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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MTA remains reliable | image via treehugger.com

NYC PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION GOING STRONG
New York is among the top 15 metropolitan areas for transportation, according to an Infrastructurist article on a National Resources Defense Council study. Jersey City and New Haven also make it on the list, reflecting on the good performance of PATH and MetroNorth trains. Keep it up MTA!

And it’s a good thing we have public transport, because…

TAXI DISCRIMINATION ON THE RISE
Apparently snobbery is up among cab drivers. The New York Times reports a 38% jump in cabs refusing requested destinations in the last half of 2010. Though it is illegal, cab drivers notoriously deny fares going outside Manhattan, particularly late at night (when a cab ride is most coveted) or to a destination were they are unlikely to pick up another passenger. The Bloomberg administration is responding with a proposed hike in fines for fare dodgers, from $200 to $500, and may revoke licenses for cabbies that commit three infractions within three years — an idea that’s been met with ire from drivers’ groups who say cabbies shouldn’t be punished for trying to preserve their profits. But for the sake of anyone trying to get from Manhattan to Bed-Stuy at 3am, let’s hope Taxi & Limousine Commission Chair David Yassky’s prognosis that “it is getting to be like the bad old days when taxis wouldn’t go to Brooklyn” won’t last.

STRINGER DISSES DEPARTMENT OF BUILDINGS
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer calls out the Department of Buildings in a Gotham Gazette piece reacting to the deaths of two ironworkers this month. Stringer cites a history of deadly accidents in the department, as well as bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. His solution? An independent review committee and reform that will modernize and streamline the department. The economic downturn could actually present an advantage — allowing time to enact improvements before the building market picks up.

ROUNDABOUTS AND REVOLUTION
Last week, as people began unpacking the greater significance of Egypt’s revolution, Vishaan Chakrabarti discussed the importance of  public space in facilitating, and impeding, civil discourse and dissent in his Country of Cities series on Urban Omnibus. This week, Jonathan Liu extrapolates lessons of Tahrir Square to an examination of the traffic circle as a literal public sphere in a Motherboard article ”Roundabouts and Revolutions.” Both pieces offer nuanced insights to the criticality of planned spaces for the spontaneous public congress, a conversation which we hope continues.

There Will Be Blood | production still

MANIFESTO!
In response to a January installment of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s Manifesto series, celebrating the publication of Pamphlet Architecture #30: Coupling, InfraNet lab has put together its own manifesto on infrastructural opportunism. Touching on topics discussed at the Storefront launch, InfraNet’s manifesto is a cursory collection of ideas already budding in architectural spheres, like the physicality of software or exploiting trashed materials, and a reminder to re-engage with concepts that have long piqued interest of designers, like systems networks and “architects as expert generalists.” Into this mix, InfraNet’s manifesto throws fresh takes on scale and the need to stay informed, grounding theories in examples that range from a man-made island in the Maldives to everyone’s favorite milkshake quote in There Will Be Blood.

There’s another book launch / Manifesto series tonight at Storefront. This one’s called EcoRedux: Design Remedies for an Ailing Planet, which promises to relate the cyclical nature of intellectual history to the ecological imperatives of the day, like, um, recycling.

BMW PAVES NEW WAYS TO USE YOUR CELL PHONE (NOT WHILE DRIVING)
BMW can’t seem to let a trend escape them. The car company has caught on to “urban exploration” in their recently established BMW i-ventures, a venture capital firm, that with $100 million in hand, will forge solutions in “sustainable mobility.” The first $5 of that $100 was allocated to a smartphone app first developed for the NYC BigApps competition. Called My CityWay, the application is a catch-all city guide that discovers location-based activities and local conveniences as the user, his smartphone and his BMW traverse the city.

YOUNG ARCHITECT PROGRAM ANNOUNCES RUNNER-UPS
Curious to see what else could have been installed in a Long Island City courtyard this summer? This week MoMA PS1 released the short list of entries that almost made the cut in their Young Architects Program (League Emerging Voice Interboro Partners won the competition with their “holding pattern” design). Among the finalists was Bronx-based firm FormlessFinder as well as MASS Design Group and IJP Corporation. Though MoMA has picked its winner, the range of  public reactions have prompted Archinect to host a People’s Choice Award on their site. The polls are open through March 11th for readers who wish to weigh in.

