Image by Ole Tange licensed under Creative Commons.

San Bernardino County has booming logistics industry and nation’s worst ozone pollution. Someone has been pulling the emergency brakes on New York trains, delaying or cancelling over 747 of them. See the invisible city under Paris.

The town choking on online shopping: San Bernardino County is home to one of the nation’s hubs of warehousing and goods distribution. It is also ranked the worse in the nation for ozone pollution. Annually, tens of billions of dollars of imported goods pass through San Bernardino and neighboring Riverside counties, increasing transportation emissions and pollution which are then trapped by coastal winds. Grassroots activists say the gains aren’t worth the health risk. (Justine Calma | Grist)

New York’s brake-pulling subway villain: Someone in New York has been pulling emergency brakes on New York City subway trains, only to be seen escaping onto the tracks and dashing down tunnels. Since March, 747 trains have been delayed or cancelled due to service disruptions from people pulling the brakes when there wasn’t an emergency. (Aaron Gordon | Jalopnik)

The invisible city beneath Paris: Robert Macfarlane describes his journey into an invisible city in southern Paris containing more than 200 miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers. The network comes from Paris’ history of underground stone quarrying, dating as far back as the 13th Century. In the 18th Century the unregulated tunneling caused sinkholes, and the city began mapping its underground counterpart. Exploring these tunnels and most of the catacombs is illegal, but a community has formed for their restoration, preservation, and mapping. (Robert Macfarlane | The New Yorker)

Portland launches a controversial software modeling project: Portland has started using a mobility modeling software called Replica from Alphabet-owned Sidewalk Labs. The massive dataset allows transportation and urban planners to query commuting and congestion data created to replicate real people. Residents are skeptical about how the data will be used. (Kate Kaye | GeekWire)

Building a town from scratch: Knight Kiplinger aims to build a city of 10,000 people on 1,000 acres of Florida farmland. The development, Pineland Prairie, will be built in some of the state’s most anti-development counties. Kiplinger persuaded local leaders to change the county’s official planning policy through years of donations and support. The development will go forward, and it may change residents’ way of life. (Thomas Heath | Washington Post)

Quote of the Week

“When we began this project four years ago, many of us wouldn’t have thought we’d be standing here today flying UAVs with advanced drone systems off high-rise buildings.”

Chris Walach in an AP article about how NASA is testing urban drone flight control in Reno Nevada.

This week on the podcast, Stephen Smyth of Coord discusses curb space and the future of cities.