I realized immediately that I wanted to put my thoughts into words when I walked up to the gate at DIA and saw the word “Philadelphia”. Just the word gives me comfort; I like the way it’s spelled, the way it sounds, and all the memories it conjures. This is when I realized that place is more than a location. Place is all the experiences, smells, tastes, sights, and sounds. Place is love lost and love found, lessons learned, laughter and tears. Place is a movie and blanket on a cold day in your downtown apartment; place is a kiss on Walnut Street; place is children’s laughter on an early fall day in Rittenhouse Square.

I will carry with me forever the taste of a real Philly Cheesesteak, memories of disinterested customer service, the way people say “Fuladelfia,” the rabid sports fans (more rabid than most places on this planet, save soccer fans in Europe), and the hot, humid days of summer that make you want to shower three times a day.

Philadelphia, whether on the periphery or in the center, was part of my life for 24 years. Arguably, it still is part of my life. As I’ve realized, you can take the boy out of Philly, but you can’t take the Philly out of the boy. My new home, Denver, is not any less important, just newer. After a week of travel for work, coming back to Denver is comfort. The skyline and mountains are imagery that will be imprinted with me whenever I decide to take the next journey. And the friends I’ve found there have built new memories that will make this place yet another so hard to leave but exciting to return.

Planners often boil place down to the basics, forgetting the intangibles that make a place. It is a tough balance though. Tearing down grandma’s house may open up the building of new memories for 100 new people, but tearing down a memory is an awful struggle we see play out over and over at planning meetings and in courts all the time. Planners look at streets, setbacks, uses, and transit. These are all possibly dry topics, but a good planner connects these to the very real interactions we have in a place. Planning is about building the infrastructure of memories and experience. It is an exciting prospect, but one that planners miss in the process of planning.

Every time the story is the same: city announces very expensive plans to build light rail system; libertarian groups and anti-tax groups get together and complain that the light rail is too expensive and doomed to fail because we live in an auto-oriented society (sometimes Wendell Cox or Randall O’Toole shows up); light rail opens and surpasses initial estimates (many times by leaps and bounds).  AND it ends up spurring investment in the city.  According to the Times:

In the first quarter of 2009, downtown Phoenix saw its revenues increase 13 percent, while the rest of the city saw a fall of 16 percent, according to Eric Johnson, a redevelopment program manager for the city’s Community and Economic Development Department. (Businesses along the line suffered greatly during the many years of construction, it should be noted.)

Now the point here is not to argue that transit is good and cars are bad.  There is such a thing as a bad transit line.  These often involve poor planning, may be highly politicized and actually don’t do anything for the common good.  We need to make the debate less about yes or no to transit and more about how to do transit right.  We need to carefully and democratically weigh pros and cons and come up with the option that best supports the common good of the community.  I am excited that we are gaining more and more American case studies with rich data to build a case for well-planned transit.  For too long, we’ve depended on studies from overseas.  Now we have places like Houston and Phoenix – some of the most auto-dependent cities in the country – where many people believed transit would never work.

Now for high-speed rail gaining momentum.  Recently,the Transport Politic dug up a proposal from the French national railroad operator, SNCF, in response to a call for expressions of interest to  finance, design, build, operate and maintain high-speed rail in one of the federally-designated HSR corridors.  According to the post, the SNCF proposal is incredibly detailed with the most exciting part being for “the 1,400-mile system it envisions for the Midwest, a network that has never been so fully studied.”  Details on the proposal are well covered by Transport Politic, including links to the original documents.

Also very recently, America2050 came out with a report that details where HSR could work best.  They use population, the size the local economy, distance between cities (with 250 miles being optimum), the quality of the local transit networks at each end, how bad the highway congestion is both cities, and whether the cities are in a mega-region as variables in the study.  While the methodology may not be perfect, it is a great quantitative analysis on how to phase our investment.  Studies like this are very important to both build a case and make policy decisions that match up to good planning, not politics.  The Infrastructurist has more on this report.

