Lime scooters in Arlington, VA by BeyondDC licensed under Creative Commons.

Looking back on the impact of e-scooters. Interest rates gum up existing housing stock. Researchers in Australia find links between car exhaust and brake pad particulates and Alzheimer’s.

Lessons from eight years of scooter sharing: The sharing economy promised to change how we move around cities, especially with the proliferation of electric scooters. But years later, research shows that the mobility and climate benefits of scooters are directly related to how companies deploy and manage fleets from construction to disposal. On the whole, scooters reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but trip emissions are increased when a customer uses a scooter for a trip they would have otherwise walked. (Syris Valentine | Grist)

Mortgage rates are too good to give up: Homeowners with low-interest rates on their mortgages are unlikely to sell and move to a new house because their rates are so much lower than what is available in today’s markets. This makes it harder for first-time homebuyers to enter the market. Between 1998 and 2020, there was never a time when more than 40% of mortgage holders had a rate more than one percentage point below existing conditions. But in 2023, 70% of mortgages are a full three percentage points lower than the going rates. (This article may be behind a paywall). (New York Times)

Car exhaust and Alzheimer’s: New research from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) found a connection between vehicle exhaust and Alzheimer’s symptoms in mice. Magnetite, a particle found in car exhaust, dust from brake pads, and coal-fired power plant emissions, is small enough to pass through the blood-brain barrier. And researchers at UTS say that magnetite can induce signs and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. If replicated in humans, this may have implications for neighborhoods choked with exhaust, school pick-up and drop-off, and cycling and jogging along major roads. (David Waterworth | Clean Technica)

Zoning reform for transportation funding?: Colorado’s House Bill 1313, Housing in Transit-Oriented Communities, would promote housing density along transit corridors and employment districts. The bill, which passed the House and is now headed to the state’s Senate, would provide municipalities with funding for technical assistance and studies to promote development. The catch is that places that don’t comply will forfeit funding from the state’s Highway Users Tax Fund. (Marianne Goodland | Colorado Politics)

Pitfalls of moving away from big cities: A new paper from Enrico Moretti at UC Berkeley followed workers whose jobs had been lost between 2010 and 2017 and found that those who stayed in large labor markets were able to get another job much faster than those who didn’t. Workers in smaller markets often took a year or longer to find similar work, and over the last year after the big work-from-home boom, the importance of labor market size looms over many decisions to leave them. (This article is behind a paywall). (Aki Ito | Business Insider)

Quote of the Week

“There is something a little odd about effectively taxing new housing to pay for societal needs that should be paid generally by taxpayers — by the entire community.”

California State Senator Scott Weiner in the Los Angeles Times responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sheetz vs. El Dorado County related to impact fees.

This week on the podcast, we’re featuring a one-on-one conversation between Billy Terry, Executive Director of the National Transit Institute at Rutgers University, and India Birdsong Terry, General Manager and CEO of the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority. They discuss leadership, hiring, and culture change at Ohio’s largest transit agency.