Planning Pool

I admit it – I thought it was strange and dangerous at first. But then one of my less-intimidating female friends tried it,  and not only did she survive; she had a fantastic time. I no longer had an excuse – I had to plunge forward and try Couchsurfing. Once I did, my eyes were opened to a completely new way of travelling. I realized that there are over a million people around the world willing to open their homes to me and show me around their city. Not only does it make travelling cheaper and more interesting, but … Continue Reading

To start off Tech Week, we’re going to talk about something that is near and dear to the hearts of many urban planners – Google Maps! Here’s a Top 10 list of great features in Google Maps:

1. Directions – You already know that you can get directions from A to B on Google Maps, but did you know that you can get those directions for transit or for bikes? Just click on “directions” on the top left hand corner – the train looking thing represents transit directions and the bike icon represents cycling directions. They aren’t perfect, but they are pretty good!
2. Street View – Street view is a great way to nab some precedent images or other images that show what the street looks like today. You can capture a screen shot of the street view and then import … Continue Reading
   

Around North America and Europe, a whole lot of energy is being invested in using social media to improve communication between transit agencies and the people who rely on their services. An impressive and ever-growing array of agency-created and privately-produced iPhone and iPod Touch apps disseminate information about transit schedules, service updates and even real-time bus and train locations.

The US-based website CityGoRound helps people to find local transit, biking, walking and driving applications. Advancing its overall goal of making sustainable transportation more convenient, CityGoRound also actively encourages transit agencies to make their data public.

Just as users can access information about transit services, transit providers also can take advantage of social media to gather data from their users. For instance, as discussed in this PlanningPool post, … Continue Reading

Last month, we updated you about Vancouver’s Open City Initiative and the Beta Open Data Catalogue that had just come online. In a similar fashion, New York City is opening up its public databases, ranging from traffic data to restaurant health inspections and property sales. The project, called NYC BigApps, is a competition that is giving away $20,000 in cash prizes to people who can figure out how to use the data in really interesting and accessible ways. This project sounds great, because not only is the data being made publicly accessible, but the competition is an incentive for people to use the data, making the city more transparent and accountable.

A few days ago, Discovery.com Tech released an interesting video about “smart grids.” Smart grids are electricity networks that can better match electrical demand with electricity supply.

The price of electricity changes in each hour, day, month, and year, because there may be a shortage of electricity supplied (high price) or not enough demand for electricity (low price). For example, electricity is usually expensive in the evening when people are cooking, doing laundry, watching TV, and turning lights on. Electricity is also expensive during work hours, as offices and manufacturing facilities require energy. Electricity can be expensive in the summer, because people turn on air conditioning. The same is true for heating in the winter. As you can … Continue Reading

A large part of what we’re attempting to do here at the Planning Pool is to implement user-friendly technologies to give people a greater voice in their community.  We’ll be adding/improving a couple of features over the coming months to achieve this goal.  With this in mind, kudos to Eric Gordon and Gene Koo, who have together been awarded a MacArthur grant for their Hub2 project to explore the urban planning applications of the video game Second Life.

Though some old-timers will scoff at the thought that Second Life might one day be a widely utilized planning tool, it (or something similar) will become only more viable in the future.  There are surely large chunks of essential information (like accurate budgeting) that cannot yet be fully captured in video games, but people like … Continue Reading

In recent months, many governments have decided to spend their way out of the current recession. The United States has seen a scramble to fund “shovel ready” projects that will create the most short term jobs, regardless of the usual criteria of worthiness. It’s the same old story – politicians taking the easiest, most expedient option. But word comes from Spain of the benefits of looking ahead. The Wall Street Journal printed an article last Monday about the success of the Spanish high speed passenger rail network, named AVE (meaning both Spanish high speed and bird). It’s the kind of epic, transformative project that requires not only billions of dollars but also the will … Continue Reading

EveryBlock is “a news feed for your block,” a mashup of municipal public information and maps. It keeps track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city. At the moment, EveryBlock is covering 11 American cities: Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami-Dade, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, DC.

So why is this useful? Every day, loads of new information is created about the place where you live: people inspect restaurants, newspapers cover accidents, and people post photographs. Not only is this information spread out on many sites, but no one would have enough time to sort through it themselves.

EveryBlock has three main types of news:

1. Civic information — building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections and more. In many cases, this information is already on the Web but is buried in hard-to-find government … Continue Reading
   

SeeClickFix.com is a new social networking service located in New Haven, Connecticut, that is using the wisdom of crowds to highlight municipal infrastructure problems.

The website is hoping to engage the community by providing tools that increase transparency and communication between residents, governments and organizations. Overall, SeeClickFix.com’s goal is to make it easier for residents to improve their community, using Google Maps.

The best thing about SeeClickFix.com is that it is so easy to use:
See – see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
Click – open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
Fix – publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution
The website was started by a group of nerdy software and design entrepreneurs in New Haven who saw the British FixMyStreet.com … Continue Reading

Back in the prehistoric days of my undergrad, I recall a particular Canadian Literature class when my professor got off on a tangent about the siting of universities in British Columbia. “What’s wrong with us?” he ranted.  “Eastern Canadian universities are located in the heart of the city, close to civilization. We sequestered UBC at the end of a peninsula, SFU on top of a mountain, and UNBC in the forest out of town!”

Whatever the reason for our current predicament, the relative isolation of these universities has important transportation implications for students and everyone else who uses a campus. Current trends to develop market housing for non-students on university lands have been controversial, especially when nearby affordable housing for students is in short supply. On the bright side, though, these developments may indirectly benefit students in another … Continue Reading