Songs of the Day: Friendly Fires / Future Islands

All right, folks, it looks like I officially have a case of the "F's", both musically and otherwise.

F is for...

• Fan-freaking-tastic! to see a Husky win this past Saturday against Utah (boo, Mormons!), 31-14. We checked out the game at a sports bar in The Marina District, and it was like I had never left the Greek System. The Marina's general doucheyness aside, there is simply no better way to watch a football game than hammered with your UW friends. We are even thinking of going down to Stanford to represent the Huskies in their game there in 3 weeks.
• Fuck you, landlord! $2250 for a mice-infested shithole??? You gotta be kidding me. I'm counting my lucky stars it's only a six-month lease. 
• Free at last, free at last, by God almighty we are free at last! The Occupy Wall Street protests continue unabated in NYC. I'm glad to see people are finally stepping up en masse to protest the serious economic inequality in this country that makes any talk of a financial "recovery" from the recession little more than a cruel joke to the 99% of people out there. Here are some pictures from the San Francisco version of the Occupy Wall Street protests, which took place on our Montgomery Street, a.k.a. "Wall Street of the West." I stumbled upon the protests randomly on my way back from a bike ride in North Beach. Although I don't think the SF protests had anywhere near the same impact as those in NYC due to their relatively small size, it is great to see the protest ethic is still alive and well in this city. There may only be 800,000 San Franciscans (compared to 8 million New Yorkers), but damnit we aren't going down without a fight!

Now for your songs of the day:

I like Friendly Fires' "Skeleton Boy" because of its unique medley of indie lead singer and disco beat. Usually that combination will leave you sounding like a rip-off of MGMT, but these guys rock it!

Future Islands are the closest that any band I've heard of has come to sounding like The Talking Heads, my number one favorite band of all time. I think only !!! (chk chk chk) would be able to give them a run for their money on this type of sound, but Future Islands has that whacked-out David Byrne-like wail and perfect beats down just right.

CEP Senior Project Night!

Last Thursday I had the opportunity to relive some of my academic glory days in the little hippie conservatory of ideas known as CEP, or Community, Environment, & Planning, the undergraduate urban planning program at UW.

As an academic major, I'm not aware of any program that even scratches the surface of what CEP can offer its students. It's a completely unique interdisciplinary program that allows you to customize your education around a series of core seminars that focus on, you guessed it - community, environment, and planning. But that's not all -:) it's also the only major I've ever heard of that is almost completely student-governed.

Everything from student admissions to graduation ceremonies and colloquia are 100% run by the students themselves. Nothing can really prepare you for your "admissions interview", a graded discussion with current CEP students, but that's just part of the magic of it all. At the end of the day, it's your Individual Study Plan (ISP) that's your ticket to admission. In it you articulate your vision not just for coursework, but for study abroad, volunteer opportunities, community engagement, and the course of life you envision for yourself. You are a citizen first, a student second. It's basically the academic vision of gemeinschaft. As far as I know, the only academic programs that come close are at Evergreen State and UC-Santa Cruz - but right here in the middle of the best school in the Northwest - count me as a proud alumnus!

One of the best descriptions I've heard of the program is that it's like a major in direct, participatory democracy. Every Friday we would have what we CEPsters call "governance," a several hour-long forum on the structure and content of the major, share student news, career connections, and community events, collaborate with subcommittees (and you thought I was kidding), and host guest speakers. Granted, many of us CEPsters are of the granola crowd - or perhaps the Critical Mass crowd - so we weren't exactly talking about Robert's Rules of Order, here...let's just say our dialogues sometimes got out of hand. You can only debate your own graduation requirements for so long without getting truly tedious. There were many cases, however, when the ability to truly take charge of your education in a program like CEP was without equal.

Our professors liked to say that their often hands-off approach to the direction of their seminars (as opposed to a "sage on the stage" approach), was a method of incubating organic student discussions. Often times what this meant was that the professors may only be speaking up to 10% of the class time, the rest is all student input. With a very engaged group who has done the readings, this approach can work marvelously. Otherwise, it's a recipe for disaster.

The crowning jewel of the CEP education is the Senior Project. Together with the several project-based classes and required internship, this is where the pedal meets the metal. In my experience, a program like CEP is either a very good fit for you or a very bad one, with very little in between. You either need a lot of direction in charting your uncertain academic course, or you simply need the time, space, and resources to make your plans a reality.

Senior Project Night is the final showcase for the graduating seniors' projects that many have spent thousands of hours working on. My own Senior Project is, in fact, the origin of this very blog. It's the catalytic experience that awakened so many of my interests in green fleets, electric cars, bikes, transportation planning, and so much more. So much time is spent on these projects, in such a tight-knit environment (there are 80 students in the program) that your project teams often become like family. I'm a firm believer that if you want to envision the trajectory of a CEPster, you need look no further than their Senior Project. So one year out from my own departure from the CEP universe, I was thrilled to be able to see this year's round of projects.

Here's a few of my favorites of this year's projects!

Roosevelt: A Living District

Cristina Haworth and Jenn Robinson-Jahns

With current forms of urbanism placing undue burden on environmental systems worldwide and eroding traditional community bonds, there is an urgent need for new methods and theories of citybuilding, methods that not only promote the development of functioning, healthy, and liveable cities, but also help create cities that exist in harmony with the surrounding environment and serve as ecologically restorative forces.  This project explores the concepts of the International Living Building Institute’s Living Buildingsand Living Cities design contests, using a literature review and case study framework to apply the ideas to a site slated for redevelopment within the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington and envisioning it as a Living City in 2035.  A contextualizing paper identifies a few of the components critical to the establishment of a Living City, including the concept of a Living Building and existing examples; the expansion of the concept to the neighborhood and city scales; and initial applications of the Living Cities concept. This work also introduces a few of the key components to Living Buildings and Living Cities: technology that can provide a decentralized and sophisticated power grid, eco-districts that create economies of scale, and systems for the on-site treatment and recycling of waste. We then use site analysis to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the Roosevelt neighborhood, including renovation and re-use opportunities, potential opportunities to use natural systems processes such as solar or water circulation patterns, and connections to the surrounding community.  Within this context, we visually apply the concepts introduced to the Roosevelt site in order to envision it as a thriving Living City and provide a hypothetical representation of what is possible for the future of the area within this framework.  It is our hope that this work will serve as a catalyst for conversation within the Roosevelt Neighborhood Association and challenge its members to think about urban systems and what may be possible within the urban framework in a new way.