In the past week there have been a number of other articles, op-eds, and reports indicating a building momentum toward the support and funding of smart transit investments.  I hope this is part of a trend and not just an anomaly.

SMS during New Years Eve from realtime city on Vimeo.

This is a visualization of SMS activity during New Years Eve in Amsterdam.  As expected, SMS activity goes way up at midnight.  This type of analysis isn’t about tracking any one person, but seeing the greater whole.  While it doesn’t tell us anything groundbreaking, it gives a glimpse into another world of linkages that sits on top of the physical world – a technosphere that links us virtually within our physical environments.  However, visualizations of Twitter activity in Iran might give you a glimpse into the local political effects of these intangible connections.  There are a number of these visualizations you can find on Vimeo or YouTube (including one of cell phone activity during the inauguration) and I suggest checking them out.

Much of this work is coming out of universities, and a couple of pioneering entrepreneurs with PhDs.  However, the real excitement rests in the hands of the tinkerers, thanks to an ambitious project – Pachube.  Pachube is:

…a service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.

Pachube gives any person with a little technical background the ability publish and consume raw sensor data from all over the world.  While this won’t appeal to all Internet citizens, it could have great impact on the way we track and visualize the measured world.  What Pachube gives novice users and professionals alike is a low cost method for tracking performance, understanding trends and relationships, and holding people accountable.  Additionally, with access to cheap remote monitoring devices from providers like iobridge, the world of grassroots monitoring and tracking could explode.

The power of Pachube is in the data format, not in any particular toolset.  By providing a predictable and easy to maintain data format, Pachube opens up a world of possibilities.  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the possible imacts of these emerging tools.  Comment below.

Here is the trailer based on the two pilot episodes in Philadelphia and Reykjavik, enjoy!

This is My City – Trailer from Tim Kafalas on Vimeo.

SimCity is not the only game franchise giving users the ability to play with the economics, land use, and policy of cities, but it was the pioneer.  Second Life and a host of other massively multiplayer games have created online communities whose economic activity could match that of small cities and allow users to build communities as well as online social status.  Now, a new city simulation game, Cities XL, is slated to come out in September of this year.  Having just entered their private beta, they released this excellent teaser showing gameplay:

Cities XL will not only bring compelling graphics and gaming to your desktop, but will connect your city to thousands of others on massively multi-player “planets.”  I’m most excited to see how people imagine and re-imagine cities; I think it can tell us some things about the values and ideals people have about livable and exciting communities.  Could these games someday become platforms for civic design and engagement?  Folks at MIT think so and so do I.  I’ll explore this idea more in future posts, but I think it’s only a matter of time before we have platforms powerful enough to push compelling real-time visuals out to the public for interactive comment and design.

We’ve come a long way from SimCity.  What are your thoughts on civic design and the future of engagement?

Kelly says that this redefined socialism is decentralized to the extreme:

Instead of gathering on collective farms we gather in collective worlds.  Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops.  Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs [i.e. Programmable Web].  Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done.  Instead of national production, we have peer production.  Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

In other words, we are entering into a digital socialist movement that is leaderless and stateless, bound up in innovative technology and global networks that have enabled collaboration and sharing on a vast scale.  The barriers to innovation are coming down and mobilizing a project doesn’t necessarily require large reserves of cash.  Before you write your congress person to report me as a pinko-commie bent on the destruction of the state, let me be clear that this is a movement without a leader.  It is born from a confluence of historical circumstances and practicality that are anything but anti-American or un-patriotic.  And this ground shift will never replace government.  Instead, this cultural and economic shift will influence and change the way in which we think about the production and consumption of goods and services.  It will augment and evolve our current system so that both individual freedom and collective responsibility are reconciled and honored.

