50 Ideas for the New City | Photo by Will Martin

THE OMNIBUS BOOTH We hope you’ve caught sight of our 50 Ideas for the New City Posters around town on fences, scaffolds and storefronts from Jamaica, Queens to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Tomorrow, Saturday, May 7th, get an up-close look at them at the Omnibus Booth (Bowery and Rivington) at the Festival of Ideas for the New City StreetFest, where Urban Omnibus staff will be out all day to chat about the future of the urban landscape with whoever will listen. Come on down and say hi, and submit your idea for the new city in person!

FLASHLIGHT: NYC  Check out some of the temporary, site-specific, illuminated art that Flash:Light NYC is bringing to the festival. LET US MAKE CAKE is tapping into the creative potential of recent innovations in light, sound and projection mapping with a three-part installation: On the Street, on Mulberry between Prince and Houston; In the Cathedral, in St. Patrick’s Basilica on Mott St. north of Prince; and On the Museum, on the façade of the New Museum on the Bowery. All three get underway at 8pm and run on a 20-minute loops until 11pm or midnight, location depending. But that’s not all! The projections will be followed by a midnight organ concert in St. Patrick’s! A collaborative project by Nuit Blanche New York, and Light Harvest Studios, participants range from established artists such as Vito Acconci, Jon Kessler and Marilyn Minter, to emerging artists such as SOFTlab, Chris Jordan, Mia Pearlman, Dustin Yellin, Z-Collective and Brooklyn-based street artists.

AUDI URBAN FUTURE Go see the beautiful 50-foot long architectural model of Manhattan: Audi Urban Future – Project New York at Nolita’s OpenHouse Gallery (201 Mulberry Street), curated by Architizer. This long-term project examines how mobility, urban living and the role of transportation will change in the coming years. Based on the award-winning concepts from the inaugural Audi Urban Future Award — hosted at the 2010 Venice Biennale — the model includes the winning entry by J. MAYER H. Architects from Berlin, and five NYC practices (LEONG LEONG, Matter Practice, Abruzzo Bodziak Architects, labDORA and THEVERYMANY) who will present their vision for 2030 New York at a roundtable Monday night, 7-10pm.

CRONOCAOS Cronocaos, an exhibition presented by OMA / Rem Koolhaas on the growing urgency of preservationism in architecture, is now on view in the New Museum’s partially-renovated, ground floor space at 231 Bowery. In the exhibition, which debuted at the 2010 Venice Biennale, Koolhaas seeks to find “what the future of our memory will look like, and how our obsession with heritage is creating an artificial re-engineered version of our memory.” Check it out to see historic objects and photographs, analysis of the rapid growth of preserved urban and natural territories, and a timeline of OMA projects that have confronted the issue of preservation over 35 years of practice, including the 2001 proposed extension to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the curatorial master plan for the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

AFTERHOURS: MURALS ON THE BOWERY  The New Museum is presenting Afterhours: Murals on the Bowery, an installation of 17 international artists’ site-specific paintings on commercial spaces’ security gates along the Bowery between Houston and Grand Streets. In celebration of non-traditional public art, check out these seen-at-night-only murals for yourself, or get a taste of what you’ll find in this NYTimes.com slideshow covering the unique series.

CUP DOWNRIGHT SYSTEMS Join CUP for an evening of videos about the inner workings of NYC’s hidden systems by viewing three of CUP’s hidden infrastructure documentaries at the Anthology Film Archives for the Festival. Films shown include Garbage Problems (2002), The Water Underground (2006), and The Internet is Serious Business (2008). Tickets are $6. Sunday, May 8, 6:30 pm at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue.

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TAXI OF TOMORROW
The City of New York has selected the design for its future taxi cabs: the Nissan NV200. For some, this is a roomier, more convenient choice. But many others (including some government officials) say the design looks outdated, ugly and is inaccessible for the disabled. Assemblyman Micah Kellner expressed disdain over the new cabs, saying “Who knew that the ‘Taxi of Tomorrow’ was the delivery van of yesterday? Just because you paint a van yellow doesn’t make it a taxi.” His view is representative of several city officials, including NYC Public Advocate Bill De Blasio and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.

The result of the design competition ends a 5-year long bid for visions of New York’s taxi cabs of the future initiated by the Design Trust for Public Space. The competition was set to find a design to replace the classic Ford Crown Victoria, the most common taxi sedan seen lumbering up and down the streets of the city. In 2009, the competition was made official by the Bloomberg administration who will offer the winner an exclusive 10-year contract on the city’s taxi design and manufacturing. The competition came down to three designs:

Taxi of Tomorrow Nissan NV200

THE WINNER: Nissan NV200
PROS: Legroom, outlets, anti-bacterial seats, sliding doors to avoid dooring cyclists
CONS: Looks like a minivan, bulky, not handicap accessible

RUNNERS-UP:
Karsan (top)  & Ford Transit Connect (bottom) | Images courtesy of Taxi of Tomorrow

Read more on the cabs of tomorrow at The New Yorker and NY Daily News.

