Urban Reads: How to Stop Big Tech’s Takeover of Our Streets

Waymo self-driving car. Photo by Daniel Ramirez from Honolulu, USA, (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Every day at The Overhead Wire we sort through over 1,500 news items about cities and share the best ones with our email list. Each week, we take some of the most popular stories and share them with Urban Milwaukee readers. They are national (or international) links, sometimes entertaining and sometimes absurd, but hopefully useful. Omaha growing parking to pay for streetcar: To make room for development along the new streetcar route and pay the rail line s bonds, Omaha has been building paid parking garages. The city has spent almost as much money on the garages as the streetcar and will depend on people moving away from a deeply ingrained free parking mindset. Critics wonder if the city is creating competing interests by supporting driving as the streetcar seeks riders. (Jeremy Turley | Flatwater Free Press) Congestion and carbon pricing: The success of NYC s congestion pricing pro