Best Practices of the BIM Modeler

Justin Jameson

A BIM is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility. As such it serves as a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its lifecycle from inception onward. (National Institute of Building Sciences 2011)

One of the challenges in a design group is creating unambiguous construction documents. In order to avoid such ambiguity, designers may establish a methodology for local best practices. Unfortunately in some cases best practices are established by routine and are often not documented. With the advances in technology the best practices procedures of the past are quickly becoming obsolete, while the procedures of the best practices of the future are becoming much more complex. Therefore the need for documentation of the best practice procedures becomes imperative. In this project I confront these problems in the case of a local design group. Specifically, the challenge was to document the local standard Building Information Modeling (BIM) practice and submit a Quality Management System (QMS) report. Utilizing the information gathered from the QMS report, I created a manual of standard practice which is now available as reference for all employees. I completed this project using multiple methods in multiple phases. Phase 1: building the information foundation; I conducted online research exploring what Building Information Modeling (BIM) is. I also reviewed other districts’ best practice manuals for traditional drafting. Phase 2: analyze and compile; throughout the review process I analyzed the information which I considered to be current best practices. Analysis consisted of referencing how the suggested practice complied with the National CAD Standard and the A/E/C CAD standard. Phase 3: the committee; to ensure that the QMS report was accurate and useful to the design group I organized a multidisciplinary committee of practicing professionals. The committee reviewed my initial information, then provided input about the BIM process. Phase X: refining the process; the final phase of the project is intended to repeat. In this phase the committee will periodically review the document; as procedures become more defined the document will be updated and become more defined as well. The outcome of the project is a documented best practice manual for BIM users.

Bridging the Gap: Increasing social sustainability through a community-university farm partnership

          Michelle Venetucci Harvey

The UW Student Farm membership base has grown exponentially over the past three years, and involved students have quickly exceeded the capacity of the current farm space. Furthermore, the UW Farm’s presence on the University of Washington campus has become firmly entrenched in the University identity over the past two years, and student farmers want to extend their connection to the larger community of Seattle and address issues of food justice. In order to accomplish our goals of expansion and social sustainability, I participated in a farm expansion process for the past two years. After identifying an expansion space at the Center for Urban Horticulture, we decided to partner with the existing Seattle Youth Garden Works (SYGW) farm in order to create a community connection and share resources. I became the liaison to SYGW and helped build a partnership through meetings, communication, and collaborative writing sessions for organizational documents. After doing background research on nonprofit partnership models and youth empowerment theory, I wrote an organizational document for future UW Farmers and participated in SYGW youth recruiting and a mentorship program in order to gain some perspective of the SYGW program itself. I also participated in the discussion and creation of a legitimate governance structure for the UW Farm, which will increase the farm's legitimacy and ability to work with partner organizations. Ideally, this project and partnership will help both the UW Farm and SYGW become more financially and socially sustainable through shared resources and workforces. The established governance structure as well as partnership document will help maintain institutional memory for this expansion project and transition leadership to future UW Farmers.  

Congratulations and best of luck to this year's CEP Seniors! You guys rock my world!

Has Seattle "Reinvented" Itself?

I don't normally write online comments to newspaper articles, but every so often one will come along that really pushes my buttons. This recent piece in The New York Times is trying to capitalize on the country's almost cult-like fascination with Seattle that's been around since grunge and Sleepless in Seattle. Not only are we responsible for $4.50 mocha frappuccinos and the Dreamliner, we have also "reinvented" our economy through education and cutting-edge urban design, the author argues, in a way that has uniquely saved us from the recession. Did I get that right? Because of course, Seattle likes to think of itself as being so "progressive" it's practically from the future. But are we really? Does the way we run things in the Emerald City really hold true for other cities?


Here's the original article:

As the 2010 Census rolls out, much of the attention of news organizations is focused on the continuing growth of Texas and Florida, but there is much to be learned from the less extreme, but still significant, population growth in less sunny places, like Seattle.
Seattle is one of the few large cities outside the Sun Belt that is growing more quickly than the country as a whole. The city’s growth reveals the benefits of concentrating smart people in dense cities. 

The success of Seattle was hardly foreordained, as it shares much with America’s many declining cities. Like Detroit and St. Louis, Seattle grew as a node of the great transport network, which included canals from Erie to Panama and intercontinental railroads, which enabled Easterners to access the vast wealth of America’s hinterland. 

Seattle’s growth spurt during 1880s coincided with its rail connection to the East. In its early years, the city specialized in providing access to timber and Klondike gold. 

To succeed in the 20th century, American cities needed to do more than help move natural resources, and Seattle moved into manufacturing transportation equipment, natural enough given the vast distance that separated the city from the country’s population centers. 

During World War I, the city’s shipbuilding industry expanded rapidly, andBoeing began as a partnership between a naval engineer and a lumberman. 

Just as Michigan’s forests were part of Detroit’s early success in making cars, since early automobiles — like the carriages that preceded them — had plenty of wood, early planes used light wood and Washington’s timber industry was a boon to Seattle’s airplane industry. William Boeing’s own expertise in wood products helped him to be smart about early airplane construction. 

In 1954 more than half of Seattle’s manufacturing workers labored in the transportation industry. By 1960, Seattle was seen by many as Boeing’s town, but that should have been recognized as a bad omen. 

For 50 years, economists have documented that urban reinvention and entrepreneurship rely on small companies and industrial diversity, not industrial monoliths. 

At the start of the 20th century, Detroit was one of the most innovative cities on earth, with an abundance of small automotive entrepreneurs supplying each other with parts, financing and new ideas. 

As the Big Three rose to dominance, Detroit became synonymous with urban decline. Boeing’s outsize footprint in Seattle set the stage for the city’s 20 tough years after 1960.
Before the industrial revolution, cities were centers of small, smart companies that connected with each other and the outside world. Small companies and smart people are the sources of urban success today. The industrial city now seems like an unfortunate detour during which cities exploited economies of scale but lost the interactive exchange of ideas that is their most important asset. 

As Boeing scaled back its Seattle employment, the city floundered. By 1971, amuch-discussed billboard read “Would the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?”
But there was a crucial difference between Seattle and Detroit. Unlike Fordand General Motors, Boeing employed highly educated workers. Almost since its inception, Seattle has been committed to education and has benefited from the University of Washington, which is based there. Skills are the source of Seattle’s strength. 

Over the last three decades, human capital has become increasingly linkedwith urban growth outside the Sun Belt. 