PROJECT NEON IPHONE APP
Want to see a map of all New York’s neon signage on your phone? Project Neon, which you can read more about in Kristen Hively’s recent Omnibus feature, is running a Kickstarter campaign to bring this soon-to-be free app to you. The app will include searchable information about the hundreds of neon signs in the city, a “view signs closest to you” map, and other features for signage junkies out there. Check out the project’s Kickstarter video and consider supporting this awesome future digital guidebook.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Buttons | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

This weekend marked the convergence of transit gurus, software developers, and private and public service experts for the inaugural TransportationCamp, a weekend-long “unconference” presented by OpenPlans with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. The event — featuring group tours of transportation facilities, talks from industry leaders, and self-propelled discussion sessions — aimed to unite transit professionals and self-proclaimed technophiles to facilitate dialogue between the two parties in an attempt to improve transit systems through technology.

A brief note on the concept of the “unconference”: these are informal, highly flexible forums, facilitating often spontaneous topic discussions that stand in stark contrast to the comparatively staid world of conventional conferences. Like a traditional conference, TransportationCamp featured scheduled talks with an impressive array of industry leaders (Chris Vein, the White House’s new Deputy CTO for Government innovation, gave a particularly fascinating talk on the role of technology in the renewal of government). But unlike a traditional conference, session topics are proposed by attendees, drawn up on oversized post-it notes, and integrated into a master schedule. Compelling session post-its tend to garner the most attention and attendance, with sessions ranging from casual roundtables to Q&A discussions to abbreviated presentations.

Session board | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

This rather democratic structure yields a vast array of session topics – from a discussion exploring fare payment systems facilitated by MTA reps, to a Taxi App Pageant featuring brief presentations from developer start-ups followed by a Q&A session with Ashwini Chhabra, of NYC’s Taxi & Limousine Commission. These sessions were all lively with active engagement from attendees. The problem with such a conference – indeed, any conference – lies in the insularity of its subject matter and the homogeneity of its constituents. While coming from a broad range of organizations and backgrounds, attendees represent a very specific demographic (relatively well-educated and affluent) that can be disconnected from end-users of both the transit technologies being developed and of public transit itself.

A striking example of this disconnect was apparent during the taxi pageant. Here, app developers pitched their wares – Cabulous, TaxiMagic, FareShare, CabCorner and Weeels [click here to read Weeels' Urban Omnibus feature -ed.] were all represented — most of which aim to promote ridesharing in urban areas. Apps locate and match users based on their GPS coordinates and common destinations, helping both to reduce fares for riders and to ensure cabs are occupied as often as possible. This is a great idea, which explains why so many start-ups are chasing the concept. But while the app may seem entirely useful, few have experienced any success in terms of actually matching users. This failure was squarely attributed to a lack of volume, the inability to achieve critical mass. Without enough app users, it becomes impossible to make successful matches.

A discussion after the session, however, indicated larger problems in this transit initiative. ”They didn’t really account for the fact that many people won’t share cabs for social reasons – namely safety,” noted Manasvi Menon, a consultant at the transportation and infrastructure firm Parsons Brinckerhoff. Once we examine the app’s utility from beyond the perspective of someone immersed in transit or technology, issues of safety – or the perception of it — make a cab share program matching users based on GPS coordinates problematic. To address these issues, TransportationCamp may need to broaden its audience beyond transit and technology circles.

Session board in use | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

Transportation-Camp’s greatest success is its ability to respond rapidly to its own internal patterns or deficits.A similar disconnect was visible early in the day during a talk from Charles Monheim, C.O.O. of the MTA. Monheim, who dubbed himself a “car-free New Yorker” to scattered applause, extolled the recent improvement the MTA was making to the system beyond “bricks and mortar,” namely soft technological infrastructure in the manner of smartphone apps.

Since making its data sets available to app developers, the MTA has seen the proliferation of apps bearing its name, all helping to make the system more user friendly, aiding in navigation, decreasing wait times, and making public mobility in the city more efficient. But while Monheim lauded this “21st century philanthropy,” he failed to address who was left out of the new phenomenon. In a room filled to capacity with transit professionals and software engineers, it’s easy to forget that not everyone has an iPhone. Despite the enormous push to develop apps aimed at improving public mobility, those without access to smartphones, largely the city’s less affluent, are excluded from the app bonanza currently underway.

Fortunately, the beauty of an unconference, and perhaps TransportationCamp’s greatest success, is its ability to respond rapidly to its own internal patterns or deficits by adding another dimension to the discussion over the course of the weekend.

