode 582: A Latent Hazard Activated by Conflict

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:01:14 GMT

This week we’re joined by Professor Eric Dumbaugh of Florida Atlantic University to share his new paper on Land Use and Road Safety: Understanding the Persistence of Vulnerable Road User Deaths and Injuries in the United States. We discuss the connections between the siting of destinations and deaths of vulnerable road users as well as a long game needed for true road safety.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

You can read the transcript at The Overhead Wire

AND you can find our archive here.

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Episode 581: In Good Faith

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:01:34 GMT

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re joined by Ryan Avent to discuss his new book In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies. We discuss human evolution and the impact of collective knowledge and culture and the need to create a new story about the future of society. We also discuss grass is greener thinking on infrastructure, the nature of belief without the need for evidence, and the fact that there is no perfect past.

You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

You can find all episodes in our archive including the Mondays Show

You can also find a full transcript at The Overhead Wire

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Episode 192: Mondays at The Overhead Wire – No BRT for Christmas, Only Ham

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:02:56 GMT

Chrissy Mancini Nichols joins the show again and we have a blast talking about all kinds of urban topics. We discuss the rise of electro-states, a new way to measure accessibility from Wendy Zhao, short versus long term thinking on BRT alignments, and thoughts on how we should fund transportation considering our new world of deliveries and electric vehicles. Lots of great stuff, listen in here at The Overhead Wire.

Discussion Items

Dawn of the Electric World Order - Phenomenal World

A new way of measuring accessibility - USC Price

Colfax: to center run or side run BRT - Westword | Denverite

Funding transportation - will we miss the gas tax? KQED | Governing

Bonus Items

Hormuz Jeff - Saturday Night Live

Women Changing Cities - Talking Headways

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Many thanks to Bob Nanna for our intro/outro music.

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Leapfrogging the Oligarchy

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:03:57 GMT

When cell phones were introduced some places that didn’t have landlines could skip the infrastructure investment and go straight to mobile phones. Same with renewable energy that comes from solar panels generating power locally instead of connections to power plants and grids that require larger upfront investments. Now, I’m interested in this idea of satellite based internet as a similar leapfrog innovation.

When I have thought about transportation lately I’m consistently wondering if we’re at the edge of our spatial limits with auto oriented development. Meaning that we’ve built out our regions in a way that is hard to build more housing affordably unless we either rethink transportation, telecommunications, and/or land use.

On the transportation side, I really do think we’re “running out of land“ as I’ve mentioned before. We’ve used all the space within a reasonable driving or transit distance to employment or entertainment destinations for single family tract housing developments and there’s just not many more huge parcels to build that many homes. Hence large increases in housing costs.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

As Redfearn and Orlando note in their paper on the subject, neighborhood tracts with aging housing stock are also resistant to densification and sclerotic. There are groups working on this trying to break the logjam on already built out spaces, but that reform is at the moment slow and confronting entrenched interests.

But the pandemic and the white collar work from home movement has also opened up another path for connection albeit not as good or perhaps efficient as humans meeting with each other. Work from home allowed certain workers to move somewhere else to find a cheaper cost of living as long as there was internet. Of course we can’t ignore the equity considerations we’ve not even begun to grapple with in terms of who can work in such a way and where, but it does give us insight into what many people are craving. Affordable living and good quality of life.

During a recent visit to Boise Idaho, a major receiving region during the pandemic migration, I learned the extent that the region has been bursting at the seems with growth, especially sprawling single family subdivisions. These growth regions are now getting more expensive as builders and governments are grappling with demand but they also lend credence to the idea that our development and financial systems are good at suburban growth at scale and infill in bits and pieces.

The IIJA (infrastructure bill) passed during the Biden administration has funded broadband expansion (BEAD) that could have been an opportunity to grow something different for communities that aren’t quite as connected by networks as they should be. It wasn’t as good as it could have been (lack of a public option and more money to existing interests) because of telecom companies and states that are in the pockets of said telecom companies but the overall idea of connecting more Americans to a faster internet is still strong.

Now we’re seeing another emerging telecom type that could leapfrog the legacy (ha internet has legacy?) players which is satellite based internet. There’s something to be said about the proliferation of orbital physical and visual pollution around our planet, but technological advancement in this “space” could mean connecting people that weren’t connected before because existing companies said it would be too expensive to run a line to everywhere.