The ability to attract skilled people was intimately tied to the success of Seattle’s star companies, such as Amazon; Nordstrom’s, whose strategy of empowering employees was more feasible because those workers were skilled; Starbucks, a coffee chain founded by educators; and Microsoft, which depends on a steady supply of smart software engineers. (Disclosure: I serve on the domestic advisory board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.) 

A great paradox of our age is that despite the declining cost of connecting across space, more people are clustering together in cities. The explanation of that strange fact is that globalization and technological change have increased the returns on being smart, and humans get smart by being around other smart people. 

Dense, smart cities like Seattle succeed by attracting smart people who educate and employ one another. 

A person’s earnings rise by more than 7 percent as the share of people in his or her metropolitan area with a college degree increases by 10 percent, holding that person’s own level of education constant. Educated neighbors are particularly valuable in dense cities, where contact is more common. 

Skilled people have often chosen to come to already educated cities, and the share of Seattle adults with college degrees has risen to 56 percent from an already high 47 percent in 2000.
Today, Seattle is one of the wealthier and most productive metropolitan areas in the United States. Per-capita personal income is 25 percent above the United States average. Per-capita productivity is 37 percent above the metropolitan average in the United States. That productivity explains why Seattle has grown so robustly over the last decade. 

Seattle has also helped itself by permitting taller structures. That density enables ideas to flow freely. Building up is also an environmentally sensitive alternative to building out, and Seattle’s height helps the city maintain a relatively high level of public transportation use and a relatively low level of carbon emissions. 

Sun Belt sprawl isn’t the only model of modern metropolitan success. Skilled, tall cities like Seattle provide an alternative model of urban growth that emphasizes the creation of knowledge. 

The Seattle model is particularly important, because the ideas created in skilled cities are likely to be the economic mainstay of America in the next century.

I've lived in Seattle for 21 years, and I have lived in both its central city (Capitol Hill) and in suburban areas (Kirkland), graduated from the University of Washington, now working for a Microsoft vendor.

The article is absolutely right to point out the UW and the Port of Seattle as primary ingredients in the success of our fair city. The Port is responsible for nearly a quarter million living-wage jobs in the city, and as Asian economies grow, so do we. Washington is the most trade-dependent state in the US almost exclusively for this reason.

The UW is probably the world's best kept secret among top public universities - it's affordable (less than $8,000 a year in-state tuition), full of top-ranked departments, with 60,000 students packed into a relatively small city neighborhood a 10-minute bus ride away from one of the best and most vibrant downtown areas of the West Coast.

With other factors, the article is a bit off. Luck has definitely been just as much a factor in Seattle's success as entrepreneurship and the "creative class." Microsoft took root in the Eastside suburbs not because a highly educated workforce was ready and available, or because the various infrastructure was secure and well-established. It did so because two of its founding partners, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, had the serendipity of being upper-crust white nerds at an elite prep school working on computers at the precise economic moment (de-industrialization and restructuring in the late 1970s) when doing so could make any decent programmer a millionaire. Starbucks, likewise, emerged at the tail end of the largest crime wave in American history during the late 90's, before- which building sidewalk cafe culture and walkable downtowns (as the early espresso carts before Starbucks did) would have been unthinkable.

Second, the author is quite mistaken if he believes that Seattle's affinity for density is at all responsible for its growth. 75% of Seattle is zoned as single-family neighborhoods. Areas of true high-density living, like one would find in New York, Chicago or San Francisco? There are exactly four of them: Downtown, Capitol Hill, the U District and Belltown, with a combined population of perhaps 100,000 people. Seattle only rezoned areas of South Lake Union and the Denny Triangle for high densities in the past 5-10 years. Before that, these and several other areas were nearly barren and full of parking lots. We just got to the point where major groceries became comfortable locating downtown, which in the US is some kind of accomplishment. How about families with children living downtown? Elementary schools in high-density areas? Compared to a New York, Chicago, or even Vancouver to the north, Seattle shows few of these key signs of life in its "high-density" areas.

Transportation is a severe problem in Seattle, and it is precisely because the city has not adequately invested in truly high-density, sustainable neighborhoods (especially in its middle-class "urban village" areas), that this is the case. The 520 bridge, the Alaskan Way Viaduct debacle,  and our notoriously pothole-plagued streets do not help our case for being paragons of the quality transit infrastructure needed to "win the future", as Obama might say. Need I mention our relatively pathetic light rail system that was rejected in a public vote in the 1960s - it might reach our suburban job centers by 2030, and that's if Tim Eyman doesn't have his way. Outside of a few key corridors, bus service is infrequent and low-quality. In reality, the city's transportation network is a lot like that LA - lots of transit "ridership" on a few highly-trafficked routes, but with the vast majority of commuters trapped in congested freeways with no alternatives in sight.

What is really so special about Seattle?
1. Seattle really is the most educated city in the country, topping even Boston and SF. Do you have a Bachelor's degree? So do 55% of Seattleites over 25. A Master's degree? 1 in 4. 1 in 10 Seattleites has a PhD. If are you are a high-school grad, GOOD LUCK trying to live here.

2. Compared to local incomes, Seattle has some of the most overpriced real estate in the country. The quality of life here makes up a lot of that. Geographically, Seattle is hourglass-shaped with water on all sides. Pretty much anywhere with a "view" - and this is a large chunk of the city - is out of reach to the middle class.

3. If there was one cultural vibe you get from living in Seattle, it is the feeling of being unique and/or apart from the rest of the US. As one of my transplant friends often tells me, this is a "city of the mind." It's like Scandinavia on the Pacific. If you want to study with some of the smartest people on the planet, write code that will change the world, fight global warming, or do business with China, this is the place to do it. Socially, this feeling of constantly being on "the edge" of the next big thing has some negative consequences. The "Seattle Freeze," an ever-present lack of social energy and perceived coldness to outsiders, is something every transplant experiences. Part of it is indeed due to the gloomy weather. As I'm writing, I'm thinking back to the last time I saw sunshine, and the number of weeks it's been is daunting. Another is the dominant upscale, corporate culture of the city that dampens the nightlife on weekdays in most areas. Finally, the high-tech emphasis of our economy (geeks working long hours) and the influence of Asian and Nordic local cultures blends together to create a relative shyness, indifference even, to new people you don't find in other cities.

So...What Do You Do Exactly?

Every so often, I find an article that hits the nail on the head for exactly what I wish I could say, if only so eloquently. When I was in school at UW and told people that I studied urban planning (don't even get me started with Geography!), I was met with blank stares and mild eye-rolling 90% of the time. You wanna do what now? The other 10% probably has some idea of the profession and assumes you are either a) an architecture school reject or b) a lost hippie who wants to create urban farms to feed organic food to the homeless - don't worry, some of us still do!