While the question of transit equity went largely unanswered in the sessions attended Saturday, upon returning for the Sunday schedule, one session post-it caught my eye. Rosa Parks: Is there an app for that?, facilitated by Benjamin de la Peña of the Rockefeller Foundation, unpacked the notions of transportation equity in New York City, and explored not only how technology could be used to create a more efficient transportation system, but also how it could “bring attention to the structural injustices” that exist within such a system.

In this session, filled to capacity, like-minded attendees discussed the absence of serious discussion of the digital divide from many of the weekend’s sessions (Monheim’s oversight had not gone unnoticed) and data necessary to visualize inequality in the transit sector. The ability to illustrate transit deserts and other accessibility issues, for example, could be used to help improve underserved districts.

Like all sessions, de la Peña’s was limited to 45 minutes, but the nature of the discussion propelled further discussion and connection over lunch and the remainder of the day – the real goal of any conference.

While TransportationCamp may have occasionally fallen victim to the weaknesses that haunt conventional conferences, the event succeeds in its flexibility and responsiveness. Rosa Parks: Is there an app for that? was coordinated on the fly, and responded directly to a void felt by participants during the weekend – impossible in the world of the conventional conference.

But an unmitigated success still demands the format push conventions even further. Unconferences proudly differentiate themselves in terms of their informality and flexibility, so TransportationCamp would be wise to use these traits to bring a broader array of stakeholders to the table. End-users of ridesharing apps, and indeed, their smartphone-less counterparts, surely have a contribution to be made to the transit puzzle. Inviting them to the table may facilitate more comprehensive solutions to existing transit issues.

Post-conference reception | Photo courtesy of TransportationCamp

Next weekend, TransportationCamp is headed to the West Coast for TransportationCamp West in San Francisco. Register here. And if anyone wants to recap it for Urban Omnibus, let us know here.

Mat Triebner is a freelance urban strategist, designer, and co-founder of Scout Ltd., a UK-based spatial consultancy promoting creative reuse of vacant lots. He lives in Brooklyn.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Graphic charting the amplitude of the tsunami in Japan | via NOAA

EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI RAVAGE JAPAN, DESIGN STANDARDS MAY REDUCE EXTENT OF DAMAGE
The calamitous combination of an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and the subsequent tsunami that hit Japan earlier today has flooded cities, crumbled buildings and left a still-unknown number dead, injured and stranded. Updates and reports are still coming in, but, as expounded on in this Times article, Japan’s stringent building codes and a comprehensive system of seawalls helped to stave off what could have been even more extensive damage and higher death tolls. Preparedness and construction safety standards may have prevented the disaster from claiming the number of lives and destroying property to the degree of last year’s earthquake in Haiti or the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. To stay informed and assist in response efforts, you can check updates on Google’s crisis response page, follow constantly-updated news reports, and see graphics explaining the impact of the tsunami and its movements across the Pacific on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website, including a fascinating (and terrifying) propagation animation. Meanwhile, GOOD has assembled, and is continuing to update, this list of ways that citizens can offer help from afar.
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New York City Prettymap by Stamen Design | via prettymaps.stamen.com

FAST COMPANY’S 50 MOST INNOVATIVE COMPANIES
Fast Company has released their selections for the 50 Most Innovative Companies in the world, as well as a series of top ten lists for “6 key industries” — Advertising, Biotech, Fashion, Mobile, Music and Design. Ranking first and second on the design list are Omnibus favorites Stamen Design (who made #48 on the overall top 50) and Local Projects (see Give a Minute). (Curiously, architecture firm Snøhetta makes the top 50 at #35, but is absent from the Design top ten.) Fast Company highlights an interdisciplinary mix within the design field — firms that design with information and technology (Stamen), create conversational experiences (Local Projects) and make awesome typefaces (Hoefler & Frere-Jones) all are at the top of the list. The list itself underscores the importance of design innovation in the global business landscape and reaffirms FastCo’s role as a tastemaker in future-facing thinking about the evolution of design professions.
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The Panorama of the City of New York | via the Queens Museum

THINGS TO DO
Fancy yourself a master of New York geography trivia? Tonight you have the chance to prove yourself at the Queens Museum’s 4th Annual Panorama Challenge! Commissioned by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, the Panorama is the world’s largest scale architectural model (would we expect any other scale from Moses?), and will provide a visual aid to contestants answering questions about the city’s landmarks, bridges and neighborhoods. The games begin at 7pm, and beer and snacks will provided.

