Charlotte B-cycle by Tyler LaCross licensed under Creative Commons.

Charlotte, North Carolina envisions a downtown without cars. A Portland paper asked residents for examples of scooter riders behaving badly, but didn't exactly get what it asked for. Proposed federal gas tax legislation would also tax bicycles, electric vehicles, and transit.

Charlotte's car-free future: Charlotte is planning long-term for a downtown without cars, and is working towards different vision for the city. If the NASCAR Speed Street festival — which closes down streets for 90,000 visitors each year — is any indication, a carless downtown is certainly possible. (Next City | Daniel J. McGraw)

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

A tax on bikes and buses: Representative Bill Shuster of Pennsylvania is proposing a program to raise the gas and diesel tax — while also adding taxes on electric vehicle batteries, bicycle wheels, and transit fuel that had previously not existed. Per-mile taxes will be tested in the meantime to see if they are viable. (Planetizen | Irwin Dawid)

How the US uses its land: There are 1.9 billion acres of land in the lower 48 states, and these maps lay out how we use that land for recreation, farming, and living. Unfortunately, they don't include how much land we devote to parking. (Bloomberg | Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby)

Austin's land use code rewrite is on thin ice: The mayor of Austin is calling for work to end on the city's land use code rewrite. The city has been working on it for a number of years and spent $8 million on it so far. Citing “toxic” discourse, he's looking to start over again from scratch. (Austin Chronicle | Sarah Marloff)

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)

This week on the podcast, we've got Patrick Siegman, the first Shoupista.