Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy

If I were you, I’d take some time to read Adam Greenfield’s Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy:

Occupy Sandy’s effectiveness constitutes both powerfully impressive testimony as to what ordinary people can achieve when organized in a horizontal, leaderless, distributed and consciously egalitarian network, and a rebuke to the seeming inability of the centralized, hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations to which our society has hitherto entrusted mission-critical disaster recovery functions to cope with what this responsibility demands of them.

Between last week and this, with the cheerful help of everyone I spoke to (and particular thanks to Easton, Lev and Caitlin), I’ve begun to map the process flow at 520 Clinton: to identify the site’s major discrete functions, chart the flow of people, material, information and other resources between them, and identify any blockages or breakdowns in these flows. The rest of this post consists of preliminary notes toward just such a map.

via Preliminary notes to a diagram of Occupy Sandy « Adam Greenfield's Speedbird.

Into the vault: the operation to rescue Manhattan’s drowned internet

Miles of copper is ruined not only in the cable vault at Broad Street, but also at 20 or so manholes around the area. Even worse, paper insulation in the copper wiring sucks water through the cabling from capillary action, destroying cabling even in dry areas. Levendos says it’s “far too tedious, time consuming, and not effective of a process to try and put this infrastructure back together,” so Verizon’s taking the opportunity to rewire with fiber optics instead. Service has been restored to FiOS customers for over a week — unlike copper, fiber optics aren’t damaged by the water. As part of this process, crews have already pulled fiber up the major corridors — including Water, Broad, and Pearl Streets — to ultimately connect the fiber network to buildings.

Into the vault: the operation to rescue Manhattan's drowned internet | The Verge.

Dumb Ways to Die – by the Melbourne Metro Trains

Melbourne Metro Trains has released a new ad campaign about train safety with perhaps the cutest video about death I’ve ever seen:

A three-minute animated music video, written by McCann ECD John Mescall, is the centre piece of the campaign. The video highlights the many dumb ways there are to die, with being hit by a train – a very preventable death – among them.

Mescall said: “We’ve got people eating superglue, sticking forks in toasters and selling both their kidneys. But truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and we still couldn’t come up with dumber ways to die than driving around boomgates and all the other things people do to put themselves in harm’s way around trains. The aim of this campaign is to engage an audience that really doesn’t want to hear any kind of safety message – and we think dumb ways to die will.”

La Torre de David – Vertical Slum

Tower of David

The 45-story Torre David office tower in Caracas, Venezuela, was nearly complete in the early 1990s when a pair of events changed the building’s trajectory forever: First, the project’s developer, David Brillembourg, died in 1993. Then, the next year, Venezuela’s economy cratered. Torre David, about 90% finished at the time, was abandoned–as both a project and a property. Electrical infrastructure had not yet been installed. The lower stories were still missing finished flooring, sewage pipes, and paint. Large slabs of marble meant for a luxury hotel on the first six floors had been carted into the building but never installed.

– Will Cities Of The Future Be Filled With Vertical Slums?

Caracas | La Torre de David

Accessible Transit – NYC Subway Hurricane Sandy Service

With the extensive damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy on the Northeast it is unsurprising that the New York Subway has been especially hard hit. Many of the underground river crossings were fully flooded, but luckily most of the rolling stock has been spared and all of the large capital projects (East Side Access, 7th Line extension, and the Second Avenue Subway) have received little to no damage.

What hasn’t been spared are people’s commute – which has been brutal due to the lack of power below 34th Street. This means that even if all cross river tunnels were dry and open for operation there would be no service due to power loss. Below is the Accessible Transit map for the New York City Subway during partial shutdown. This is the sixth installment of my Accessible Transit Map series – an unofficial map, not sanctioned by the MTA or NYCTA. As in previous maps, I have removed all stations which are not handicapped accessible.

Maps represent corporeal objects, through convenient fictions; a representation which works for a majority of its users. But where are the maps for the disabled or those require additional accessibility? Wouldn’t the mother with newborn in stroller need a different map then those without the need to lug all the accoutrement’s of childhood? Equally, those in a wheelchair require a map different then one which the walking can use. I decided to rectify the situation by editing the maps of major metropolitan transportation systems, in order to create a map for those who are not represented on the official map.

Midtown Detail

Overall Map

You may download the Accessible Transit NYC Subway Hurricane Sandy Service map here:

Other Accessible Transit Maps for your perusal:

Let the Federal Reserve buy up MTA Infrastructure Bonds

86th Street

The most obvious source of funding for these projects would be for the Federal Reserve to purchase public infrastructure bonds instead of the $40 billion a month of mortgage-backed securities it has been buying. The housing market is important, and keeping mortgage rates low is useful, but investing in public infrastructure is much more important for the nation now. This approach would require a small legislative change to Section 14(b) of the Federal Reserve Act, which currently only allows the Fed to purchase of municipal bonds that mature in six months or less. These infrastructure bonds must be issued with maturities extending from 30 to 50 years, because the assets they fund will last at least that long. In two months, the Fed could buy $80 billion in infrastructure bonds. That would build some very important public infrastructure.

– Can the Port Authority and MTA afford repairs after Sandy?

NYC Bike Lanes are a Financial Boon

9th Avenue Cycle Track Parking

The NYC Department of Transportation just released a new report on how NYC’s new transportation practices – including separated bicycle tracks and dedicated bus lanes – are paying off not only with faster commutes, safer streets, but financially: Measuring the Street: New Metrics for 21st Century Streets (PDF). Locally-based businesses on 9th Ave from 23rd to 31st Streets increased their retail sales up to 49%, compared to 3% borough-wide. This is in addition to a 58% decrease in injuries to all street users. And on First and Second Avenues in Manhattan there are 47% fewer commercial vacancies (compared to 2% more borough-wide).

“These projects aren’t just about the quality of life and aesthetics,” Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan said. “They really set the table for economic development.”

This is exactly what the complete streets view of the city should be: a holistic view in how we can make our shared streets work for all, not just cars.