Really urban planning is much more simple than that. I want to be able to take people's vague ideas of what a "sustainable" future is supposed to look like and put them into practice. Are you happy with your current lifestyle? Do you worry about pollution and its effect on your health? Do you hate your morning commute and wish there was an alternative to sitting in your car wasting fuel while you idle? Do you wonder why you can't walk to your corner store the way your parents could? Ever wonder how your city will restructure itself due to the recession? Where its jobs will come from? Well, that's where urban planners come in. Because I'm terrible at explaining things like this, I'll leave it to a PhD student at UMaryland whose full article is below:

It happened again, as it invariably does every holiday season. In the midst of spiced eggnog and office holiday parties or visiting with family and friends, I get asked a simple question: “What do you do?” I politely say, “I study urban planning.” And then there’s the inevitable silence as I wait for the quizzical follow-up – “What’s that?” – and another brooding year of Christmas heartache. However, this year something changed. After I uttered my usual phrase, “I study urban planning,” my speech was met with a “Wow, that’s really cool,” and “Ah, that’s interesting, I have a friend who is studying that,” or my personal favorite: “I wish I had gone into planning rather than settle for law school.”  Yes, the field of urban planning was met with unbridled enthusiasm as I made the rounds this holiday season. A Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle? I think not.

The plain truth is that urban planning is hot. If we take a look at the numbers, according to the Department of Labor, the urban and regional planning field is expected to grow by nineteen percent, from 38,400 jobs in 2008 to 45,700 jobs by 2018. Moreover, quite apparent is that a burgeoning global population has created the need for additional infrastructure including transportation systems, affordable housing, and schools while simultaneously existing infrastructure needs repair and restoration. It is no wonder that U.S. News and World Report included urban planning as one of the fifty best careers for 2011. But this is really just the beginning. 

In his notable work, Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester describes planning or designing as “a deeply social process of making sense together.” Planners, to appropriate the sociologist’s C. Wright Mills language, translate personal troubles into public issues.  Moreover, they help individuals and communities communicate and develop visions for the future based upon shared interests, values, and norms. In a time and place where the prospect of the future seems uncertain, unsettling and even frightening at times, the expertise that planners bring is needed more than ever. In this context, a perfect storm of factors is contributing to an auspicious growth for the field. 

Let’s be straight: Urban planning is and traditionally has been a relatively obscure field in a relatively obscure set of disciplines known as the social sciences (we like to talk things out). In her article “Planning Theory’s Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action and Interactive Practice,” Judith Innes writes, “There are probably 1,500 people today who hold a planning Ph.D. The proportion of educators with a Ph.D. in planning is steadily increasing.” This was in 1995. Today, my educated guess is there are in the range of 2,500-3,000 people with planning Ph.D.’s and they are in more places than walking the corridors of the Ivory Tower both here and abroad. You can find them in think tanks, NGOs, law firms, and public policy organizations. In terms of academia, one only need take a glance at the Job Bank on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) website to see the plethora of faculty jobs available. Indeed, the L. Douglas Wilder School at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) alone has announced it will be filling ten or more tenure-track or tenured positions in the coming two years. Ten positions! That’s larger than the entirety of many planning departments, and along with a number of new positions, the field is seeing whole programs commence and become newly accredited including those at Boise State University and the University of Louisville, among others. To put this in perspective for those new to the field, the annual planning conference for academics draws between 400-500 individuals yearly. The field is not large; we aren’t talking a department of history, economics, or political science here. We are talking about a field where there are at present fifty-four openings for urban planning faculty (I counted). 

Why all the activity?  A constellation of factors are at play, including:

• The first full generation of trained planners are on the eve of retirement

• The growing relevance and significance of planning, both locally and globally from Dubai to Detroit reflected by the ascent of wealth and the capacity to build mega-project (e.g. as in Dubai), but also the ascent of poverty resultant from failed public policy, markets, and structural economic forces (e.g. Detroit)

• The growing visibility of planning through media (including this magazine) and the blogosphere thereby precipitating more interest from the general public

As both supply and demand factors continue to incentivize the field, the explicit notion that both individuals and communities are looking for answers and find themselves increasingly reflected in the language of planning, whether tacitly or knowingly, begs the question: What does this emergence mean for how we train planners for the future? It is a question that generations of planners have considered, including Paul Davidoff and Judith Innes. 

Davidoff, regarded as the founder of advocacy planning, described in his 1965 article Advocacy and Pluralism in Planningthe need to broaden the scope of a planners’ education. He wished to widen the focus of planning to include all areas of concern within government. He speaks to the primary role the planner has as a coordinator and suggests that two years of graduate study may be insufficient to broadly train planners for this difficult job. Judith Innes, writing in the mid-1990s, notes the importance of allowing students to take over their own learning processes. She references an anecdote in a teaching workshop she attended which imbued her with a Deweyian lesson, “that learning by doing has far more power than simply learning by reading or listening and that social learning – learning as part of a group effort – has important advantages over the solitary investigation of the lonely researcher.” More recently, Leonie Sandercock contends the need for “therapeutic” processes to transform urban spaces from places of fear (racial, socio-economic, etc) to places of cohabitation and coexistence. Such processes could be structured in helping residents organize meetings in moving from fixed positions to shared interests. These three scholars are but three voices over planning’s lifespan that add to the discourse on planning pedagogy. The ascent of issues such as all things sustainability-related, social justice, and international development planning only contribute to the dialogue on what a planner should be learning.   

Peter Bosselmann, a professor of urban design in architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that among his students,

“

There’s an interest in international work right now, which probably has to do with the economy . . . Geographically, China is very important, as is India, and we assume that soon the urbanization of Africa will start becoming of interest. [Topic-wise], the environment is becoming stronger and stronger, especially the forces of nature and how they’re acting on cities, such as the rising of water tables.”

What so many of us love about planning is that it is dynamic. And urgently so. From the growing wealth gaps in the United States and globally, to environmental issues, individuals come to planning because they wish to effect change. We can only hope that as the institution of planning moves into the next decade, planners will be more cogent of their past, their context, and their responsibilities to their craft in embracing this dynamism. No Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle required. 

Via: Planetizen

Seattle Bike Share Comes Closer to Reality

In the past six months, there's been a wealth of attention devoted to starting a bike-sharing system in Seattle. In November, I wrote about the first feasibility study done for bike-sharing in Seattle, a collaboration between SDOT and the UW.