In my mind, our road expansion and airplane system now has diminishing returns and should be enhanced by programs that connect people faster with more economic impact. This could mean high speed rail which stops at more cities and economically connects mega regions, it could mean densification of existing urban conurbations, or it could mean deploying broadband to places that haven’t had high speed quality internet before.

Right now oligarchs like Elon Musk (Starlink) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon Leo) have the upper hand in this domain and are rigging the system to give themselves more of a head start. But it would behoove our governments or collectives to get out ahead of them to capture this value for everyone.

Advancements and investments in transportation and connectivity are one of the keys to affordability needed for a good quality of life. I would prefer we develop 15 minute cities and faster transportation networks, but there’s also an opening for connections to health care, loved ones, and opportunity that broadband can provide.

***

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Episode 580: Community Severance by Road

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:02:43 GMT

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Jaime Benavides and Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou of Brown University to discuss their new paper showing how community severance by road infrastructure and traffic has led to more mental health related hospital visits in New York City. We talk about the role of roads cutting people off from social connections and how impacts of roads on mental health were separated out from air quality.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find all of our episodes in the archive.

If you’re not a big podcast listener, we have a full transcript on The Overhead Wire.com

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Episode 579: Greensboro's Downtown Greenway

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:01:38 GMT

Talking Headways episodes are generally evergreen so feel free to jump in at any time!

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Dabney Sanders, Project Manager of the Greensboro Downtown Greenway. We chat about opening the final section of the Greenway after 25 years of work, the amazing art projects on the route, and lessons for other cities wanting to build greenways.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find this and other episodes in our archive.

Find a full transcript of this episode at The Overhead Wire.

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The Transportation Bill - A Money Supply Mechanism that Lacks a Heart

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:03:36 GMT

Lots of discussion related to the reauthorization of the transportation bill (previous was IIJA) this year including a flare up related to the addition of an electric car tax that would cost more than gas typically does for drivers annually. Republican Sam Graves and Democrat Rick Larsen have agreed to include it in the house version of the bill, but climate oriented Democrats in the Senate are dead set against a user fee for electric vehicles and hybrids alone. Larsen is on the record as saying all drivers should pay their fair share.

The argument of “user pays” or “fair share” however, like the transportation bill itself, is an anachronistic look at how transportation operates and should be funded in this country. Every transportation advocate I know, including readers of this newsletter, know that drivers come nowhere near paying their fair share of the transportation system.

Additionally, when we create a system that’s focused on drivers and their payments, it limits our imagination as to what the transportation system could be for everybody. When drivers pay they expect all funding should go to them, setting up opposition between different modal factions. In reality, we should be developing a system that works for everyone that everybody pays into.

Photo by Oliver Potter on Unsplash

I myself am tired of looking through these bills to see what we got, when bill after bill ignores the need for improved access and actionable goals that would benefit Americans. Not to mention the current administration just ignores the law as it exists now anyways by not funding transit capital projects or research they deem “woke”.

The bill also just shows how we lack imagination about how we see our future selves. It doesn’t feel forward looking or innovative, and I don’t mean in a whiz bang space ships for everyone type of way. Just the basics of safety, accessibility, and generating valuable assets that make people’s quality of life improve. It’s just a money supply mechanism that lacks a heart.

Last week I wrote about how it feels like we’re entering a new era of civilization on earth with the emergence of electrotech. This bill is the perfect encapsulation of how much we are actively pushing against that change with all our might, but stuck in the riptide that will eventually wash us out to sea.

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Episode 578: Sidewalk Nation

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:02:01 GMT

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Cardozo Law professor Michael Pollack to talk about his new book Sidewalk Nation: The Life and Law of America’s Most Overlooked Resource. Michael discusses who manages, owns, and feels ownership of sidewalks and advocates for a Department dedicated to them. We also talk about the nexus between sidewalks and roads, the impact of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Denver’s successful funding and maintenance referendum.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find more episodes of the show in our hosting archive.

Find a full transcript at The Overhead Wire.

The episodes are numbered but most are fairly evergreen!

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A New Development Cycle

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Tue, 12 May 2026 11:03:38 GMT

About a year ago I interviewed my old urbanist friend Jim Kumon on the podcast (Part 1 | Part 2) about his work developing missing middle housing in the Twin Cities and other spots around the country and he mentioned something super interesting that a colleague reminded me of recently about the cycle of our growth regimes in the US that also reverberated around the world.