“Single Room Occupancy: New Typologies,” an exhibition by Jonathan Kirschenfeld Architects (formerly featured on the Omnibus for the Floating Pool project) opens tomorrow evening following a presentation of the firm’s recent projects tonight at 6pm at the Pratt Manhattan Campus, entitled “Typologies of Social Engagement.” The exhibition will display four projects that address housing in New York City neighborhoods, and, in conjunction with the lecture, investigates the future of sustainable living and housing prototypes for underserved communities. The lecture is tonight, March 11, at 6pm at 144 West 14th street, and the exhibition will be on view through April 10 at 0.00156 acres Gallery on 114 Smith Street in Brooklyn.
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OLD BROOKLYN CHURCH MAKES A HOME FOR NEW ARTS COMMUNITY
In Greenpoint, an Irish Catholic church makes unexpected bedfellows with local artists. The Times reports on the collaboration between filmmakers, musicians, visual artists and Reverend James Krische to keep St. Cecilia’s church a vital hub of activity. Declining enrollment and lack of funding forced St. Cecilia’s schools to close its doors in 2008, but rather than let the building fall into disuse, as has happened with so many Brooklyn churches, the Reverend reached out to the local arts community — in part because St. Cecilia is the patron saint of music. The popularity of the classroom-turned-studio spaces spread through word of mouth, and St. Cecilia’s is now a location for film and TV shoots, band practices and gallery shows. Most importantly, it is an example of how to bridge the divide between older populations and incoming demographics in changing Brooklyn communities, and of how to keep historic structures relevant through re-evaluating their program.
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Domus architecture guide app | via Apple

DOMUS iGUIDE
Domus launches a new app to ease the life of the archi-traveler. Architecture guides to Berlin, Shanghai, Milan and New York are now available for the iPhone in English and Italian. Replete with maps, directions, images and facts, the guides create itineraries for tourists, and even curious locals, to investigate the built environment with the expert aid of “the most authoritative international magazine of contemporary architecture, art and design.” New York’s edition features 80 buildings, 100 architects and four itineraries: Downtown Architecture, Art and Design Walk; The Center: Midtown Drift; Unorthodox Modern; and Contemporary Curtain Walls. Domus plans to release more versions, creating cell phone accessible tour guides to the worlds great cities. Though an exciting platform to start exploring to be sure, the guides do make you wonder if, as the New York Guide says, “the best architectural moments often happen by way of surprise, through direct and accidental encounters.”
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Gowanus by Design is asking for speculative ideas on the future urban development of the Gowanus Canal community. Called “Connections: the Gowanus Lowline,” the competition invites participants to imagine potentials to reengage postindustrial lands, and create dynamic, pedestrian-oriented architecture that either passively or actively engages with the canal and the surrounding watershed. Submissions are due April 17th, and the winner will receive a $1,000 cash prize, along with the satisfaction of participating in generative urban discourse, of course.

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The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

Since speaking with Chase, we have told the stories of innovators using web-enabled technologies to use all kinds of resources more efficiently, from office spaces to regional rail. Today we return to the streets and cars of New York, and talk to David Mahfouda and Alex Pasternack, two of the people behind a new mobile app that makes booking a car service fast, simple, cheap and, if you want, shared. You’ve seen the posters pasted along a sidewalk near you, now read an interview that explains what Weeels is, how it came about, and what the ideas behind it might mean for the future of how we get around.

Urban Omnibus: What is Weeels? How does it work?
David Mahfouda: Weeels allows users to order cabs with the click of a button, to and from anywhere in the city. The application maps travel routes, provides your fare in advance, and books the ride as well. We work with livery – or chauffeured – cars, which are more prevalent in areas yellow taxis don’t serve.

In addition, leveraging the potential of location-aware social networking, Weeels can pair users taking similar trips so they can share a ride. Users who are flexible about departure time can opt to wait for a match, saving money on the fare and cutting emissions by reducing the total number of car rides.

Alex Pasternack: In short, it links people and taxi cabs to create a more flexible, efficient, reliable, and affordable mode of transit. It begins to address the incredible excess capacity of New York City’s 13,000-car taxi fleet, much of which is underutilized even when engaged in fares; when not, its drivers must often troll around for rides, wasting time and energy. Starting with the premise that we need to not only improve our bike and train infrastructure, but also better use the road infrastructure and vehicles we already have, the mission is to make transit less costly, more flexible and more social. Think of it as transit-friendly rezoning, like the kind the city has been pushing, but for vehicles.

UO: The excess capacity in existing infrastructure is something we think about a lot. Say a little more about how this line of thought influenced you as you came up with Weeels?
David: I started thinking seriously about using existing infrastructure as a design strategy after reading Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building. He dedicates a chapter to repair that makes the case for re-use (“Every act of building…is an act of repair”), not from an ecological perspective, but from a truly environmental perspective.

Christopher Alexander is particularly interested in the positive potential of concerted human attention — if we are all repairers/builders, then our environment can be exponentially denser, richer, etc. I see that ethic in projects that deal with excess capacity as well – information and information technology are used as tools to activate or accentuate human agency and attention. Weeels poses this question explicitly by providing an opportunity for a large community of users to improve their environment by acting together.