The UW study divided the city into 10-square-meter cells and ranked them based on factors like residential population density, job density, retail density, proximity to transit, and existing bike infrastructure.

The result is a detailed portrait of where bike-sharing is most likely to succeed in Seattle. The results of their analysis suggest that bike-sharing should first be rolled out in the downtown core, Lower Queen Anne, and Capitol Hill neighborhoods. These neighborhoods both have very high residential density and walkability, extensive bike and transit infrastructure, and are full of retail and tourist destinations.

Photo courtesy of Publicola and the UW Bike Share Studio

Phase 1 of the proposed bike-share system begins with the green zone of downtown and its immediate neighbors Lower Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, along with parts of the Sodo stadium district. Continuing down the hierarchy of density, the system would be later expanded in Phase 2 to include Upper Queen Anne, Eastlake, the Central District, Beacon Hill, Ballard, Fremont/Wallingford, and the U District. Lower density neighborhood centers, known in City of Seattle parlance as "urban villages" would be the last to be added in a Phase 3. 

According to Seattle Transit Blog, King County is currently seeking a $150,000 federal grant to get the pilot Phase 1 off the ground. The program would launch first in the green downtown areas with between 800 and 1,000 bikes, with a capital cost of $3,500 - $4,500 per bike. Operational costs would average $1,200 to $1,600 per bike, which would be paid through monthly or annual user subscription fees in the range of $45-$75 per year with an hourly rate after the first free half-hour.

The King County planners STB interviewed seemed to indicate that Redmond (with its large high-tech workforce) be included in the Phase 1 and the suburban centers of Bellevue, Kirkland, Renton, and Kent would be included in the Phase 2.

The UW study explicitly recommended against this approach of including outlying population centers in the initial phases so as to not create a disjointed, less functional system. They even recommended not including the U District in the initial Phase 1, despite the high student population and retail density, because of the lack of bike connectivity with the downtown center. We'll have to see if King County follows this reasoning in their final proposal.

Also unclear is whether the County would require helmets on users of the bike-share system - most European systems have done away with their helmet laws completely to boost their ridership, and this approach seems to have been its saving grace. Will our litigious American culture subside enough for helmet laws to be relaxed? Or worse still, will there be vending machines at the bike stations to sell helmets? That just sounds like nanny-state ridiculousness, but with Seattle you never know!

A second interesting study was done in April by an STB writer, Adam Parast. He did a GIS analysis of the current bikeability of Seattle versus Portland. The project compared factors of street connectivity, existing bike infrastructure, slope, land use (proxy for density) and barriers (like a freeway interchange or an impassable slope). The result? Not surprisingly, Portland takes the cake on bikeability in nearly every respect.

Due to a combination of our more challenging geography (Portland has it easy lying in a mostly flat river valley) and our comparative lack of bicycle infrastructure, Seattle is reduced to "islands of bikeability" in a hostile, car-centric sea. One of the more surprising and extensive bike-friendly areas is Ballard. Should this area be included in Phase 1? It's about 10 minutes away by bike from the downtown core via 15th Ave. W and Elliott. Also in its favor: its fast-rising residential density, numerous tourist attractions, and largely self-sufficient retail district.

Current bikeability comparison, blue = high bikeability, red = low bikeability

Potential bikeability comparsion

More good news for bike sharing: bikes travel faster than cars during rush hour in most cities! According to a study out of Lyon, France's bike share system, bicycles are faster and more direct than cars in high-density areas during rush hour because of the complications of circling the block to find parking and then finally walking to your destination. Intuitively, this makes sense in Seattle - you can ride your bike between Downtown, Capitol Hill, and the U-District faster than rush hour car traffic.

King County is looking to launch the Seattle bike-share system by summer 2012, so there's sure to be a lot more going for bike-sharing locally, and a lot more reporting to come from Green My Fleet!

Via: Planetizen and Publicola

Huskies Ring in the New Year with a Holiday Bowl Victory - GO DAWGS!!!

The NY Times had a cover story profiling the Huskies and Jake Locker's rise to fame at UW - goooooooo alma mater!


This has to be one of the best pieces I've read about Seattle's football culture. I don't normally like posting full articles, but this piece by William Yardley is beautifully written and really encapsulates so much of Seattle - from the condos of Belltown to the strip malls of Aurora - and how it all comes together to produce one of the best college sports scenes in any big city. The full article is below:

They say Jake Locker was carved to athletic perfection between the Cascade Range and the Salish Sea. Big, strong and strikingly fast, he was a statewide myth by the time he was a teenager, a high school football force scorching through Friday nights in the farthest reaches of the Pacific Northwest.

By the time he became the quarterback for the University of Washington, he was cast here as nothing less than a savior, a rural kid summoned to the digital city from a place few of his new fans could find on a map, Ferndale, Wash., population 11,000. His father taped drywall for a living. His grandfather worked in a pulp mill for 37 years. Neither of them graduated from college, but Jake would stir the rescue fantasies of an ambitious university and what theCensus Bureau has called the nation’s best-educated city.

“Don’t go, Jake!” the crowd chanted at raucous Husky Stadium a year ago, at the end of his junior season. Pro scouts swooned in the stands. Mr. Locker was projected to become a top N.F.L. draft pick, and a multimillionaire, if he left college early. “One more year!”

On Thursday, Mr. Locker will play his final college game against heavily favored Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl in San Diego. Analysts will point to his decision to stay for his senior year as reflective of fine character — but they will also recount the disappointing season that followed, from blowout losses to his plummeting draft prospects. The savior proved mighty mortal.

Yet regardless of Washington’s 6-6 record or what might happen Thursday, many people will always measure the kid from Ferndale by more than touchdowns and passing efficiency.

At a time when college teams recruit from across the globe, when talented players are expected to jump early to the draft and others are quick to transfer if things do not go well, Mr. Locker has been defined not just by his performance or potential but also by the simple fact that he repeatedly chose to stay close to home, to anchor himself ever more deeply in the complicated corner of America where he was raised. In the Northwest, a region reaching for a broader role in the world even as it fears losing its sense of place, being a local hero meant playing across a delicate divide between old and new.

“The people who consider themselves to be the true Washingtonians, the true Northwest, they identify with Jake,” said Rob Rang, a high school literature and history teacher from Tacoma who has followed Mr. Locker closely as part of his moonlighting job — as an N.F.L. draft analyst for cbssports.com. “Not to make Jake sound like he’s some lumberjack, but he’s more of that than the latte-sipping, work-at-Microsoft kind of thing.”

