Author of Traffic Tom Vanderbilt is overseeing a project for Slate in order to make cities more efficient.
Here is your chance. Welcome to “Nimble Cities,” the second in Slate’s Hive series, a project designed to harvest the world’s collective wisdom to solve the world’s most pressing problems. We are asking you, essentially, to become transportation hackers (and we’re talking not simply cars but the whole of urban and interurban movement).
A group in the UK has launched a site called “RateMyStreet,” where you assign a given amount of stars to a street based on ability to cross, pavement width, universal accessibility, etc. I’ve already begun rating some Dallas streets. Go to town.
San Francisco is thinking about “daylighting” various buried streams throughout the City:
Over the last decade, however, several trends have forced water system managers to re-evaluate San Francisco’s creeks: Increasingly stringent federal rules governing storm-water pollution, the move to “green” urban jungles and a multibillion-dollar effort to upgrade San Francisco’s wastewater system.
And lastly, the idea of externalized costs of gasoline is snaking its way into the mainstream media as Ezra Klein describes in the Washington Post this weekend:
That’s not to say there’d be no benefit to forcing gasoline to pay its full freight. Increasing the cost of oil could make other energy sources cheaper in comparison, and if the mechanism were a tax that would fund development of alternatives, that would hasten our transition. But it is the speed with which we can discover and refine those alternatives, more than the price of oil, that will decide our energy future.