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FATBERGS
“A nice working environment” is not how most would describe a city sewer system, but to Rob Smith, “head flusher” at Thames Water, traversing the bowels of London has its upsides. Smith and his team of 39 flushers are responsible for unclogging sewer tunnels of “fatbergs”– congealed deposits of cooking oil and flushed waste that look as disgusting as they sound. Fatbergs are typically formed of restaurant grease, used condoms, baby wipes and after a bad rain, dead rats. They collect in floating masses to stop up sewer waterways, leading to water pollution. As “Below the Waste Line,” a video by the Guardian, and a post on Edible Geography reveal, an intimate look at subterranean infrastructure reveals a waste-based map of our unsavory disposal practices (Leicester Square for example is a trouble zone for dumped oil from fast food restaurants) and the daily olfactory patterns of the urban population (morning showers are a particularly pungent time).
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Canal Street | Photo by Flickr user YoHandy

CANAL STREET MAKEOVER
To say Canal street is hectic is an understatement, and fortunately the New York Metropolitan Transportation Committee has taken note. In a report released last Thursday the NYMTC recommends widening sidewalks to make the famously bustling street more pedestrian friendly. The report also calls for curb extensions, a redesigned intersection at Canal and Bowery, and crackdown on parking placards to reduce car congestion. The DOT says they will use recommendations from the study in their own plans for the street, funded with World Trade Center relief aid dollars. For more analysis on the report check out Streetsblog’s take.
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ASTOR PLACE MAKEOVER
East Village hubs Astor Place and Cooper Square are also slated for a makeover, as plans for a pedestrian plaza project that were previously sidelined by the economic downturn are now underway. WXY Architecture and landscape architects Quennell Rothschild and Partners, along with the Department of Design and Construction, envision reconfigured streets that make room for new parks, benches, trees and plantings, and added traffic islands, bringing more greenery and usable public space to the highly trafficked triangle.
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Chuck Close taxi top | via ShowMedia

ART CAB
Happy Holidays from John Amato. The president of Show Media, a company that sells ads on NYC taxis, is devoting 500 ad spots to feature art by Chuck Close and Kehinde Wiley. This is the second year self-proclaimed art lover Amato has done this. Last year, work by Yoko Ono and Alex Katz traveled the city streets. Now if only someone would donate video installations to replace TaxiTV inside the cabs…
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OBAMA’S URBAN POLICY
Jarett Murphy at City Limits checks in on the progress of the Obama administration’s urban policies, hoping that the White House Office of Urban Affairs will pick up the pace on policy implementation as the President enters the second half of his term. Murphy cites the collaboration between federal agencies, like the Sustainable Cities Initiative led by HUD, the DOT and the EPA, as evidence that urban policy is slowly aligning with the demands of today’s metro growth and getting out of bureaucratic mire, but says the administration needs to follow up on planning with tangible projects to win favor and funding.
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NEW YEAR, NEW TRANSIT
The TransportPolitic reports on widespread commitment to public transportation in US and Canadian cities for 2011, saying that five new light rail lines slated to open over the next year, along with over a dozen other transportation projects that will break ground, “represent a continent-wide public sector commitment to the extension of transit offerings.” In New York, construction will continue on both commuter and metro rails, with LIRR access at Grand Central planned for 2016 and the much discussed 2nd Ave subway line to open in 2017.
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TAXI OF TOMORROW
Want to pick the taxi of tomorrow? The ubiquitous yellow cab is being revamped, and the City is asking New Yorkers to make the final call. At a news conference on Monday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that he is seeking the advice of the project’s “most important stakeholders” — New York City residents — to choose between three design prototypes. The City selected Ford, Nissan and Turkish manufacturers Karsan Otomotiv Sanayi & Ticaret AS as the final three contenders to redesign the entire fleet of cabs based on feedback from taxi drivers, owners and passengers. The winning design will be on the streets for the next ten years, though, because the average life span of a taxi is three to five years, cab owners fear that sourcing from one manufacturer could present problems if they fail to steadily supply replacements and parts. Survey takers are asked questions about what they think the priorities of the taxis of the future should be, from fuel economy to electric outlets to accessibility. Need more incentive? Not only will participants be able to influence the design of one of the most iconic symbols of New York City, they will also be in the running to win a year of free cab rides, sponsored by the Design Trust for Public Space.
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OPPORTUNITY, MAPPED
The American Human Development Project has created an interactive map (designed and built by Zachary Watson and Omnibus Advisory Committee member Rosten Woo) charting what they call the Human Development Index. Considering factors of health, knowledge and standard of living, the index computes wellbeing and opportunity on a scale from one to ten. The index can be sorted by state, congressional district, metro area, ethnic identity or zip code to find stats on life expectancy, school enrollment, population demographics, income, and much, much more. New Yorkers should be pleased to note that the City’s Congressional District 14 ranks highest on the overall Development Index, with a score of 8.79 (Kentucky’s Congressional District 5 comes in last at 2.82). Well designed and informative, the maps let users explore the facts of interrelated economic diversity and standard of living geographically, and compare their own opportunities with those of other Americans.
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Subway to Secaucus proposal by Steve Lanset and Ralph Braskett | via subwaytosecaucus.com