Told of those comments, Mr. Locker agreed.

“You saw what my dad does,” he said. “No matter what the circumstances, you can always work hard enough to give your family what they need.”

Seattle is more than generous billionaires and precision composting. It exports airplanes and wine but also wheat and wood. It is still a crossroads, energized by friction between rural and urban, union machinist and transplant techie, immigrant and entrenched. Not far from the rows of bungalows beloved by carbon-conscious New Urbanists, Aurora Avenue, a critical city artery, features stunning views of Mount Rainier — and boarded-up motels.

Yet in the center of it all there has long been a uniting force, the home team. Before theSeahawks or the Mariners or the Sounders soccer team, before Microsoft or Boeing, before the Klondike gold rush or even statehood, there was the University of Washington, founded as the Territorial University of Washington 150 years ago next fall with a single professor and 30 students.

Back then, Seattle was a frontier town with fewer than 1,000 people. It was less Jet City — or Metronatural, as a new generation of boosters has branded it — than it was Ferndale. A century and a half later, the university, not Microsoft or Boeing, is the city’s largest employer, with nearly 30,000 faculty and staff members serving 45,000 students.

But for all its heft — Washington is perennially among the top universities in attracting federal research dollars — the university has lost some of its prominence in a changing region. It increasingly struggles to draw political support outside the Seattle area. Many people view it as elitist, distracted by its global ambitions.

At a time when public universities are taking significant budget cuts, Washington has suffered plenty, losing a third of its state financing in the past two years. To raise more revenue, it is capping its in-state enrollment because outside students pay about three times the tuition.

That shift is not expected to improve local loyalty, but the university has taken other steps that it hopes will, from expanding aid for low-income in-state students to enhancing its brand name, in Seattle and beyond. Next fall, it will begin construction on a $250 million renovation of 90-year-old Husky Stadium. Rejected in its request for state money, it began a private fund-raising campaign just as Mr. Locker began his senior season.

“Sports is the gateway into the university for many, many people,” Phyllis M. Wise, the university’s interim president, said in an interview. “It is the front porch. It’s what people know.”

Small-Town Roots

Washington has seized on the small-town imagery surrounding Mr. Locker. In addition to putting his picture on buses across Seattle, the athletic department sent staff members to Ferndale for several days this summer after the town proclaimed the main day of its annual Old Settlers Picnic to be Jake Locker Day. Washington created a Web site featuring video testimonials from Ferndale residents recalling Mr. Locker’s earnest boyhood.

“I wasn’t comfortable with it at first,” Mr. Locker said. “But I thought the way they did it was best suited for me. It came from the people I grew up with. It’s a community that really, really cares about all the people in it.”

Of all the impressive tailgate parties that take place before and after Washington football games, one of the most formidable the last few years has been held by the “Ferndawgs,” the passionate group of family and friends from Ferndale who have cheered at every home game Mr. Locker has played.

Yet while the Ferndawgs now drape themselves in Washington purple and gold, very few of them attended the university. When Mr. Locker enrolled in the fall of 2006 — he graduated this month as a fifth-year senior — he was one of only 12 freshmen admitted from Ferndale High School, 100 miles north of Seattle and just south of the Canadian border.

“Even that hour-and-a-half drive, it was a huge adjustment for me,” Mr. Locker said. “I got really homesick.”

Every Husky fan knows that Mr. Locker chose to come to Washington when its football team was at rock bottom, after scandal and losses had prompted coaches, administrators and even boosters to leave a program once among the giants of college football. He could have played virtually anywhere, but Seattle was an easier drive for his grandparents.

Washington has produced many fine quarterbacks who have nurtured lasting connections here. One of them is Brock Huard, himself a small-town star who made a similar choice to stay in college more than a decade ago.

But Mr. Huard is among many people who say Mr. Locker’s tale is different and deeper. He may not have won the Heisman, but he stayed long enough to get Washington back to even.

“So much was on his shoulders to singlehandedly turn things around,” Mr. Huard said. “There’s almost a purity to him and his story — almost a ‘Hoosiers’ thing. He’s formed such a bond with this place. And that bond got pushed and tested more than anyone ever thought it could.”

Mr. Locker feels the bond, too. A principal reason he returned, he said, was “just being able to extend that passion one more year, one more game and one more snap.”

He risked failure on the field, but not necessarily financial hardship. In the summer of 2009, before his junior year, he signed a minor-league baseball contract — he threw a 95-mile-per-hour fastball in high school — that included a signing bonus of about $250,000. He has not been on scholarship since then, though he lives in a group house and shares a room with his dog. And when he decided to return for his senior year, he took out an insurance policy that would provide him with a very comfortable living should an injury prevent him from going on to N.F.L. wealth.

He still may be among the top quarterbacks picked in the draft, though far from No. 1. No one seems sure what to expect of him as a professional. Will he learn to read defenses better and pass more precisely?

“The most frustrating quarterback I’ve ever scouted,” Mr. Rang called him.

‘Thank You Jake’

In Mr. Locker’s final home game, against U.C.L.A., he missed several open receivers and threw an interception. He was marginal. He had many fine performances this season but many like this one, too. Washington won by riding other players to victory, as it often did late this season. It qualified for a bowl by winning its final game.

Yet when the U.C.L.A. game was over, the people in purple still chanted the quarterback’s name. He had played much of the season with a broken rib. More important, he had stayed. Among the better-selling Christmas items at the university bookstore this year was a hand-painted tree ornament in the shape of Mr. Locker’s No. 10 jersey.

“Jake! Jake! Jake!” they rumbled in the stands. “Locker! Locker! Locker!”

Down on the field, Clayton Olson, a 1963 Washington graduate and former high school scout who uses a cane to walk between end zones, pointed to 12 students who had painted their bare chests to spell “Thank You Jake.”

By simply getting to the Holiday Bowl, Mr. Locker has accomplished the only goal he clearly articulated when he returned for his senior year: taking Washington back to the postseason spotlight for the first time since 2002. That the game is against Nebraska only seems fitting to many people: the most disastrous performance of his life was against the Cornhuskers in a game in September this season.

No matter how things might end, Mr. Olson said, looking into stands that night against U.C.L.A., “He’ll own this town.”

Then again, for all his affection for Seattle, Mr. Locker has made clear that his final destination will be Ferndale.

“I’m very proud of where I came from and the people there and I always will be,” he said this month when he turned in the two papers that stood between him and a degree in history. “They’re the people that understand me and know me the best.” 

