• Why San Francisco Voters Must Reject a Housing Moratorium and What’s the Matter With San Francisco?
• Then, How to Make San Francisco Affordable Again
• The long tail of the subway’s history of deferred maintenance
• Cuomo to NYC: Eat My Dust, Plebes
  A new Governor, please
• This Fake Town Built for Self-Driving Cars Is Now Open
• Mass Transit Doesn’t Cause Gentrification

• Blueprints for Taming the Climate Crisis
• Deal takes shape to bolster Citi Bike
• The Top 50 Cities to See in Your Lifetime
• Track a Century of U.S. Development With a Tool That Centralizes Old Maps
• The end of Level of service in California
• Washington DC Had Bus Lanes a Half Century Ago and Can Again

 

• Transit Hub and Work on No. 7 Line Face Delays
  Color me unsurprised
• 2nd Bridge Inquiry Said to Be Linked to Christie
  Chris Christie possibly illegally had the Port Authority pay for a New Jersey bridge – money which was originally slated to build a new cross-Hudson River transit tunnel
• A Pyramid in the Middle of Nowhere Built to Track the End of the World
• History of Color Dictionaries
• Starbucks degree program not as simple as it seems
  Starbucks got ASU to lower it’s fee and use existing Federal grants
• Streaming Eagles
  On technology and our changing view of wildlife
• New York City Residents Can Control Their A/C From Their Smartphones This Summer

• The Near-Death of Grand Central Terminal
• Shaka, When the Walls Fell
• Were Brutalist Buildings on College Campuses Really Designed to Thwart Student Riots?
  Short answer: no.
• Manual Camera Controls in iOS 8
• Regent Street’s Lego Bus Stop
• Olmsted the Hero, Moses the Villain

• The Corrected Geography of the Proclaimers’ ‘500 Miles’
• Vermeer’s paintings might be 350 year-old color photographs
• How the Bay Area’s Waterfront Height Limit Could Be a Disaster for Waterfront Resiliency
  Once again, Bay Area residents are voting to make a situation worse than it it
• NYC DoT Street Design Manual
• BIG awarded $335 million to improve Lower Manhattan storm defences
• How Highway Construction Helped Hitler Rise to Power
• Entire Back to the Future town to be recreated for anniversary screening 

Google showcases their next driverless car prototype:

The two-seater prototype vehicle is Google’s reimagination of what the modern automobile should look and feel like if you took the human out of the transportation equation and designed something solely to chauffeur passengers from point A to B.

The car — which was conceived and designed by Google, unlike the ones it previously modified — lacks many of the trappings of a normal car, and that includes the three essentials: A steering wheel, an accelerator and a brake pedal.

From a tech point of view, I am amazed at the complexity  that they had to overcome and engineering prowess of the team. From a design point of view, I think Google needs to hire some better industrial designers.

Lastly, from an urbanism point of view, I think that this project is almost diametrically opposed to good urbanism. Just listen to Google co-founder Sergey Brin:

“The project is about changing the world for people who are not well-served by transportation today,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said at the inaugural Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. “There’s not great public transportation in many public places in the United States.”

We have had a 50+ year collective social experiment in this country privatizing personal mobility into private mobility subsidized by the public, at the expense of creating an efficient economy-of-scale driven transportation network. The personal car is unbelievably useful, but we have swung so far toward subsidizing personal transportation at the expense of any other transportation mode that we are only just recovering our cities from past errors.

Equitably investing in different modes of public to private transportation increases the net freedom of the individual to choose to take the subway; to choose to buy a car; to choose to walk or bike to work. Increasing choice increases our sphere of freedom.

Hopefully the introduction of driverless cars will reduce the crushing yearly death toll from motor vehicles – 34,080 for 2012 alone – and make the streets safer for other drivers who aren’t wrapped in 2,000 pounds of steel, glass, and plastic.

If anything, I hope firms such as ZipCar or Uber pioneer the use of driverless cars; we don’t need any net increase in vehicles on the road,  more roads, or more parking, but we can use those roads smarter. That would be my hope for driverless cars.

In 2012, on my Facebook feed, I stumbled across a hilarious excerpt from a legal transcript. In a deposition in Ohio, a lawyer became embroiled in an absurd argument about the definition of a photocopier.

D: When you say “photocopying machine,” what do you mean?

PL: Let me be clear. The term “photocopying machine” is so ambiguous that you can’t picture in your mind what a photocopying machine is in an office setting?

Verbatim: What Is a Photocopier