SUBWAY TO SECAUCUS
There was a lot of talk this week about an idea to extend the 7 train to Secaucus, New Jersey. Planners hoped the 3 billion dollars that was freed up after Governor Christie tanked the ARC Tunnel last month might go to the project, but, according to Jeff Zupin, transportation fellow at the Regional Plan Association, the funds have disappeared and the extension is now being deemed financially unfeasible by local government. Though a popular topic this week, the subway to Seacaucus is not a new concept. The New York Times interviewed Steve Lanset and Ralph Braskett who proposed the idea five years ago. Though not involved with the recent proposal coming from City Hall, Lanset and Braskett “had a hunch that the new plan had borrowed from his older one.”
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SEXTON AS MOSES
Make way for NYU. New York Magazine profiled the school’s president John Sexton this week, boldly comparing him to Robert Moses. Sexton’s expansion plan, known as NYU 2031, will add 6 million square feet to the campus, substantially altering the built environment of Greenwich Village and putting the core of downtown New York on the path to becoming a college town. His idea for the school goes beyond new dorms and research labs – he sees the city and the university as a connected entity and believes the project will catalyze economic and cultural development. This comes to the chagrin of many neighbors and preservationists who don’t see the proposed 38-story hotel and residential hall fitting in with the Village’s historic buildings, and who won a victory last month when the City Council rezoned parts of the West and East Villages instituting an 80-foot height limit. The new code poises both camps for a debate on the character of the Village and the impact of educational institutions on culture in the city.
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SMART SYSTEMS
The Economist recently published a special report on Smart Systems, heralding the “virtualization of the real world.” Though the comparison of these systems to a 1990’s sci-fi movie is an easy one, the idea of information-linked objects has practical ramifications in growing cities, and potential for a more participatory urbanism. Roads and bridges can be equipped with sensors that update data mainframes, alerting agencies when repairs are needed. Through smart phone applications, citizens can download information about services in their area just by snapping a picture of the street, or report on needed improvements throughout the city. And that’s just a start. Though concerns about privacy, security and surveillance make many users nervous, smart systems are on a path to transform our cities, streets, infrastructure and buildings, and the more informed we are about the technology, the better we can engage it. “The biggest risk is that smart systems become black boxes, closed even to citizens who have the skills to understand them. Smart systems will make the world more transparent only if they themselves are transparent.” For more ideas on participatory software in the city, look back at Adam Greenfield’s Omnibus feature on citizen responsiveness and a “read/write urbanism.”

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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.

Flooding in Nowshera, Pakistan, August 5th, 2010. Satellite Image: Digital Globe

With the frequency of apocalyptic natural disasters only seeming to increase, the major lessons we learned at the Institute for Urban Design’s Rebuilding a Sustainable Haiti symposium — that relief is not reconstruction, that holistic approaches to recovery and service delivery must engage national development frameworks, that investments in education and health are inextricable from infrastructure — resonate with the humanitarian nightmare continuing to unfold in Pakistan. An area the size of Italy is currently underwater. And while the known death-toll is mercifully lower than the Haiti earthquake or the Asian Tsunami, the scale of devastation is far greater: tens of millions of homes and livelihoods have been destroyed, cholera is spreading fast, and the worst of the flooding is not necessarily over. Speaking at the Asia Society yesterday, George Soros reminded the audience not to forget, amid the appeals for immediate assistance, the role that continued emission of greenhouse gasses has played in warming the planet and making its storms stronger. If you’re looking for ways to help, one option is Relief4Pakistan, a grassroots campaign working with MercyCorps. To donate $10 to the UN High Commission for Refugees from your mobile phone, text “SWAT” to 50555.

