The First White President: Ta-Nehisi Coates lays bare white supremacy and the racism coursing through this country’s veins in this excellent long read in The Atlantic that is also an except of his forthcoming book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (available October 3).
End Of DACA Protests: Citylab covered mass school walkouts led by Latino students angered the first white president ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Fiery Real Estate Grab: Hamilton Nolan proposes that Amazon build “HQ2” in hell. “This is what the extortion of public resources looks like,” Nolan said. “A desirable system would be to outlaw these types of tax incentives, which would result in companies… still locating in cities and states, but without robbing the public in order to do so.”
Can’t Get Enough Of Biking: Utretct, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, has partly attributed its economic boom to strong bicycling infrastructure. The New York Times reported, “More important for the nation’s bottom line, the country’s preference for the bicycle could save its economy $23 billion each year, according to a recent study done at Utrecht University and published in the American Journal of Public Health.” Imagine how many billions could be saved in the US, a much larger nation and economy!
Too Many Bikes: China may have finally reached a saturation point of bikes in bike share programs and several cities are forbidding new shipments. Beijing with its staggering 2.4 million shared bicycle is the latest.
Ped Blaming: Angie Schmitt at Streetsblog tracks a law Honolulu enacted and which was quickly copied by a number of cities. The law forbids people walking from looking at an electronic device while crossing an intersection. Motorists are still allowed to look at dash-mounted devices, of course. Amurica!
The featured image is courtesy of Open Clip Art.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrianizing streets, blanketing the city in bus lanes, and unleashing a mass timber building spree to end the affordable housing shortage and avert our coming climate catastrophe. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in East Fremont and loves to explore the city on his bike.