Highlights of the Holiday Bowl:

 

Saul Williams' Got a List of Demands...

Just finished re-reading Saul Williams' groundbreaking work, The Dead Emcee Scrolls. I first saw Saul Williams live at UW's Kane Hall when I was a wee freshman, having no idea of what a poetic firestorm I was about to witness.

Williams' poetry can best be described as a tongue-lashing, luscious harmony of hip-hop Zulu NYC Afrocentricity. He is also the only artist who is commercially successful as a slam poet and hip hop star. For more of a sampling of his poetic beats set to rap music, check out his hit single, "List of Demands." It was used as the soundtrack to a Nike commercial several years ago. Can you top that, Sherman Alexie? I think not...



My favorite quotes from Dead Emcee Scrolls could go on for days...suffice it to say his writing packs a punch!

Let me mold a guitar of your bodily bazaar. Strap your tongue, chord your lungs, string your toes. And bows that precede the rain shall serpent symphonies in your name.

Mother of countless daughters. The tricks of time. It is your thrust and grind that defines us. We are the offspring of your decapitated head. The bastard sons of Father Time.

Dance. Even when your feet hurt. Dance like the fires of hell are upon you and you’re dodging every flame. 

Dance when it tastes good. Dance when the spirit moves you.

Dance because you feel it and you don’t have to be taught how to count, how to step and slide, how to twirl and jump and land on a good foot before taking off to fly,

NGH, dance. Dance, nigger. Paint your faces. Shine your shoes. Pop that collar. Shake it. Wind it. Kick fight scratch rip kill BREAK.

Neck back jump back kiss BREAK. Uprock freeze pop lock BREAK. Don’t stop don’t stop snap BREAK.

Into ferocious song and dance. Calculated movement. Gestures of prayer and invocation. Dance. Your life depends on it.

Cakewalk. Lindy. Charleston. Mashed potatoes. Camel walk. Hot pants. Hustle. Electric boogaloo. Patty Duke. Steve Martin. Pee-wee Herman. Prep. Wop. Rooftop. Cabbage Patch. Chickenhead. Ragtop. Wobble. Crump. Snake. BREAK! 

Not until you listen to Rakim on a rocky mountaintop have you heard hip-hop. Extract the urban element that created it and let an open wide countryside illustrate it.

The trains and planes could corrupt and obstruct your planes of thought so that you forget how to walk through the woods which ain’t good cause if you never walked through the trees listening to Nobody Beats The Biz then you ain’t never heard hip-hop.

And you don’t stop. And you don’t stop. And you must stop letting cities define you. Confine you to that which is brick and cement. We are not a hard people. Our domes have been crowned with the likes of steeples.

The wind plays the world like an instrument. Blows through trees like flutes. But trees won’t grow in cement. And as heart beats bring percussion fallen trees bring repercussions. Cities play upon our souls like broken drums.

We drum the essence of creation from city slums. But city slums mute our drums and our drums become humdrum cause city slums have never been where our drums were from.

Just the place where our daughters and sons become offbeat heartbeats. Slaves to city streets. Where hearts get broken when heartbeats stop. Broken heartbeats become break-beats for NGHs to rhyme on top.

Cop car swerves to the side of the road. Hip-hop takes its last breath. The cop scrawls vernacular manslaughter onto his yellow pad, then balls the paper into his hands, deciding he’d rather freestyle. 

You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to remain silent. And maybe you should have before your bullshit manifested.

 

Song is the invitation from the primordial unseen to become one with that which is seen. To nod your head is to agree that the moment is godly: communion. To dance is to become God. There are many ways of dancing. Follow your heart.

 

The buck and gully. The native son. Bigger and Deffer. The freshest one. The sewed-in creases. The flavored twills. The confidence snorted through dollar bills.

The “Fuck I care for?” The boldfaced lie. The been there and done that. The do or die. The dirty dirty. The filthy clean. Thugged out and nerdy. No in between. The blackest berry. The sweetest juice. That complex NGH born of simple truth.

A wealth of violence. A violent wealth. You caught up, NGH, better watch your health, the beat is dope though. The junkie nod. The use of breakbeats to beat the odds.

God and pussy. Objects of desire and ill repute. Some’d rather seek up high than dig and grind that inner truth. The angel of my eye a bit too fly to substitute with any other form than the messiah’s.

 

Shower me with blessings. No second-guessing. ‘Cause God, herself, is sitting on the edge of my bed, slowly undressing. A night symbolic as the resurrection. I’m about to slide up in the kingdom of God with no protection.

And I can hear a second coming. ‘Cause I already hear the drummer boy barumpumpum pumming. A host of angles look at me through your eyes. My first communion with my hands on your thighs. You’re catching the spirit, the Holy Ghost and the fire. Yo, this is wild.

 

I’m every Jay-Z album played in reverse. I’m risen from blunt ash and stashed in a purse. I’m smuggled over borders, contraband, ‘though I rock. I paper. I scissor. Nah, NGH, no Glock.

Pay me cash. Simply ‘cause what money means to you. Your currency has currently devalued what is true. When freedom rings through costly bling, it’s overdrawn, past due. The bankroll of an empty soul kept vaulted. Code and clues:

 

NGH WHT, I represent the truth you claim to be. The hero of the eastern sky, the storm’s eye, westerly. Rough, rugged, raw, eternal law recited over beats. Some poetry to oversee the dance floor and the streets.

 

Your evolution stopped with the evolution of your technology. A society of automatic tellers and money machines. NGH WHT? My culture is lima beans. Dreams manifest. Dreams real. Not consistent with the rational.

 

I dance for no reason. For reason you can’t dance. Caught in the inactiveness of intellectualized circumstance. You can’t learn my steps until you unlearn your thoughts. Spirit/soul can’t be store bought. Fuck thought. It leads to naught. Simply stated, it leads to you trying to figure me out.

 

Your intellect is disfiguring your soul. Your being’s not whole. Check your flagpole: stars and stripes. Your astrology’s imprisoned by your concept of white, of self. What’s your plan for spiritual health? Calling reality unreal. Your line of thought is tangled.

The star-spangled got your soul mangled. Your being’s angled, forbidding you to be real and feel. You can’t find truth with an ax or a drill, in a white house on a hill, or in factories or plants made of steel. 

ChargePoint Launches EV Charging Stations in Bellevue, WA and Washington, DC

One of the latest and most promising developments in EV charging station technology has been launched right here in the Seattle area!

