Boat launches and rescue infrastructure
In one of many Current TV pods marking the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Jared Arsement documents a volunteer effort to rescue those stranded in New Orleans using an army of citizen owned and operated flat-bottom boats. Arsement observes something a few moments into the story that caught my attention:
“…it’s an interesting situation to try to launch boats into an area that doesn’t have boat launches to go into because it’s not a body of water, it’s a city.”
Is this something we should be discussing for our coastal cities? Do we need to emplace boat launches in potential flood zones in cities like Corpus Christi, Mobile, or even New York? Or will freeway on- and off-ramps serve our purposes for the next few decades?
Is anybody thinking about other types of rescue infrastructure?
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DC loses power
Another sign of weakening infrastructure, this time in the nation’s capital.
A single switch in a Pepco substation failed yesterday morning, cutting power to the heart of the nation’s capital, including the White House and downtown offices. The outage shut down Metro stations, threw rush-hour traffic into a state of bedlam and highlighted how vulnerable the city can be.
High quality service provision is an economic development tool
“The most important economic development tool in a municipal government’s toolbox is to do what you’re supposed to do: provide public services and do it well.” - Dr. John Matthews, in class tonight.
Forget tax incentives and selling your city’s soul for a Mercedes plant; firms are increasingly attracted by good roads, good police, good schools, good sewerage, and good anything else that makes for a well-run city.
Roads in Japan sing when you drive on them.
A team from the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has built a number of “melody roads”, which use cars as tuning forks to play music as they travel.
The concept works by using grooves, which are cut at very specific intervals in the road surface. Just as travelling over small speed bumps or road markings can emit a rumbling tone throughout a vehicle, the melody road uses the spaces between to create different notes.
Depending on how far apart the grooves are, a car moving over them will produce a series of high or low notes, enabling cunning designers to create a distinct tune.
This isn’t the future (or maybe it is; it’s just not evenly distributed yet): the melody roads have already been installed!
There are three musical strips in central and northern Japan - one of which plays the tune of a Japanese pop song. Notice of an impending musical interlude, which lasts for about 30 seconds, is highlighted by coloured musical notes painted on to the road. According to reports, the system was the brainchild of Shizuo Shinoda, who accidentally scraped some markings into a road with a bulldozer before driving over them and realising that they helped to produce a variety of tones.
In heavy traffic the melody must play mournfully slow; that’s nothing to sing about. Still, I like the idea.
The greening of Toronto’s parking lots
Atlanta could learn something from a pilot project for creating more efficient and appealing parking lots within Toronto. Spacing Toronto writes:
the City of Toronto is piloting new design guidelines for “greening” surface parking lots. The proposals include measures to address many of the major environmental problems, and in the process, they address some of the aesthetic problems as well. Ideas include landscaping with trees and grasses, using permeable surfaces such as bricks, and creating separated pedestrian walkways.
Seattle cyclist shot in the lung by motorist
As Seattle grows and gas prices escalate, the city’s residents look for alternative ways to commute. Unfortunately for those who’ve discovered biking, the drivers are fighting back; one cyclist was recently shot in the lung with a BB gun. Now things are beginning to swing the cyclists’ way:
An expected City Council vote Monday on a bicycle master plan would add millions of dollars in improvements, including 19 miles of cycling trails and a 230-mile system of marked routes for riders.
“I think it will cut down on accidents,” said Councilwoman Jan Drago, the plan sponsor. “When we have more bike lanes and trails, it will help.”
WTF is platform building?
What is platform building? It’s when you put buildings over railroads and highways. On platforms:
Earlier this century, urban planner Robert Moses did what he thought necessary for New York City’s growth, including building highways that displaced homes and ripped apart neighborhoods.
Now, as a space-starved city looks for places to put more housing, a construction concept called “platform building” may be gluing the city back together.
A major part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to make room for some 1 million new city residents in the next two decades, for example, is to develop air space by building on gigantic platforms constructed over the city’s highways and rail yards.
Cabspotting time-lapse visualizations
The Cabspotting project has some great time-lapse maps of routes taken by Bay Area cabs.
Cabspotting is designed as a living framework to use the activity of commercial cabs as a starting point to explore the economic, social, political and cultural issues that are revealed by the cab traces. Where do cabs go the most? Where do they never turn up?
The democracy of traffic
Traffic democratizes; commuting equalizes. Hell, the very word commute comes from the Latin for to change.
It’s rush hour in Atlanta; if you’re on the road in a car, you’ll have to wait. The commute doesn’t care about your income level or what kind of car you drive. Twice daily, Interstates 75 and 85 are the most mixed of mixed-income experiments in the region. The trouble is, we’re all locked inside our cars.
The trouble could be worse. The rich could skip the traffic ritual in favor of a helicopter ride.
They already do it in Sao Paulo:
Like a fleet of airborne limousines, the helicopters are increasingly used by privileged Paulistanos to commute, attend meetings, even run errands and go to church. Helicopter landing pads are now standard features of many of Sao Paulo’s guarded residential compounds and high-rise roofs.
Illustrating what may be a Blade Runner-esque glimpse of the future in metropolises where rich and poor are crammed together, helicopters are the vehicle of choice for more than just their convenience. Many of the roads here are hopelessly clogged with traffic. Carjackings, kidnappings of executives and roadside robberies have become a part of the risks of daily life for anyone perceived to have money.
At 400 and growing, the total fleet of private helicopters in Sao Paulo is the biggest of any city in the developing world. Although the fleets in New York and Tokyo are larger, the helicopters in those cities are owned mostly by corporations, not rich individuals.
The future of commuting looks a lot less democratic. I’ll miss the Jaguars next to me in traffic when they’re gone.
Metro systems by annual passenger rides; Osaka surprises.
Three lists:
- Metro systems by annual passenger rides.
- Metro systems by number of stations.
- Urban rail systems by length.
Based solely on these lists, I’m prepared to declare Osaka’s the most underrated metro system in the world.
Photograph of Nipponbashi Station in Osaka, Japan, by Lynt.
A handy list of Atlanta’s recent plans and studies
The city of Atlanta offers a handy (and fairly comprehensive) list of its recent plans and studies.
Putnam on America’s “big triangles”
Robert Putnam reduces sprawl to simple geometry. Brilliant:
It’s less clear where home is; I mean, basically as Americans we live our lives in big triangles. One point of the triangle is where we sleep, one point is where we shop, and one point is where we work. And our American triangle has gotten much larger.
[via: Sprawled Out]
A guide to old Manhattan street names
Abattoir Place, Shinbone Alley, and The Waal: Oldstreets.com is a guide to old Manhattan street names. Street naming seems to have been a much more private concern than it is now:
Many of the names listed in this Guide were never officially adopted at all. On the other hand, some streets that appeared on official maps for decades never existed on the ground. Both types can nevertheless be important to a researcher. For example, the vanished streets on the Kips Bay and Stuyvesant farms, though never officially adopted, are named in deeds and leases.
Pasta&Vinegar&Stephen Graham
Pasta&Vinegar neatly summarizes Stephen Graham’s “Beyond the ‘dazzling light’: from dreams of transcendence to the ‘remediation’ of urban life.”
Best sentence I read this morning
“It is ironic that, even as the expansion of the Internet led people to declare the ‘end of geography,’ the Internet continued to be understood largely through metaphors of geographic place, for example, superhighways, teleports, server farms, home pages.”
(Zook, Matthew. 2005. The Geographies of the Internet. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 40: 53-78.)
What other metaphors of place do we use to understand the Internet?