“And so humanity has a pretty good cycle about every 70 to 80 years where we flip a switch and something serious happens. You know, whether it’s the industrial revolution to things that happened around post-Civil war and the railroads, and then World War II and suburbia, and we’re kind of running on the fumes of that last 80 year cycle, right? We’re kind of past due. And now the pandemic and other things that have changed, we’re into a new cycle. We don’t really know what that is yet.”

These development cycles upended what people knew about cities, transportation, urban planning and design. Urbanization happened intensely and at a full burn since the industrial revolution to where we are now.

What’s more interesting though may be starting to get glimpses of what a new 80 year cycle looks like.

From an energy perspective, the cycles went from wood burning to coal to gasoline and with the Iran War raising the cost of oil, it looks like a lot of countries are looking for stability and certainty in something old but evolved: electricity. A new item in Phenomenal World discusses the rise of the “electrotech” powered by overwhelming Chinese investments in electrification, everything from cars, trains, and ships to energy grids and renewable energy investments exported around the world.

These investments and long term thinking began for China after the 2003 Iraq War and are now being realized on a large scale, and adopted by countries across Asia Pacific, Africa, and Europe.

Here in the United States the highway lobby which includes car manufacturers, oil companies, road builders and more are continuing to pull in the direction of the post world war development regime and against a new electrotech future. But people that live in the existing system are waking up to the expense and unaffordability of oil dependence and the urban systems it has installed and expanded.

Moving aside for the moment the impacts on our planet’s climate, this push towards a monolithic unbalanced transportation system has increased costs for families that I don’t think people still quite grasp. Housing costs tied to job accessibility and distance. Transportation costs tied to how far we are forced to drive, how much new vehicles cost to operate and insure. Public health tied to access to fresh food and care infrastructure.

Photo by Max Bender on Unsplash

Electrotech thus isn’t the only answer because much of it is tied to enforcing a previous regime built on automobility. But what comes with electrotech is the potential for a reset button on the poor built environment decisions that have been made over the last 100 years as well as our local economic systems. Instead of profits exported from our neighborhoods, we get to keep them if our utilities and neighborhoods are structured correctly.

A reduction in cost of living for families and improvements in health will grow people’s quality of life and create a value unmatched and unknown in most of the country. It’s something to look forward to, not fight against.

***

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Episode 577: Find the Bus Art

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:01:11 GMT

This week on the Talking Headways podcast, we’re joined by Stephanie Dockery to discuss the Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge. Stephanie discusses how a bus art can get a cult following, how artists are creating attention in their cities with temporary art, and what happens after the projects disappear.

Find the Bloomberg Connects art app here which contains audio, video, and written resources.

To listen to this episode, visit Streetsblog USA

Find all audio episodes in the archive including this one here.

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Bonus Episode: Mapping Every Sidewalk in Your State

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:02:38 GMT

We’re doing a bit of a crossover episode this week as I wanted to do two things, promote the amazing podcast The Brake hosted by Kea Wilson at Streetsblog USA and Dr. Anat Caspi at The University of Washington and her work focused on creating a platform that inventories Washington State’s sidewalks. This is a reproduction of The Brake's February 24th episode What It Would Take to Map Every Sidewalk In Your State.

The Washington State sidewalk inventory is now 100% complete but if you’d like to be part of the coalition to get legislative support for continued maintenance make sure to contact the folks working on OS Connect.

You can listen to the Mondays version here.

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Many thanks to Bob Nanna for our intro/outro music.

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Episode 576: The Logistics of Package Delivery

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:01:42 GMT

This week we’re joined by Arizona State Professor Benjamin Fong to discuss an item he wrote in Urban Omnibus entitled Where’s My Package? We discuss his work trying to suss out how e-commerce companies like Amazon have built their logistics systems and the difficulties of last mile deliveries. Benjamin also shares potentially beneficial legislation, movements that could benefit workers, and the process of siting warehouses that impact small towns to the benefit of big corporations.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA

Find all of our episodes in the archive.

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Episode 190: Mondays at The Overhead Wire - Aging Out of the Car

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:03:50 GMT

This week we’re Han Solo, but have a lot of great news items to share including SRO legislation, Japan’s rail expertise, the idea of onboarding residents to a city, and the quiet that came from the solar eclipse.