Take the open source movement, for instance.  As Kelly mentions in his article, a recent survey indicates that most people contribute as a means to learning and building experience.  Others enjoy the accolades and relative fame afforded to those at the fore of a big project.  Individuals are still rewarded and honored in this system.  In return, they give the fruits of their labor back to the community to co-create something greater than they could have alone.  Additionally, individuals and companies have monetized open source software through innovative and legal business models.  I’m not saying all work will be done at this level and scale, but I believe it will happen where it is most appropriate, born out of an intrinsic desire to share and collaborate.

Ironically, the capitalist-driven dotcom boom of the 90’s helped hasten the new global digital socialist movement by leaving us with a wealth of network infrastructure.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see this last boom-bust cycle push the movement along further.  Instead of populist outrage and taking to the streets, people are mobilizing for greater transparency and accountability, building better ways for people to collaborate and share, or just trying to build the next Twitter.  Tim O’Reilly wrote about DIY on a civic scale recently in response to a story on CNN about Kauai residents successfully taking on a road repair job in a state park for which the state had no money.  O’Reilly points out that:

The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!

The movement isn’t a revolution, but rather an innovation in culture and economics.  We live in a world defined less by walls and more by bridges.  Not to belabor the point, but don’t read this as a call for a new world order or a global government.  It is instead, an acknowledgement that there are forces at work rewiring our culture to solve the problems of the next century and this time it isn’t coming from a single individual or group of politically powerful people.

For those of you still afraid of the word socialism, I understand it leaves a bad aftertaste.  But, remember that the United States is built on foundations of innovation in our economy and institutions.  Our government was an original mashup, borrowing from the best minds on governance and political economy of the time.  Within this framework, we have seen our country invent and reinvent solutions to new problems both from the ground up and the top down.  So long as the tenents of democracy are preserved, this digital socialist society could help us take on even greater challenges.  No revolution required.

Many people understand implicitly that different transportation options operate as a system.  For example, I may drive my car to the airport, get on a plane to fly to some distant city, and then get off and catch a train to my hotel.  Each transportation choice is made based on a mix of economics, convenience, and efficiency.  Driving a car during off peak hours when roads are less congested may make more sense than waiting an hour for a train, but catching a frequent train during rush hour may save the unnecessary stress of congestion.

While it is very easy to see how each transportation mode can operate as part of an integrated system, we often do not address transportation solutions systemically.  Instead, the debates fall into unnecessary camps that create a false notion of either-or decisions.  This has part to do with the way in which we finance transportation as well as the limited pool of funds available (especially in these times).  However, we need some bold leadership and clear communication that all options need real consideration.  Now is the time to build a global competitive advantage by strengthening our major regions with integrated systems.

Integrated transporation systems not only gives expanded choice to American citizens, but can be an important economic development tool.  Imagine a 36 minute commute from downtown New York to downtown Philadelphia on a truly high speed system.  If the high speed rail was then linked into strong local transportation options, mobility would increase for the region allowing the efficient movement of goods, services, and ideas.  This would link the two city economies, enabling better global competitiveness.

By now, the high speed rail corridor map has spread around the blogoshpere, but you can see a very specific strategic approach to funding priority corridors. 

Richard Florida has much more to say about this specifically as it relates to mega-regions.  He also mentions Patrick Adler’s (of the Martin Prosperity Institute) high speed rail time table, which compares average drive times between major cities and the hypothetical high speed rail time based on average French TGV speeds of about 155 mph.  The table is show below courtesy of Richard Florida’s blog and the Transportation Quarterly.

Before I get too far off track (no pun intended) talking about just high speed rail, I wanted to bring this post back to its initial motivation.  High speed is just one piece of an infrastructure framework we can build in this country to reinvent and reinvigorate regions.  Too often we break it down into its component parts and lose the forest for the trees.  If I were to zoom into the map above, you ideally would see local systems that integrate into these regional links.  The challenge for planners and policy makers is to help people visualize and understand these connections and how each piece – local, regional, and national – fits together.  This was best done recently by NC3D to help pitch high speed rail to Californians, which I’ll leave you with to enjoy.