ChargePoint America, a $37 million grant program run by Coulomb Technologies, has recently opened public charging stations in Bellevue, WA, as well as Washington DC. The program was funded in part from a $15 million Department of Energy grant from the ARRA stimulus package of 2009. Thank you, Obama!!!

The ultimate goal is to set up 4,600 stations across the country, in nine regions: Austin, Texas, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, Fla., Sacramento, Calif., the San Jose/San Francisco Bay Area, Bellevue/Redmond, Wash., and Washington DC and is a strategic partnership between Coulomb and three leading automobile brands: Ford, Chevrolet and smart USA. If ChargePoint succeeds, maybe we won't be so apt to relegate such dinosaur status to our dying Detroit brands. 

Already ChargePoint has set up stations at the UW Bothell campus, Bainbridge Island, and the ultra-pricey Aspira condo building in Downtown Seattle (sadly, for Louis Vuitton-toting residents only). 

These latest two stations have been installed at the Bellevue City Hall and are open to the public. In order to promote ChargePoint stations for EV drivers in the Northwest, they established a sub-contractor, ChargeNW, where subscribers can get discounted home charging units and even find the nearest station on their Smartphone app. 

Via: Inhabitat

Bike-Sharing Hits New York, San Francisco, and Everywhere In Between!

Back in March of this year, when this blog was a wee babe, I wrote about bike sharing programs that have become wildly popular in Paris, London, Barcelona, Boston, and Washington DC.

Bicycles are one of our oldest and most enduring forms of carbon-neutral transportation, but it is only within the last five years or so that they have been re-evaluated as key pieces of our urban transit infrastructure, rather than fun recreational toys.

Bike-sharing programs embrace the budding concept of "collaborative consumption," in which traditional capitalism is replaced by networks of consumers who band together via the Internet to provide shared needs.

Examples of collaborative consumption abound, especially in more progressive and tech-savvy cities. On Craigslist, people shop for used furniture, job postings, and even casual sex! The free, minimalist, and communal nature of Craiglist and other online classifieds has spelled death for the local news business. ZipCar provides a shared, publicly available fleet of cars for short trips in urban centers, so regular people can avoid the expense and hassles of car ownership. Travelers increasingly use Couchsurfing instead of booking hostel rooms, creating a stable network of peer-reviewed, intimate accommodations, and even lifelong friendships along the way. Urban gardeners aching to get a plot of land and frustrated by the lack of public garden space have taken to "garden-sharing", where homeowners advertise their open space via iPhone applications.

A full history of the collaborative consumption movement is available here, via GOOD. 

Let's go around the horn and take a look at some of the big developments taking off in American bike-sharing sytems:

SAN FRANCISCO

A $7.9 million pilot project is set to provide bikes in San Francisco and along the Caltrain corridor in San Jose, Palo Alto, Mountain View and Redwood City for use by registered subscribers. Over 1,000 bikes are scheduled to be available in late 2011. 

The system is aiming to replicate the success of European bike-sharing, with automated charging stations and annual, daily, or monthly subscription fees for users, along with hourly rates. Like many of the most famous systems, the first 30 minutes would be free of charge, to encourage riders to use the system for short trips close to home. 

The pilot program would begin with about 500 bikes and 50 stations in the San Francisco city center, focusing on the City Center, Tenderloin, Market Street, and Transbay Terminal areas. An additional 400 bikes would go into the urban centers of CalTrain corridor south of the city.

After the program is fully operational by 2013, the bike-sharing system in the Bay Area is planned to expand to over 13,000 bikes! 2,750 of the bikes would be in San Francisco and another 10,000 in Santa Clara County. This is on the scale of the famous Velib system in Paris, which boasts 20,000 bikes.

NEW YORK CITY

New York is taking steps to create the largest bike-sharing system in the United States, one that eventually will turn a profit through advertising with a public-private partnership. According to Transportation Nation, the system will have 10,000 bikes available 24 hours a day by 2012. 

“New York is made for bike share,” said Paul Steely White, Executive Director of Transportation Alternatives,” so this announcement is very exciting. The characteristics that make bicycling an everyday form of transportation, New York has in spades: density, flat terrain, temperate climate, lots of short trips and an on the go lifestyle. This nimble and inexpensive way to get around will fit easily into New Yorkers’ constantly shifting errands and schedules.”

By using wireless technology, including a searchable map of solar-powered bike stations using GPS, New York believes it can replicate the success of the London system and quickly turn a profit.

WASHINGTON, DC

In our nation's capital, an earlier bike-sharing system run by SmartBike DC will be replaced by a newer expanded system, offering 1,100 bikes and 114 stations in the District and Arlington County. This is a dramatic increase from the current 120 SmartBike stations. 

Treehugger has more details on the upgrade:

"The new system will allow a wider range of membership opportunities. Annual memberships will cost $80, double the current SmartBike rate of $40, though for a much better service. People can also purchase monthly memberships for $30 or daily ones for $5. All memberships allow unlimited bike rentals, free for the first 30 minutes with usage fees (levels not yet specified) after 30 minutes."

MINNEAPOLIS

Minneapolis has just launched Nice Ride, the largest bike-sharing system in the US to date. It debuted in June 2010 with 700 bikes and 65 stations, where riders swipe a credit card, take out a bike, and go. As with other popular programs, long-term subscriptions can be purchased online for the low price of $60 per year. That's lower the cost of Netflix, people!

DENVER

Denver's program launched in April 2010, with 400 bikes and 42 stations. Already, it has logged 8,000 registered users and 800 annual members. 

One important byproduct of the rise of privately-funded bike-sharing systems is that they help point to the overwhelming lack of bike infrastructure in most US cities. Simply by creating a critical mass (no pun intended) of everyday cyclists, cities are quickly made aware of where the street networks need the greatest improvements to accommodate them. 

MIAMI

Miami, or as I like to refer to it, the "whitest city in Latin America," has started its "Deco Bike" system in posh Miami Beach. The program boasts 100 solar-powered stations and over 1,000 bikes. It claims that a single station can meet the needs of up to 200 commuters who would otherwise travel by Lambourghini. Not bad, Miami! You just might redeem yourself after your stint as Jersey Shore South. 

SEATTLE

Seattle is predictably falling behind in the race to provide public transit alternatives. We are good at one thing, though: Feasibility Studies! The City of Seattle commissioned a feasibility study through the UW Department of Urban Design & Planning. The study identifies possible corridors and phases where stations could be installed, potential ridership, and limitations. Any chance we could expedite this process we are so infamous for, Seattle?