An App to Help You Lose Yourself in the City - Neighborhoods. Smart phones have fundamentally changed the way most people navigate around cities (oftentimes, as our Sarah Goodyear wrote earlier this year, with negative consequences for our collective grasp of “street smarts”). Smart phones can get you anywhere, from anywhere, by just about any route or transportation mode imaginable, effectively eliminating the lost art of getting lost in the city. Now that you’re probably tethered to one of these things, it may be too much to ask of you to leave your smart phone in your pocket. But what if you used it to help you lose your way in the city, instead of finding it? This is the premise behind a new app from the Broken City Lab in Windsor, Ontario. The tool, called Drift, wants to help you “unfamiliarize” yourself with your neighborhood, as one of its developers, Justin Langlois, puts it.
He didn’t necessarily set out to make a commentary on smart-phone technology by inverting its traditional use. Here’s one from Eli Grimson of “an example of change”: An Addictive Traffic Game Challenges You To Keep Up The Flow. You’ve just been hired by the Traffic Management Laboratory, and your first assignment is to see that the city doesn’t come to a complete standstill. No pressure. With a view of the grid, you have to keep the cars moving, or watch the place descend into chaos and road rage. Welcome to Gridlock Buster--an online game developed by the Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute at the University of Minnesota. Click on an intersection to change the traffic light, and let the cars go. The more you can get through without people becoming antsy, the more points you accumulate. The aim of the challenge, according to John Hourdos, at ITS, is to educate young people about the role of traffic management, and its impact on economic activity and environmental performance.
"It gives kids the idea that traffic management is not random. The game gradually increases in difficulty as you move up the levels. "The purpose of the game is to help people understand the value of traffic management. A Simple App Helps You Avoid Red Lights, Saving Gas and Emissions. Traffic lights are a necessary nuisance, but they're also incredibly bad for the environment. Idling vehicles in backed up traffic soak up fuel, and are a source of needless emissions. Even if the wait at a light isn't long, the acts of stopping and revving up to speed from a standstill are the parts of the driving cycle that use up the most fuel. People also tend to drive headlong into red lights, slam the brakes, and then wait. What if, instead, they knew exactly the speed to drive that would let them see green at every intersection. An application called "SignalGuru," designed by researchers at Princeton and MIT, uses a network of smartphones mounted on car dashboards to estimate traffic light patterns to do just that.
As the driver approaches a traffic light, the display on the app shows a suggested driving speed and lists the time (in seconds) until the light is due to turn green. The app makers used iPhones and 20 cars to test the system in Cambridge, MA, and in Singapore. The Future Is Coming: Track Parking Spaces On Your Phone. An App That Organizes Your City by Travel Time | Technology on GOOD. Choosing the Paths Less Traveled? There's an App for That - Technology. In his final year at the Design Academy of Eindhoven, Tom Loois received a vague assignment: “Design your personal definition of silence.”
Loois, whose training is in product design, had no idea what to do. He found himself, as the deadline approached, wandering around the city searching for inspiration. Then he noticed a little alley near his route home from school. “I stopped my bike,” he says, “and I thought, ‘I’ve passed by here so many times but I’ve never been here.’ I don’t know where it goes, where it might lead.” Loois’s final project ended up being a smartphone app called BlankWays, which charts your progress through the city, noting which paths you’ve come down before and suggesting itineraries to cover new ground. Loois, who calls himself a translation designer, liked the idea of putting three-dimensional experience onto a map; translating from one medium to another.
Here are his cumulative maps of his years in Eindhoven. And not visited: Street Bump: An App That Automatically Tells The City When You Drive Over Potholes. City governments are increasingly relying on digital technology to gather data from citizens. In San Francisco, residents can contact the city on Twitter to report potholes and graffiti. The CitySourced app lets people around the world report issues in their cities (i.e. illegal trash dumping, graffiti, etc.), as does SeeClickFix.
But every solution out there requires residents to take action--snap a picture, send a Tweet, write a complaint. The Street Bump app--a collaboration between the city of Boston, The New Urban Mechanics and crowdsourcing platform Innocentive--is for the lazy among us. The app, which is set to be released publicly for Bostonians in the coming months, uses a smart phone’s accelerometer and GPS to find and automatically report potholes to the city.
Last year, the city of Boston teamed up with Innocentive in the hopes that the crowdsourcing platform could improve its app. Street Bump is currently being tested by municipal workers.