LISTEN to this episode at The Overhead Wire

Below are the show notes including links to the articles that we discussed.

MAIN ITEMS

SRO legislation - Niskanen Center

Older drivers - Carbon Upfront!

Japan’s railways - Works in Progress

The warehouse in plain sight - Places Journal

Onboarding residents - National League of Cities

Free range parenting - The Dispatch

Total eclipse silence - ScienceDaily

Sacramento parking legend - Sacramento Bee

Way-mo cars on the road - Streetsblog NYC

BONUS ITEMS

Boom and bust built into the system - Kings College

Mamdani curb management - Streetsblog NYC

Credit card charges going up for Clipper - SFGate

Federal home loan bank system reform - New York Times

Local government staffing shortages - Smart Cities Dive

City owned grocery - 6sqft

Automated speed enforcement - Global News

Robotaxi polls - The Verge

Water conservation overshadowed by drought - The Conversation

Finland opens longest active transportation bridge - New Atlas

Gas prices and housing supply - Newsweek

Amazon’s algorithm makes prices go up - Washington Monthly

Wildlife connections through land use - bioGraphic

Asphalt’s health impacts - Arizona State University

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Many thanks to Bob Nanna for our intro/outro music.

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And everything else at

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Episode 575: The Urban Truth Collective

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 11:00:44 GMT

This week we’re joined by Tom Flood, Grant Ennis, and Brent Toderian to discuss their new communications project, The Urban Truth Collective. We discuss pushing back on falsehoods and conspiracies through positive messaging around cities.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA. Find all our past episodes here.

Read a full transcript at The Overhead Wire.

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Thinking Further on Marchetti's Constant

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:01:52 GMT

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about Marchetti’s constant, the idea that people will spend an hour commuting each day, or half an hour each way and adjust lives accordingly based on transportation technologies and housing location choices.

Two research papers posted today feed into that with interesting results. Using data from the Canadian Mobility Survey, researchers at McGill University sought to determine some of the factors that would get people back on transit after the pandemic. What they found was that people that identified as transit riders and had recent transit use were likely future riders with non-users indicating low use intention.

But also included are those (52% of respondents) who believe a 20-35 minute door to door transit trip is reasonable. That time allowance would fit Marchetti’s constant of ~30 minutes commute one way which as Carvalho and El-Geneidy suggest should induce transportation planners to prioritize transit service and projects that get people to jobs within that time window.

The barrier however seems to be car use and people’s sunk in habits which can be psychologically hard to break. Even free transit as seen by researchers in Australia can not seem to break through that car barrier. In some instances though, we know when someone moves to a new house, there’s a possible window for change.

A second research paper in JAPA written in part by our friends Shima Hamidi and Reid Ewing also show another tide pushing against transit usage; the increase in sprawling development. But they found certain levels of compactness increase more active transportation uses while drive times and car ownership went against it. I would then personally posit that building more housing further out blows up any possibility that transit travel times could fit inside of Marchetti’s Constant.

Photo by Wallace Fonseca on Unsplash

Of course there are new wrinkles in the discussion. Work from home has become more popular for certain professionals post pandemic and commuting is only one type of trip. But Marchetti’s Constant cut in half for other trips ends up in a discussion about 15 minute cities and relates to our previous entries around time poverty and time based planning.

So then what are the solutions that give people a comfortable commute and an affordable home? We could pave everything over and keep sprawling. That’s the option we continue to choose. Though I still think we’re running out of land for sprawl and from an economic and social standpoint we are hitting a dead end with our singular auto based paradigm.

Or we could be more strategic in thinking about what this actually means from an affordability and quality of life standpoint for residents of our cities. Perhaps Marchetti’s Constant shows us a way forward for cities in a larger context.

***

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Donald Shoup's Parking Enforcement Army

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:03:40 GMT

I love this superhero introduction story to a parking enforcement officer. Grant Nakamura may not be motorists favorite officer, but his valor in the theater of public rights of way as portrayed by Sacramento Bee writer Ariane Lange is now the stuff of legend. A true Shoupista whether he knows it or not.