Alex: I should add that figuring out how to make the city and its inhabitants more responsive to each others’ needs — and turning all of us into agents of repair and renewal — is an especially poignant issue for David. In 2009 he started the Fixer’s Collective, a weekly meeting in Gowanus of amateur and expert tinkerers who attempt to repair and teach how to repair any old household item that New Yorkers bring in.

David: In 2006 Alex and I took a trip on the Trans Siberian railroad, and the immensity of that movement across Asia inspired me think seriously about improving mobility in the United States.

I love trains, but the train infrastructure in the United States is impoverished. If you’re going to think about mobility in the context of the United States, you have to address the automobile directly. So I started to ask, What if the car is not a private transit vehicle, but a public transit vehicle?

Something about the idea seemed inevitable to me, perhaps the correspondence between our digital information systems and physical road/car systems. I built some computer models to approximate the behaviors of these socialized cars. Then the iPhone came out and all of a sudden many of my ideas seemed less like science fiction. So I started mocking up a smart-phone interface — and a few years later, here we are.

Weeels unites our need for mobility, our desire to save money and our responsibility to be more efficient, all underwritten by our willingness to share.Alex: I lived in China for over two years, working as a journalist on the environment, design and urbanism, and saw a society in the throes of a shift from thrift to Western-style excess. To see that country’s twin impulses — the ingenious efficiency and sharing attitudes that came from many lean years, evident in my neighbors’ ability to reuse practically anything that many in the West might consider trash, and the drive toward luxury, literally, in the hordes of private cars that clog the streets of Beijing — I could see more clearly than ever the need for being more conscious of our resources.

The advent of social networking, largely with the rise of Facebook, held out the promise of an interesting technological solution to excess capacity: more responsive shared knowledge, and the many efficiency benefits that could come with it. Imagine a smart version of Craigslist. Now, for instance, we could perhaps know if someone in our friend group was getting rid of a book that we wanted to read — or had extra room in their car or in their cab.

And yet, I’ve been dismayed to see that that promise has never been quite fulfilled. Instead we have more diversions, and certainly more data, but not presented in a way that’s often useful. That’s not to mention the many headaches over privacy, which only underscore the commercial interests that underpin so much of our favorite technology.

That’s starting to change now, in part because users recognize a need. Weeels appeals to me because it makes use of our networks to tackle a very straightforward problem that we intuitively know can and should be solved through sharing. Potentially, its solution is a very elegant one: Weeels unites our need for mobility, our desire to save money and our responsibility to be more efficient in our use of natural resources, all underwritten by our willingness to share.

UO: Given the trouble the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) has had setting up cab sharing stations that are actually used in Manhattan, how do you see Weeels as a successful tool?
Alex: Rather than asking people to wait at a few locations for a cab, imagine that taxi stands can be anywhere. The taxi stands turned cabs into buses, traveling along a fixed route. But what people deserve are buses that turn into cabs, or simply cabs that are easier to use, more accessible, and potentially cheaper than they currently are.

UO: What has been your experience with livery cab drivers and dispatch companies? How have they responded to and participated in the creation and development of Weeels? What do drivers think?
David: The company that we’re currently working with, Eastern Car service, one of the largest in the city, has obviously been very responsive to the work that we’re doing. The manager at Eastern, Marvin Aleman, is himself a technologist — he built the driver’s iPhone application that Weeels accesses when booking rides.

The drivers that I talk to are generally positive about the project. I think they understand that sharing is a necessity in these economic times, and they are excited by the prospect of offering rides to more people. Though Weeels rides feel pretty different from a passenger’s perspective, they’re not actually all that different from a driver’s perspective. We built the product with that in mind. We knew there was room to increase the efficiency of this system without drastically disrupting the way the service works from the provider’s standpoint.

UO: How have you interacted with the TLC?
David: We’ve had conversations with both Commissioner Yassky and Policy Director Gallo. We’re currently waiting to hear back regarding two pilot proposals — one to operate Weeels in a select group of yellow taxis, another to build shared taxi stands/kiosks at transit hubs (like JFK and Grand Central Station) capable of real-time route matching, so that even users without phones can create shared rides to anywhere in NYC.

Photo by Flickr user Joep Roosen.

UO: What is the potential for yellow cabs to eventually be a part of Weeels?
Alex: Huge.

David: Yeah, it would be a fantastic boon for the city if the TLC decided to pilot the Weeels application in yellow vehicles. Drivers would reduce the number of hours they spend trolling around looking for fares, which would decrease the amount of fuel wasted and CO2 emitted on NYC streets. And because it would eliminate the need for trolling, such an app would also allow drivers to get out of their vehicles in between fares, which would decrease the existent negative health risks associated with driving taxis for 12 hours per day.

Drivers would make more money as shared trips would garner higher fares and, given the reduced cost of a shared ride, more customers. City traffic would be significantly reduced as more cheap mobility in the city would obviate the need and/or desire for private vehicle transit. It would be possible to hail a cab in the rain, and to do it without even having to go outside until the last minute.