Our friends at We Make Money Not Art have a comprehensive review of a new book called Urban Interventions — Personal Projects in Public Spaces. The work described in the book — 200 projects that, according to publisher Gestalten, “surprise and provoke with work in cities including New York and London, but also in countries such as China, Columbia, and Turkey” — reminds us of the extent to which performances, installations and creative structural improvements in public space have become a genre of public art unto themselves. The emerging field of practice, of course, also includes many architects and designers seeking to suggest alternative uses and futures within public space, kind of like the temporary structures built from found materials over the course of the Make a Difference in Two Days Event we hosted with Bryan Bell in late 2008.

Sometimes, proposing the redesign of a public object on your own initiative doesn’t require a one-off installation. Especially if you can share it with readers of the New York Times. Interdisciplinary design team antenna (who have lent their considerable talents to everything from subway cars to office furniture) recently offered a Times op-art piece that points out what’s wrong with New Yorkers’ least favorite TV screens — the ones in taxis — by offering a viable alternative scheme.

Not too long ago, we took a walk with Neil Freeman to the geographical center of New York City. If that whet your appetite for centers, then head to Lebanon, Kansas for “The Centers of the USA,” an exhibit of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, open indefinitely since August 14th. “The exhibit depicts and describes several of the ‘Centers’ of the United States, such as the geodetic center, in Lucas, Kansas; the geographic center, near Belle Fourche, South Dakota; and the current population center, in Edgar Springs, Missouri.”

Photo: Eric Allix Rogers

Lights out for the flying saucer: the Architect’s Newspaper reports that Terminal 3 will be demolished and Terminal 4 will be expanded. As much as we love mid-century modern, Terminal 3 has been need of an overhaul for some time now. Any chance the expanded Terminal 4 will be as much fun as the JetBlue terminal?

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Brooklyn Bridge, 1898

Every borough has its own fabled histories, idiosyncratic residents and constantly negotiated neighborhoods. This summer, WNYC is running Borough Tales, a series that explores the legends and quirks of each borough and invites listeners to ask questions of some passionate borough historians. Last week, Queens Borough Historian Jack Eichenbaum spoke about the significance of neighborhoods and the changing patterns of immigration in Queens. This week Brooklyn Borough Historian Ron Schweiger chose his favorite era in Brooklyn history and spoke about being a life long Brooklynite, a Dodgers (and now Cyclones) fan, and the creation of the Coney Island Hot Dog, the nation’s first fast food.

Speaking of food, a reminder for our Toronto readers that Foodprint Toronto, the second in a series of international conversations about food and cities organized by Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, is taking place tomorrow, July 31. Twilley and Rich spoke with us earlier this year about food systems and their impact on the city, in anticipation of their inaugural Foodprint event here in New York (and stay tuned for a follow-up piece from Twilley next month). This time around Pruned has interviewed the pair about the Toronto event and how they’ll be picking up where they left off in New York City.

One of many points of intersection between food and cities is, of course, community gardens, some of which provide the land required for urban farming. Community gardeners in New York have relied for some time on an agreement between the City and the State Attorney General’s office that helps to protect community gardens from purchase and development. Way back in January 2009, we learned more about this from Holly Leicht, who was involved in litigation leading to the original agreement, while we were investigating urban agriculture in East New York. This agreement is set to expire in September. Make your opinions known by writing in to either the Department of Parks & Recreation (read their rules in this PDF) or the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (read their rules in this PDF) by August 10th. Read more about this on Treehugger.

Clearly, open space of all stripes requires politics and planning, in New York as elsewhere. Peter Harnik, director of the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land, has written a book on the subject entitled Urban Green: Innovative Parks for Resurgent Cities, in which he shares case studies from Atlanta to Chicago to Pittsburgh. Read Anne Schwartz’s informative review of the book on Gotham Gazette.

For a different kind of public space, Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta is among those firms selected to design permanent public places along the newly pedestrianized sections of Broadway. Famed Marxist urbanist David Harvey may think that reclaiming the avenue for foot traffic is just a part of the process of turning “the whole damn place into a suburb,” but we are looking forward to the designs. Other firms in the project team include WxY architecture + urban design, Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects, BILLINGS JACKSON DESIGN, Leni Schwendinger Light Projects LTD, Pure + Applied, Weidlinger, Buro Happold, BEXEL, Wesler Cohen, and Ducibella Venter and Santore.