Photo by Michael Kahn on Unsplash

Of course Officer Nakamura would also be the nemesis of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy who just released an initiative at USDOT entitled “Freedom to Drive” which as you would expect seems to come from someone who hasn’t been paying attention the last 100 years.

Quote:
“This national effort aims to save American families both time and money by focusing on maximizing roadway capacities, fast-tracking projects that alleviate congestion chokepoints, and leveraging American technology and private-sector partnerships.”

Of course no one has ever thought of this before and it’s not like our state highway departments haven’t been trying to build our way out of congestion. Just one more lane bro.

Smells like a MacGuffin for bike lane removal if you ask me.

***

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Episode 574: Second Hand E-Bikes

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:01:24 GMT

This week on The Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Calvin Thigpen of Toole Design and Ysabel Hoogeveen of Upway to discuss a report entitled Refurbished E-bikes: An Affordable Transportation Solution for Cities and Consumers. We chat about costs for used e-bikes and what could help grow the industry.

Listen in to this podcast at Streetsblog USA.

Find our archives at our hosting page.

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Time Poverty and the Invisible Load of Care

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:02:59 GMT

I pointed out on social media a few days ago that we don’t talk enough about the very real issue of time poverty in response to a ridiculous article that stated AI would give people too much “free” time and leisure. The article was ridiculed enough so I won’t share it here, but it’s clear the author has never been a care giver nor understands the absurd underlying notion implying that time does not belong to us in the first place.

Interestingly enough a somewhat related item appeared yesterday about the Invisible Load, the tasks and systemic issues that create burdens for care giving women. Rula Health took a survey of women in 30 cities and found that 81% said they are frequently overwhelmed by the hidden labor of keeping track of family needs and managing responsibilities.

We have discussed the importance of time previously, but what was super interesting about this snapshot was seeing how much of the responsibility burdens were tied to transportation and access. Managing appointments, managing kids’ social lives, grocery and supply runs require movement and access. If not proximate, they likely contribute a larger share to time poverty, especially for the transport insecure.

This work is unpaid and as Melissa and Chris Bruntlett note in their book Women Changing Cities, it doesn’t show up in formal statistics. Our GDP measurements don’t accurately measure this work. From a transportation planning standpoint, trip purpose pie charts only go so deep into what trips are for and who makes them. Invisible indeed.

Photo by Florian Schmid on Unsplash

But it doesn’t have to be. Cities could survey people just like Rula Health and come up with solutions to what is now made invisible. In other parts of the world they have already. In Bogota they’ve set up Care Blocks to provide more proximate services to care givers. In Barcelona, the Superblock set up improves on public health outcomes and according to one study that could mean a reduction in premature deaths by 700 every year.

Perhaps LLMs and AI will do a lot of things, but some things aren’t likely to be offloaded to a machine, especially if we didn’t note its impact in the first place.

***

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Episode 189: Mondays at The Overhead Wire - Proof of What's Possible

The Overhead Wire by Jeff Wood — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:02:06 GMT

This week on Mondays at The Overhead Wire, our mostly bi-weekly news review show, we’re Han Solo, but got some great and interesting news on cities for everyone. We look at a model base for disabled Olympians in Milan, the economic security of American households, and how reverse game theory can create win win situations in cities. All the items we covered are in the notes below.

Listen to this episode at The Overhead Wire.

Main items:

Accessible cities can exist - Teen Vogue

Economic security of Americans - Governing

City doesn’t need a dashboard - Route Fifty

Texas’ clean energy future - Grist

BART parking rentals - Metro Magazine

Disorder in the liberal city - City of Yes

Climate gentrification in Atlanta - Capital B News

Reverse game theory - Noema

Bonus Items

Akron Innerbelt plan - Signal Akron

Rail trails and housing markets - Joint Center for Housing Policy

Safer streets for women and girls - The Guardian

Fixing what annoys commuters in NJ - NJ.com

Overriding local zoning - Boulder Reporting Lab

Climate damage impacts - BBC Science Focus

A regional innovation engine - China Daily

Hands off the wheel bad for safety - KSL

What government really costs - Governing

Electricity price hub - HeatMap

Vehicle size impacts - ITDP

One acre, one vote - Grist

Longest outdoor escalator - Parametric Architecture

Mexican high speed trains to Tucson - KJZZ

Financial costs of pedestrian deaths - Streetsblog USA

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Many thanks to Bob Nanna for our intro/outro music.

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