The city would effectively multiply its accessible and utilizeable public space as the interior of vehicles becomes a place for encountering the city and its other inhabitants. (That’s especially true if the city chooses a progressive automotive design via the Taxi of Tomorrow competition. This design reorients the interior of the taxi to make it feasible to actually hold a party of four comfortably.)

Regarding the way Weeels will work practically with yellow cabs: rather than using Weeels as a booking instrument, it would be a way for prospectives (taxi-hailers) to access rides already in progress. On the other hand, as a passenger, I would be able to “open” my ride to other prospectives headed my direction. I would be able to identify those prospective passengers, and choose which I would like to pick up to reduce the environmental and monetary cost of my ride.

Alex: Also: the TLC recently and quietly ended its accessible cabs program, which allowed handicapped New Yorkers to dispatch yellow cabs specifically designed for handicapped-accessibility. It’s no surprise that handicapped rights groups are upset about this. Weeels for yellow cabs could prove to be one solution.

UO: What about Weeels’ relationship to privately-owned mass transit, which is especially prevalent in Brooklyn with services such as the Flatbush dollar vans. Can you talk about Weeels in the context of multi-modal connectivity between different types and modes of transport.
Alex: We’re building Weeels to become an ubiquitous interface for optimizing all kinds of unrouted vehicle transit. The algorithms we’re testing on taxis are directly applicable to many other kinds of unrouted vehicles currently operating on the US roadscape.

David: Since Weeels runs on digital, responsive infrastructure, not on fixed routes or schedules, it will, as a matter of fact, come to be most useful where other fixed transit infrastructure (again, anything that runs on a fixed schedule or route) doesn’t provide service. Namely, in the seams: Weeels cars and Weeels passengers will be most prevalent wherever existing modes of transport cannot or have not yet provided mobility.

What’s more, these patterns will be self-reinforcing. As Weeels establishes itself as a transit mode along a particular route, that route will become more popular (and cheaper, and more efficient) until individually-organized mobility is no longer needed along that corridor, and Weeels use establishes itself fluidly in some other sector of a city or even county.

Learn more — and get the iPhone and mobile web version of the app — at Weeels.org.

David Mahfouda is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Weeels. David graduated from Harvard in 2005 with a degree in Visual and Environmental Studies and received a master’s degree in Product Architecture and Engineering from Stevens Institute in 2009. He is a member of EyeBeam’s Sustainability and Urban Research groups, the founder of Flag Project, a co-founder of the Fixers’ Collective, and a co-curator of this year’s TRANSPORT exhibit at Proteus Gowanus.

Alex Pasternack is the Chief Communications Officer for Weeels. A native New Yorker, Alex Pasternack has worked as an editor and writer with a deep interest in the environment and design. Since Harvard, where he studied History and Literature and worked on environmental campaigns, Alex has been interested in the essential role that infrastructure and transportation plays in creating a sustainable future. His writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Christian Science Monitor, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, Paper, Icon, Metropolis and TreeHugger, among others.

Graphics courtesy of Weeels.

Hurricane Earl is coming! Or at least passing by. Though early reports stated that the storm might hit New York City hard, current forecasts are far less ominous. But maybe we shouldn’t rule out landfall yet. BLDGBLOG tells us that cities might actually attract passing hurricanes due to the jagged topography of urban landscapes. The irregularity of city land cover can result in an air vortex of sorts that can cause storms to veer up to 20 miles off course. With any luck, our potential vortex will stay quiet and keep Earl at bay, since disaster specialists are concerned about New York’s hurricane readiness. City residents don’t consider major storms a realistic threat so preparations would likely be insufficient and the aftermath could be crippling. Flooding would allow saltwater to permeate major infrastructure systems and cause long-term damage and shut-downs even after the storm passed.

Hurricane speculation is just one of many reminders of the vulnerabilities of our infrastructure. Last week, a fire that disrupted the commutes of over 100,000 LIRR passengers was caused by a fire in an “obscure contraption of levers and pulleys” which dates back to the early 1900s. New York is not alone — The New York Times spotlights five major infrastructural systems from across the nation that could be brought down by anything from simple wear-and-tear to burrowing squirrels. Meanwhile, Grist points out that our international systems can be equally unstable, particularly our global food systems, a problem that has motivated many, from community coalitions to government officials, to encourage more localized foodsheds that will improve food security, sustainability and local economies — a challenge that involves land tenure, zoning issues, waste management, urban agriculture and more.

Situ Studio is at it again. The impressive team of Brooklyn designers and digital fabricators, who apply their skills and knowledge to everything from the Guggenheim exhibit Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward to a forensic investigation into the killing of a demonstrator on the West Bank, has now teamed up with Princeton University geoscientist Adam Maloof to develop 3D digital reconstructions of fossilized sponges — which might sound boring until you consider that the sponges may be the earliest known form of animal life. Situ’s Bradley Samuels touched on the potential implications of their work for T Magazine: “For Situ Studio, the most exciting aspect of this collaboration is that we were able to successfully employ knowledge developed within an architectural practice to help solve problems in an entirely different field by applying design tools to spatial problems on a completely different scale.” Exactly.

