Cities.
Urban design, transit, civic tech, Open311, the city as internet
- Beautiful Permanence & Messy Change
I am traveling home today from Switzerland, having been there for a week for a few board meetings (and also some amazing skiing in between, notching a life goal I’ve had since I was a teenager). Every time I travel to Europe I end up fixated on the fact that the physical infrastructure there is… Con...
- Water
I am in the Netherlands this week, catching up the Leap engineering team which is based here in Utrecht, and attending an IoT conference that Helium will be at in Amsterdam. I have always loved it here, primarily because of the close relationship to the water. The Dutch have for centuries harnessed ...
- Broadening Access
I spent the morning today at MTA headquarters, judging the “Accessibility” category of the NYC Transit Tech Lab competition, organized by the Partnership for NYC. Here is the view from the 20th floor of MTA HQ at Bowling Green: Ostensibly, the theme of the day was accessibility in the sense of thing...
- The Octopus Card
I am in Hong Kong this week for Blockstack‘s Decentralizing the World Tour (more on that in a forthcoming post). I arrived yesterday and have been exploring the city a bit. The first observation is how awful the air quality is. Holy cow. This report from Plume Labs (snapshot from the time when I...
- Getting out the vote
Yesterday, a fabulous new tool launched — HelloVote: HelloVote makes it easy easy easy to register to vote. Sign up w your phone number and do the whole thing over text. This is great for a lots of reasons — from its immediate practicality, to its more general lesson that it’s possible to build new...
- As Massachusetts ponders ride-sharing regs, where’s the data?
Today, hearings begin at the Massachusetts state house over how to regulate the budding ride-sharing / on-demand transportation industry (Uber, Lyft, et al). Adam Vaccaro over at Boston.com has a good summary of the various competing bills — a pro-Uber bill that welcomes new Transportation Network C...
- Here’s the solution to the Uber and Airbnb problems — and no one will like it
It’s been a fascinating week to watch the war between Uber and the De Blasio administration play out. Not surprisingly, Uber ended up carrying the day using a combination of its dedicated user base and its sophisticated political machine. This is yet another very early round in what will be a long a...
- The more things change…
Here’s a slide from 2009, when we were convincing transit agencies to open up their data, and then later building MTA BusTIme: And here’s one from yesterday, from a talk I gave at the Shift Conference (blog post to follow w more on that): Continue reading
- Where do web standards come from?
I’ve spent the better part of the last six years thinking about where web standards come from. Before joining USV, I was at the (now retired) urban tech incubator OpenPlans, where, among other things, we worked to further “open” technology solutions, including open data formats and web protocols. T...
- Technological revolutions and the search for trust
For the past several years, I have been an advisor to the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. This is a group tasked with helping cities consider how to govern in new ways using the volumes of new data that are now available. An adjacent group at HKS i...
- Open311 Data Prediction Challenge
As the federal government shuts down, there is no shortage of predictions about how it will shake out, when it will end, and who will take the blame. Speaking of predictions (how’s that for a segue?), David Eaves (who writes a great blog for those who like the intersection of cities, governments and...
- Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
Here’s a plug for Anthony Townsend‘s new book, Smart Cities (which I haven’t read yet but have discussed with him throughout the making). I can’t wait to get my hands on it, and suspect that it’ll be an enlightening read for anyone watching the “smart cities” / “civic hacking” space. The angle I’m ...
- Being an Urban Planner Just Got Awesome
I’m here today at the Adaptive Metropolis conference at UC Berkeley, organized by ReBar. Which, as I suspected it would be, is awesome. The premise of the conference is how cities, and the way we plan, manage and engage with them, is changing — an in particular, how bottom-up, diy, adaptive, respo...
- The Adaptive Metropolis
I’m writing this from a plane en route to Berkeley for what should be an awesome conference: Adaptive Metropolis: User Generated Urbanism. Among the organizers is my favorite DIY city-making collective: ReBar. Back in 2005, ReBar did something amazing. They pulled up to a San Francisco parking spa...
- Beyond Civic Apps: Making All Apps More Civic
(cross-posted on the MIT Center for Civic Media blog, the PBS IdeaLab blog, and the Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions blog) A few years ago when I was working on the Civic Commons project with Code for America and OpenPlans, I did a presentation at Living Cities called “Cities that Work Like the Web...
- Uber and Safer Cities
For some reason I have always liked talking to taxi drivers about their business. Maybe it’s because my dad was a NYC taxi driver back in the 70s, or maybe it’s because driving a taxi is such a classic immigrant path to building a life here. And it’s certainly because of the amount of tech… Contin...
- Open Data
Open data is a huge driver of innovation. Traveling around NYC is better because the MTA opens up route, schedule and real-time data for people to build apps with. Responding to natural disasters is easier when data is open and interoperable. As we continue to collect more data about ourselves an...
- Leading with Policy: Uber’s Ridesharing Strategy
Over the weekend, Christina pointed me to Uber’s new policy white paper on ridesharing. In a nutshell, Uber has decided to compete (with Lyft, Sidecar and others) in the ridesharing space, and will use a framework for deciding how and where to do that, based on the perceived regulatory friendliness...
- Why Casual & Natural Is So Awesome
Last week I was playing ping pong with Zander and the topic of conversation (naturally) turned to canal skating in Ottawa. You see, in Ottawa during the wintertime, the city’s canals freeze over and they turn into temporary frozen streets. As you can see above, Ottawans turn to using them for thei...