A Lyft car in Baltimore, MD by Elvert Barnes licensed under Creative Commons.

Racial and LGBTQ bias continues to be an issue for ride-hailing companies. City workers have fled Milwaukee for the suburbs after a residency rule was lifted. What is the role of the modern urban planner?

Bias continues to infiltrate ride-hailing services: Data showed that black riders have historically had longer wait times for service with hail-railing companies. In response, companies have put in measures to counter this problem, but the problem hasn’t gone away. Researchers called around 3,200 rides in Washington, DC and found that black riders and people who indicated support for the LGBTQ community experienced a disproportionately high number of canceled trips. (Rebecca Bellan |Citylab)

Milwaukee city workers move out in droves: For 75 years, city employees were required to live within city boundaries as a condition of employment. The Wisconsin legislature approved an end to this residency requirement for city employees in 2013. Data from August 2019 shows that 28% of city employees now live outside the city, costing the city nearly 10,000 residents. (Mike Gousha | Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

The plight of the urban planner: Nikil Saval explores the contemporary role of the urban planner, especially as America’s housing crisis worsens. The United States has instituted a strong relationship between development and politics, putting planners in a tough spot between residents, developers, and politicians. Saval argues that while planners were called “evil or obsolete” decades ago, the profession has great purpose today. (Nikil Saval | The New Yorker)

CurbFlow reduces double parking: The District Department of Transportation (DDOT) and digital curb space management company curbFlow released some results of a three-month pilot project. The pilot removed curb parking at nine locations where commercial deliveries often block traffic or excessively take up parking, and allowed drivers to reserve spaces in advance. Because of the project, double parking went down 64%. (Katie Pyzyk | Smart Cities Dive)

A city in Texas adopts a new street grid and code: Bastrop, Texas, adopted new, groundbreaking land-use regulations this week that address flooding and establish a future street grid as a framework for growth. The city has been hit by five floods and three significant wildfires in the past decade, prompting a new plan that better considers climate resilience for the city. (Robert Steuteville | CNU Public Square)

Climate change’s great lithium problem: Amid Bolivia’s recent uprisings and political conflicts lies the contention over the country’s lithium extraction. Over half of the world’s lithium reserves are held in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina, and demand is only growing for such “technology metals” that are also important to clean energy. President Evo Morales combated these extractive dynamics, seizing mines and redistributing land. This sparked backlash from foreign companies, which forced several concessions and as much as $1.9B from Morales’ administration through lawsuits. This is all complicated by Morales’ stepping down and the political complexities in Bolivia. (Kate Aronoff | The New Republic)

Quote of the Week

Harb thought they would see people sending their cars out more than if they were driving themselves, something like a 20 or 30% increase in [Vehicle Miles Traveled] VMT with the chauffeurs. Nothing to sneeze at, of course, but towards the middle of the wide range of the results the surveys had suggested. He was wrong. The subjects increased how many miles their cars covered by a collective 83 percent when they had the chauffeur versus the week prior.”

Aaron Gordon in Jalopnik discussing research that used chauffeurs as stand-ins for future AVs.

This week on the podcast, Dr. Anne Goodchild of the University of Washington discusses The Urban Freight Lab.