Let’s say you decided to move out of New York City. Where would you go? Or, when you moved here, where did you come from? And why? Brian Lehrer posted those questions to his WNYC audience and then launched Map Your Moves, a migration pattern data visualization challenge using the responses. WNYC has fifteen submissions posted on their site, which range from the humorous to the downright stunning. And FlowingData takes a closer look at Moritz Stefaner’s interactive map and Andrea Stranger’s series of posters.

Screen grab from Map Your Moves by Moritz Stefaner

We recently heard Dan Doctoroff discuss his tenure as Deputy Mayor for Economic Development as part of the League’s Conversations on New York series. Though Doctoroff left office in 2007, projects he launched continue to shape the conversation about our city’s future. This week, City Limits offers a status report for some of Doctoroff’s most notable projects, including Hudson Yards, Bronx Terminal Market, and the rezonings of Downtown Brooklyn and Williamsburg/Greenpoint.

Last year, we played around with Museum of the Phantom City, an iPhone app which acts as a mobile, living museum of visionary, unbuilt designs for New York City. Now, there is a new app that serves as a portable encyclopedia of built architectural projects around the globe, which you can browse by location, material, architect, program, and more. OpenBuildings.com, the community-driven architectural directory, started the app, simply called Buildings, as a mobile travel guide for architecture enthusiasts. iPhone users can download the app for free to gain access to detailed information, photos, sketches and technical drawings. You can also contribute your own photos or videos to existing entries straight from your phone. Word on the street (or, more accurately, in some comments) is that an Android version is on the way. Sounds like a great excuse to explore the city over the long weekend.

The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

App-lovers take note: the NYC Economic Development Corporation has presented the winners of its NYC BigApps contest. The winners, who received cash prizes ranging from $500 to $5,000, include the grand prize-winning WayFinder NYC, an augmented reality application that helps users find the nearest subway station, Taxihack, which allows users to share reviews of their taxi drivers, and the Popular Choice Award winner NYC Way, which combines over 30 iPhone applications that sort, by proximity, information about nearby swimming pools, wifi hotspots, post offices, emergency rooms, street vendors, and more.

The pedestrian plazas in Midtown have people buzzing once again, and this time not about the chaise-longues. The New York Times got word from an unidentified city official that the anticipated traffic flow reduction has not met the DOT’s expectations. It is not clear whether the experimental project will be made permanent, but in the meantime both supporters and detractors are eager to see the data made public. Streetsblog reminds us that traffic flow is not the only indicator of success for this project, noting a significant reduction in pedestrian deaths in the area and the support of local businesses and such groups as the Times Square Alliance.

Vishaan Chakrabarti’s Double Down on Density has sparked quite a bit of conversation this week, both here on the Omnibus and around the web. Questions are being asked and comments are being made about the Northeast Corridor, how regional configurations come into play, how infrastructure spending is often cast as “debt and pork,” and our nation’s consistent cultural tendency towards highways and sprawl. The discussion, with Chakrabarti’s responses, continues — join in. There is plenty more to talk about.

Also garnering some attention lately is Vanessa Keith’s recent feature Clip-on Architecture. Fans take note: her piece was adapted from a more extensive article that is now available for download here (PDF). And in other climate-aware news, a panel of experts this week presented over 100 recommendations for how to make New York City’s building codes greener. The measures are referred to as “suggestions” for now, and the panel acknowledged the need for financing and incentives for developers, but Bloomberg sees this as a key advancement in his goal to reduce greenhouse emissions by 30% by 2030. Stay tuned to see how this plays out.

In other transportation news, consulting firm Frost and Sullivan released a report last week that car sharing is up 117% since 2007 (via TreeHugger). Additionally, Streetsblog reports that the Seward Park Houses foray into community-specific car sharing has been wildly popular. The program is run by Hertz and makes use of two of Seward Park’s parking spaces, with claims that each shared car replaces 14 personal cars. Lower East Side residents take note: The program is now open to the general public.

We’ll end this roundup with some fun with maps, photos and archi-art for your weekend perusal. Map lovers, expect to waste some serious time exploring both the New York Public Library’s brand new georectification (!) maps site (via Gothamist) and the 1924 aerial map on NYCityMap (via Curbed) — though Omnibus readers might remember (as Steven Romalewski mentioned in the Curbed comments) that OASIS offers a look back as far as 1609 and explorations of more recent development, in greater detail, from 1996 to the present. For an alternately angled New York City view, WNYC has posted two photo slideshows by Stephen Nessen of underground happenings: one of Grand Central from one hundred feet below and one of the tunnels for the 7 train extension (via The Infrastructurist). Finally, we recently discovered the blog butdoesitfloat and its architecture-centric art eye candy. We highly recommend perusing the archive for a stunning collection of images ranging from a David Maisel photography series on mining to an unearthed LIFE magazine photoessay on Le Corbusier in his studio:

Top image: 100 feet below Grand Central Station, photo by Stephen Nessen, via WNYC. Bottom image: Photo by David Maisel, via butdoesitfloat.com. The Roundup keeps you up to date with topics we’ve featured and other things we think are worth knowing about.