This blog is cross-posted at http://www.placematters.org/node/197

My friend Alex over at SanFrooklyn posted this and I had to share here as well.  You can thank the Germans for this one.  Enjoy.

I originally come from the Philadelphia area, living in the city for 3 years before moving to Denver.  This is where I got my first exposure to a wonderful carsharing service, Philly CarShare.  Also a non-profit, Philly CarShare built up an identity very quickly to the point that it became cool to be a member.  In a world of for-profit competitors (like ZipCar, which acquired FlexCar in 2005), Philly CarShare was able to establish themselves very quickly.  The service grew from a handful of cars and 9 members in 2002 to over 400 cars and 40,000 members in 2008.

The non-profit carsharing model seems to work really well, especially if a strong local or regional identity can be developed around it.  Philly CarShare captures perfectly why they’re run as a non-profit:

We view decreasing auto use as a social benefit, not as a threat to the bottom line. Our pay-as-you-go pricing encourages choice, rather than commitment to driving. Our Philadelphia headquarters and nonprofit status mean all the benefits stay here; no revenues get siphoned to distant investors. Our commitment to make car sharing accessible means we offer totally free memberships, eligibility to 19-year-olds, and a debit billing system that enables even the lowest-income households to join. PhillyCarShare is committed to serving every neighborhood of Philadelphia. We’re excited to make our city less about cars and more about people.

Philly CarShare works because they consistently and effectively communicate the benefits of carsharing.  I believe eGo can reap the same benefits of being a home-grown non-profit bent on creating a social benefit for members and non-members alike.

I can hear the dissenters though saying, “This is Denver! Not New York or Philadelphia. We love our cars here.”  Of course you do.  But believe it or not, they love them in Philadelphia too.  People carshare for very different reasons.  Some for the environment, some for economics, and others because its trendy (think Whole Foods).  And even for those who don’t, there is a great benefit.  Studies show that carsharing can lead to a decrease in car ownership.  In one study of carsharing impacts, car purchases were delayed or avoided by 12 to 68% of carsharing members (for US based organizations).  A mature program can take anywhere from 6 to 25 cars off the road per carsharing vehicle.  In Philadelphia, 2100 cars were removed from the streets in 2006 by members along with a host of other environmental benefits.  No matter what you think about regional air quality and other “lofty” environmental goals (which I care about), most can buy into easier on-street parking.

Look out for more cars in the future including a handful in the Platte River Valley area of Denver.

Now there are very practical reasons why I am excited about this as a user of and advocate for transit, but this upgrade to Google Maps is pointing toward something much more exciting and potentially transformational.  Behind this innovation was an XML standard released by Google for transit information, making it far easier to share and exchange transit data across agencies, technologies, and organizations.  I am eagerly awaiting for Google to release an API that let’s users create transit mashups.

What is holding this up?  Well transit agencies are very proprietary about their data (my home city’s transit agency SEPTA hasn’t even signed up with Google yet, opting instead for an expensive, proprietary system).  It will be a matter of time before Google comes up with a creative solution to balance private concerns against the public good or before transit agencies realize how much money they will save and make by crowdsourcing transit information systems.

One easy to imagine application would be a text message query system that would simply return the times and bus routes of the next 3 or 4 buses coming to a stop.  This would help people make the often harrowing decision, should I wait for the bus or walk or take a cab?  Then if only we could just get all the buses and trains to arrive on time or, better yet, report their location in real time so that any mobile user could get accurate updates on bus arrivals and departures.  Heck, transit agencies could even use long term data to adjust schedules dynamically.  Then we would have a truly pervasive transit information system that we could all hold in our pocket.

The possibilities are exciting, but it will take another breakthrough that involves transit agencies opening up their data to developers and eager transit lovers like myself.