Planning Pool

Bikewise is a website where users can report bike crashes, hazards, and thefts. The site is similar to SeeClickFix, EveryBlock, and PickupPal, some websites that we have written about before. The site, run by the Cascade Bicycle Club in Seattle, WA, aims to make biking safer and more fun. Bikewise wants users to add their own reports about crashes, hazards, and thefts. You can read more about the site on Streetsblog.

The site doesn’t seem to work in my Chrome browser, and there’s no information for Charlotte, NC, where I am now. But, Bikewise seems to be a great idea for “citizen journalism” and for the public to transparently see information about the city around them.

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
   

One of our readers sent us a tip about PickupPal, a globally-available and free carpooling website. PickupPal hopes to reduce carbon emissions, combat road traffic congestion, fight high gas prices and enable people to connect and improve the environment by facilitating ridesharing.

PickupPal is a simple concept and easy to use. First, both passengers and drivers log into the website and say where they are and where they are going. PickupPal then matches up passengers and drivers who are going the same way. Then, PickupPal notifies drivers of potential pickups. The driver can make an offer to a passenger based on how much they want to charge for a ride. The site then informs passengers that they have been offered rices. The passenger reviews the offers and chooses the driver with whom … Continue Reading