The app, thanks to Irene and Brett’s wariness of function creep, is well edited. The speculative projects included all share what Irene called an aspect of unreality; not only were they visionary at the time they were introduced, but also unattainable. Quotes from the architects and a few architectural renderings are provided, but the user is left to draw conclusions about what the impact would have been.

Details about the Phantom projects are available to app users only once they are within range of the site, though they are accessible online at any time. This choice is intended to encourage people to treat the whole city as a museum, not just their mobile device.

After Irene and Brett’s talk we went on a short walk, exploring the projects accessible in Midtown, before finding a corner in a nearby bar to settle in and talk apps – the Great American iPhone App to be precise. A conversation about the Phantom City – what could have been – led to a discussion of what could be.  Everyone in the group, which ranged across age groups and professions, articulated what his or her dream app would be, some specific and some grand. An envisioned app that would track the daily route of the iPhone owner turned the conversation towards subjective mapping. Like a spatial journal, such an app could turn a map of the city into a personal checklist, encouraging urban exploration, as the Museum of the Phantom City’s bursts of light do, and prompting the user to fill in non-traversed areas. Or a user could access the paths other app users take through the city. Kevin Lynch’s theories put to the test. What could we learn about our city with that kind of information? What layers of the city might be revealed?

Besides the well-known GPS feature, the iPhone has several underused high-tech sensors like an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, and an infrared sensor which can provide mass amounts of recordable data. But smartphones’ already demonstrated prowess at collecting information has not yet been matched by potential applications to centralize, disseminate, or make visible said data for advocacy or other productive uses.

Many hoped to find ways to use this technology for public information sharing beyond restaurant reviews. But close behind the utopian possibilities afforded by the new media, just as in all of the visionary sites that make up the Phantom City, are the dystopian ones. How do we ensure that this new public platform becomes something other than a new tool of consumerism? And when am I actually going to break down and buy one? At this point it doesn’t seem too far off.

Thanks to everyone who joined us, both on foot and in conversation. Check out a few photos of the event below. If you came along and have more pics to share, add them to our Flickr group and tag them “urbanomnibus.” To find out about more upcoming events, and to stay on top of our weekly features and forum posts sign up for our weekly email, become a fan of Urban Omnibus on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Check out other recaps of the event from our co-sponsor WNYC and Omnibus advisor Hoong Yee Lee Krakauer, Executive Director of the Queens Council on the Arts.

Rachel Aland is project associate of Urban Omnibus. She lives in Brooklyn.

Video excerpts courtesy of Wayne Congar

Photos by Varick Shute

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Clearly, we’re not the only ones who think this is the coolest thing to hit our iPhones since Shazam. Coverage from the Times to BLDGBLOG has affirmed that these guys are onto something. As Cheng and Snyder discussed in last week’s feature:

iPhones and mobile devices are undoubtedly transforming the way we navigate the city. Apps like Google Maps and Urbanspoon put an unprecedented amount of information about the city at one’s fingertips. Most of these programs, however, are purely functional in purpose: they seek to clarify the city, to demystify and make it more legible. In contrast, we are interested in how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition.

Cheng and Snyder have built a new app that uses GPS technology to explore “how mobile media can deepen and intensify urban experience, perhaps even introducing new pleasures and mysteries of the metropolitan condition.” The app is called “Museum of the Phantom City,” and it turns the iPhone into an “architectural dousing rod.” As you wander the streets of New York, it shows a city that could have been — 50 architecture sites that never got built.

WNYC’s Soterios Johnson took the iPhone tour with Irene Cheng. They started off at Bryant Park, the site of a proposed airport. Take a listen to the tour:

Cheng and Snyder developed the app with the help of the Van Alen Institute — the beta version of the app is available for free on iTunes, and you can see the whole tour on their website.

On Saturday afternoon, come join us and WNYC’s culture department as Cheng and Snyder take us on a mid-town tour of some of the sites. If you don’t have an iPhone, we’ll pair you with someone who does. RSVP to culture@wnyc.org.

Urban Omnibus and WNYC Meet-up
Museum of the Phantom City
Saturday, October 31
2:00-4:00 p.m.
Meet at the Bryant Park Fountain (6th Avenue side)
Drinks and conversation to follow
RSVP to culture@wnyc.org or on Facebook