Another kind of street life, including “beautifully bleak” images of “New York City’s ventilation towers, highway underpasses, demolition sites and dumps”, has found itself epicted in the canvasses of Rackstraw Downes since the 1960s. Right now, the American landscapes of the British-born artist are on display in three exhibitions, “Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y., “Rackstraw Downes: Under the Westside Highway,” at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut; and “Rackstraw Downes: A Selection of Drawings 1980 to 2010” at the Betty Cunningham gallery in Chelsea.

If Downes’ urban landscapes inspire you to don your safari hat and binoculars for that epic urban hike this weekend, leave your GPS enabled device at home and use the very satisfying techniques of natural navigation. For tips on how, check out this New York Times infographic.

In other news, the director of design documentaries Helvetica, which explores typography through the eponymous and iconic typeface, and Objectified, which explores the world of producct and industrial design, has set his sights on urban design for the third movie in the series: Urbanized. The MTA has released its preliminary budget for 2011, confirming rumors of fare and bridge toll hikes as well as eliminating the one-day and 14-day unlimited MetroCards. The New York taxi fleet looks beyond the era of the iconic Ford Crown Vics. The Landmarks Preservation Commission is set to deny landmark status to the potential site of downtown Mosque, clearing the way for construction of the controversial religious center to go forward, notwithstanding the Mosque-exclusion zone guidelines advanced by the likes of Newt Gingrich. And last but not least, and not a moment too soon, Mayor Bloomberg’s bed bug advisory task force releases its recommendations, including that the mayor appoint a bed bug czar to tackle high-stakes pest control.

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Next Tuesday, the Architectural League will host a talk by Andrew Whalley, who heads up the New York Office of the international architecture firm Grimshaw Architects. Many of this firm’s current and recent work has Urban Omni-love written all over it, from the expansion of the Queens Museum of Art to the Fulton Street Transit Center to the massive overhaul of New York’s street furniture, including 3,300 bus shelters, 330 newsstands and 20 automatic public toilets. So come out next Tuesday to the Great Hall at Cooper Union and hear all about Grimshaw’s work. (And, remember, if you are a member of the Architectural League, admission is free. Please join today, and make note if you’re an Omnibus reader; we could really use your support).

In their respective Omnibus features, both Robin Chase and Rachel Abrams spoke of the incredible potential of instituting some sort of ride-sharing scheme for New York City cabs. Well, the Taxi and Limousine Commission is all set to move forward with three cab stands – at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, 72nd Street and Third Avenue, and 72nd Street and Columbus. Our take? Sounds cool, but the fact that all routes are fixed to head down Park Avenue to 42nd Street makes it seem rather like a bus. Where would you like to see a cab stand where you can share a cut-rate cab with a stranger? Let us know in the comments.

Or maybe shared cab-stand recommendations could follow the trend of map-based, user-suggested, urban problem solving. Instead of using the internet to flag a pothole or report a code violation, you can use this site to make your voice heard on the best location for bike racks.

Newton Creek news just in: five oil companies are working on a deal to pay for the investigation phase of the Creek’s clean-up, which will end up being far more expensive and complicated than the one for the Gowanus Canal.

An entirely different sort of relationship between private money and public aspirations has sparked intense debate and protests at the proposed Kingsbridge Armory mall conversion, over the issue of requiring a living wage for retail workers. Going forward, we think we’ll be following this one pretty closely, so if there’s a blogger out there who wants to cover this project, get in touch.

On a lighter note, we couldn’t help but agree with Curbed that Columbia’s historic real estate brochure collection is 100% floorplan porn! The online database “consists of over 9,200 advertising brochures, floor plans, price lists, and related materials that document residential and commercial real estate development in the five boroughs of New York and outlying vicinities from the 1920s to the 1970s.” The digitization of all Brooklyn addresses in the collection is complete, Manhattan will be available in January 2010, and the rest are forthcoming, borough by borough. Hot.

Top image: Grimshaw-designed street furniture, courtesy of Cemusa. Bottom image: Address: 35 Prospect Park West | Borough: Brooklyn, New York City | Neighborhood: Park Slope – Gowanus | Architect: Roth, Emery | Owner / Agent: Realty Associates, Inc. 35 Park West Corp. Bruton, Francis X. | Format: Brochure | Call number: YR.0499.BR.002.004

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