National links: Who gets to run transit agencies in the US?

Who rules transit? How some municipalities in Belgium are merging to deal with climate change. Celebrating landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s 200th birthday.

Who rules transit?: TransitCenter recently released a new report discussing who runs transit agencies and sits on boards around the United States, and how they are not representative of the population they serve. In a sample of 108 board members in 11 cities, TransitCenter found that only 36% were people of color compared to 58% of the population and 63% of transit riders. Geographically, suburban board members are overrepresented as well. (TransitCenter)

Merging cities for the climate: Small municipalities in southern Belgium are getting funding from the government to merge with other small municipalities in order to streamline administrative costs. Belgium is offering to take on the municipal debt of cities that merge, giving them more resources to deal with climate change and other important issues. (Denis Balgaranov | The Mayor.eu)

Olmsted’s 200th birthday: Tuesday would be famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s 200th birthday. His ideas on design would change the way we think about urban parks and the restorative nature of green space in urban spaces. While most known for codesigning New York’s Central Park, he also designed hundreds of other parks around the country. A new guide features some of these lesser-known spaces. (Nate Berg | Fast Company)

How community input contributed to the housing crisis: The US is facing a shortage of 3.8 million homes and many are wondering as housing prices rise how we got here. Jerusalem Demsas believes part of the blame should be placed on community input. While a laudable goal, community input as it’s practiced now is fundamentally flawed because it’s biased towards the status quo and the whims of a particular subset of the population who don’t want change. (Jerusalem Demsas | The Atlantic)

Transportation equity means lowering costs: Owning and operating a motor vehicle is expensive, so much so that in Tampa, Fla. it can take up 25% of the median wage earners’ income. In many cities like Tampa, transit is not a good first choice to reach a destination. To make transportation more equitable public transit needs to be safe, reliable, and affordable so that residents and visitors choose to use it. (Skip Descant | Government Technology)

Quote of the Week

“The problem with this narrow obsession is that while Moses may be the paradigmatic racist urban planner, he was certainly no outlier. He has also been dead for forty years, yet urban planning continues in myriad ways the same racially harmful practices of his era.”

Roshan Abraham in The Baffler wondering why we ignore people as neighborhood assets, instead focusing on infrastructure.

This week on the podcast, Frank Markowitz and Leni Schwendinger talk about creating legible nighttime spaces, programming those spaces, and the future of lighting and transportation.