Who's Driving This Public Transit System? Virtually every modern economy is mixed: governments produce some goods and services and private companies produce others. Governments generally provide those goods and services that are either considered essential and should be available to everybody regardless of ability to pay, or that require strategic coordination, including police protection, basic education, transportation infrastructure, parks, and public health services. Transportation facilities and services are among these basic government functions. Transport is all about connecting things, and it is generally not feasible for private companies to create the infrastructure needed to make these connections.
Most experts conclude that transportation infrastructure does not lend itself to complete privatization because transport systems have network effects (economies of scale and scope) and external impacts, so pure privatization without regulation or subsidy generally leads to an inefficient transport system.
GIS. Small Cities Feed the Knowledge Economy | Magazine Livable cities draw creative people, and creative people spawn jobs. Some places you’d never expect—small cities not dominated by a university—are learning how to lure knowledge workers, entrepreneurs, and other imaginative types at levels that track or even exceed the US average (30 percent of workers). Here are some surprising destinations from the data of the Martin Prosperity Institute, directed by Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class.
Source: Martin Prosperity Institute (martinprosperity.org) at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Locations based on Metropolitan Statistical Areas. Map Illustration: Bryan Christie It’s only the 42nd-largest city in the US, but over the past two decades, Omaha has been transformed into one of the Midwest’s most vibrant cultural hubs. Here’s how the rebirth happened, starting in the ’90s. Phase 1 It all started with better food. Phase 2 This was when the arts really took off downtown. Phase 3 Phase 4.
Civic Enterprise Associates LLC - Strategic Planning and Development. Center for an Urban Future. Project for Public Spaces - Placemaking for Communities. Participatory design. The loudest wins. Urban Forest Map. Candy Chang. Resource Center :: CityFarm. Chicago Tribune: August 26, 2003 City Farm Boasts Quality and Jobs- A Tomato Grows in Chicago, and Beets by Sufiya Abdur-Rahman A pile of rocks, dirt and chunks of wood was all Tiffany Bryant, 13, could see as she walked past a vacant lot on the corner of Clybourn and Cleveland Avenues on the way to her uncle's apartment in Cabrini-Green.
That was until last spring. Then, green sprouts popped up from the soil, clusters of lavender, pink and white flowers bloomed and sunflowers taller than Tiffany grew against a chain-link fence. The two-thirds-acre City Farm, a Resource Center project, with 1,500 tomato plants and nearly year-round growth of carrots, beets and other root crops, has added some green to the otherwise concrete environment of Cabrini-Green.
More plants will take root in the area as the city announced Monday that the urban farm will expand to a nearby one-acre vacant lot. "I think a garden like this for every ward in the city should be the goal," Dunn told Ald.
Waste. Biomimicry. The world's slums are overcrowded, unhealthy - and increasingly seen as resourceful communities that can offer lessons to modern cities. NOT EVERYBODY LIKED "Slumdog Millionaire" as much as the Oscar committee did. Aside from slum dwellers offended by the title, some critics lambasted its portrait of life in Dharavi, the biggest slum in Mumbai, as exploitative.
A Times of London columnist dubbed it "poverty porn" for inviting viewers to gawk at the squalor and violence of its setting. But according to a less widely noticed perspective, the problem is not just voyeurism; it's the limited conception of slums, in that movie and in the public mind. No one denies that slums - also known as shantytowns, squatter cities, and informal settlements - have serious problems.
They are as a rule overcrowded, unhealthy, and emblems of profound inequality. But among architects, planners, and other thinkers, there is a growing realization that they also possess unique strengths, and may even hold lessons in successful urban development. To be sure, there is something unseemly in privileged people rhapsodizing about such places. City and State Smokestack Chasing Blows Mostly Smoke. For Release Sunday, November 14, 2010 Citiwire.net Twenty-five years ago, when I first started writing about economic development, the governors of seven states went on The Phil Donahue Show — the premiere daytime talk show of its time — begging General Motors to build the assembly plant for its brand-new Saturn brand in their state.
It was, to put it bluntly, a pretty pathetic excuse for an economic development campaign. Even though auto assembly plants don’t literally have smokestacks, this was a pretty stark example of politicians trying to find a short-cut to economic success through the standard technique of “romancing the smokestack” — wooing some out-of-town business in hopes that they will come to town. I always counted the Donahue show as the lowest point in the history of American economic development — especially since none of the seven states got the plant. At least the Donahue show seemed like the low point until earlier this year, when Ohio Gov. Will a Common Mobility Card Work in India? India may adopt a contactless fare card, similar to the Octopus card in Hong Kong, to pay for transit trips. Photo by Pawel Loj. India is working on a transit card that will grant users access to the country’s diverse modes of transportation with the wave of a single card. “[They] will function essentially as e-purses,” a senior transit minister said of the cards.
“What this means is that the money will be on the card – these can be swiped and the value would be automatically deducted.” Such cards, over time, would rid passengers of the need to buy tickets for mass transit, including buses, trains, rail, metro, ferry, taxis and even autorickshaws. Mobile phone payments will also be a near-future option for transit users in India. The cities chosen for the new system in India are Delhi, Bangalore, Jaipur, Bhopal, Indore and Mumbai—all large cities with varying forms of transit. San Francisco Passes First Open Data Law. One year ago, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order directing the city’s departments to make their data public.
Yesterday, the city’s board of supervisors turned that order into law. As far as we could establish, this is the first time any city in the U.S. has implemented an open data law. But given that other jurisdictions often follow San Francisco’s lead in this space, it’s likely not the last. The law is brief. Open data, Newsom believes, makes city government more transparent and increases accountability. In the year since Newsom opened the data treasure troves, 200 sets of data have been released, and at least 50 apps have been built using them. San Francisco CIO Chris Vein said the city thinks open data could create opportunities for entrepreneurs. Vein said the cost to the city of implementing the law -- of actually doing the work to make the data open -- is “minimal.”
[Image: Flickr user Julie, Dave, and Family] Livability means being poor and eating only one kind of lettuce | New Urban Network. Robert Steuteville, New Urban Network If you are looking for an overheated response to the Obama Administration's livability agenda, one that regurgitates many of the heavy-handed arguments of the pro-sprawl, pro-highway crowd, look no further than a recent piece on New Geography called "Livability and all that. " Alan Pisarski, who has promoted highways through influential positions on various federal and national commissions, councils, and government agencies since the 1960s, is unhappy that the federal government is shifting some of its resources toward walkable places and transit.
Pisarski's article is a masterpiece of fear-mongering that begins with the kind of snide remark that is reserved for times when a Washington official tells the truth and should, in the view of some insider, be called out. In a chuckling tone, Pisarksi refers to "an unkind moment" when a reporter asked Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood what livability means. This argument makes no sense. He continues: 3-D Printing Is Spurring a Manufacturing Revolution.
Water. Transportation Problems. Ecosystem Services - Pricing Nature.