Planning Pool

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

I’m enjoying delicious coffee and beer in Portland for the week, so I’ve got some Oregon things to share.

• What is the role of zoning in issues of free speech?  This Portland Mercury article details a push in Oregon to create new zoning regulations for stores selling “adult materials”.  State law currently makes no distinction between sexually oriented businesses and those exercising free speech to express less libidinous views (like religious bookstores).
• Portland is often lauded for the success of its urban growth boundary, but elsewhere in the state, local governments are less than thrilled.  This is largely because regional land use is strictly limited by the Oregon legislature in all regions aside from Portland’s Metro, which has special status.  Though recognizing the success of the state’s regulations in preventing sprawl, the bi-partisan Big Look … Continue Reading
  

So, it turns out that hydrogen is a great idea for some things, but not for others.  In fact, knee-jerk hydrogen car skeptics worry that fuel-cell vehicles might be like bombs on wheels (a concern having no scientific basis).  Good to know that New Jersey’s Hindenburg disaster of some 82 years ago still reverberates through public consciousness.  Though hydrogen won’t lead to the unwarranted automotive explosions of so many 80’s action films, it is a legitimately bad way to float zeppelins.  Unfortunately, after the Hindenburg, the baby got tossed with the bathwater (save for the Goodyear Blimp).

Now anyone who’s bought a plane ticket in the past 20 years knows the increasingly prohibitive cost of flying.  For those of us with an eye toward the polar icecaps, there is also increasing awareness of the detriment that jets are to … Continue Reading

I’m addicted to planning porn.

If you’re still reading, allow me to elaborate…

One of the most accessible, exciting and sometimes frightening elements of planning is the effort to imagine future incarnations of society through the lens of new-fangled, far-reaching technologies.  Of these, there is no shortage.  Imagine flying cars, living buildings and cities built on pontoons.  Such ideas artfully stretch the bounds of our imaginations, but most of us have no expectation that any of it will ever come to fruition.  Nothing is new about planning porn.

Take, for example, my parents’ generation, the Baby-Boomers.  On one hand, their most outlandish expectations for the far-off future were probably a blend of George Jetson and Mr. Spock.  On the other, few foresaw the rapid rise of personal computing and widespread mobile communications, despite … Continue Reading