"An absolute victory for Moses leads to heartless cities, built to accommodate cars but not pedestrians, with high-rise buildings that are disconnected from their streets. An absolute victory for Jacobs means a city frozen in concrete with prices that are too high and buildings that are too low. New building is needed to welcome the diversity that makes urban magic. No city can survive without the personal engagements beloved by Jacobs, but no city can thrive without master builders such as Moses. Mumbai and Shanghai had better take note."
"Riders using Google Maps on a mobile device or browser can see real-time departure and arrival times at public transit stations. Because Maps uses live data, service alerts and actual departure times are available to users by clicking on a transit station or when planning a trip."
"Densebrain’s project works by taking note of which cellphone tower a phone is communicating with. It then looks for disruptions in service followed by significant changes in location. If a phone located near Times Square suddenly loses service and reconnects at Prince Street and Broadway 15 minutes later, then it has almost certainly traveled there using the N or R trains. This type of data, when taken from large numbers of phones and analyzed algorithmically, could give an accurate look at the performance of the entire subway system in real time."
— Projects Use Phone Data to Track Public Services - NYTimes.com
"We recently showed around a group of Dartmouth students involved in the project who are hoping to get a better grasp of their market. They had imagined a ready-made constituency of slum-dwellers eager to buy a cheap house that would necessarily be better than the shacks they’d built themselves. But the students found that the reality here is far more complex than their business plan suggested."
Mexico City is proving that bike share can work even in cities where the car has long been king. And that residents are hungry for a different, more efficient, way to get around. (via Bike Sharing Thrives, Even in Mexico City’s Chaotic Streets - Environment - GOOD)
"Can you remake a city in the image of the web? Can the open, decentralized, real-time spirit of the online world be applied to the places we live to make them more creative and innovative? What are the opportunities and challenges of the so-called “networked city?"
— How can we build a city that thinks like the web? - Eventbrite
"There’s so much good that can be accomplished using open datasets, it would be a tragedy if we let this slip through our fingers with preventable errors. With a bit of care up front, and an acknowledgement of the challenges we face, I really believe we can deliver concrete benefits without destroying people’s privacy."
"Cities are technologies for trade, for learning, for worship, but they’re also a powerful communication technologies."
— http://m.boingboing.net/2011/05/16/serendipity-the-net.html?dlvrit=36761
"Google hopes that robotic cars will one day halve the number of road fatalities, cut energy consumption, fit more densely onto crowded roads and free commuters for more productive activities—like dreaming up even better ways to use a 250-year-old theorem."
— Why Bayes Rules: The History of a Formula That Drives Modern Life: Scientific American
