I realized recently that I had accumulated four Metrocards for the NY subway system, three of which had less that the minimum for a fare. Someone had mentioned that you could move the funds onto one card, but not at the automated kiosks. To do so, you have to stand in line at a teller booth, and once I was there, I was informed that there is a limit: up to four cards. Then I went through a truly astonishing procedure, where I swiped the cards on a reader that was outside the teller booth, told her the amounts, and handed her the cards. She then did something with the card inside the booth, and gave me one card back. It took maybe ten minutes.
Obviously, the MTA does not want to make it easy to get back all the fragmentary amounts on the mazillion of Metrocards purchased every year. In fact it turns out the $52M in unused fares falls into the hands of the MTA every year. Now, some socially conscioius NYU students have an idea to divert those less-than-$2.25 amounts to good causes:
Zak Stone via Good
A new project from a trio of New York University students seeks to transform that monumental sum into a public good. MetroChange is their concept for a charity platform that would make it simple for subway riders to donate spare change to nonprofits. With a swipe at MetroChange kiosks set up in highly-trafficked subway stations around the city, subway riders could scan their card to see how much change was left. Then, with the push of a button, they could donate the balance. At the end of every month, MetroChange would turn that change into social change by donating it to charity.
According to MetroChange, the idea would work best if the kiosks targeted tourists, who are less likely to refill their cards. But while it sounds like a simple, effective idea, founders Stepan Boltalin, Genevieve Hoffman, and Paul Maywill need to convince a key partner to sign on: the MTA. According to MetroChange’s blog, they see two likely ways to partner: The MTA could agree to return the “unused value back to the community where it originated” or an outside group could agree to make a monthly match. MetroChange is actively recruiting partners. Message them via Twitter to send your ideas.
Software heavyweight moves headquarters to Silicon Alley - NY Daily News
New York City’s challenge to Silicon Valley’s high-tech dominance continues apace. By the time Mayor Bloomberg’s brainchild of an applied sciences campus takes root in 2013, the momentum may be too great to stop.
Latest case in point: Infor, the world’s third-largest creator of manufacturing software, is moving its headquarters from Atlanta to the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan — joining Google, Facebook, Twitter and other leading-edge firms in establishing a major presence in the city.
CEO Charles Phillips says the prospect of the new engineering campus — the prize Stanford, Cornell and others are fiercely competing for — was a big part of the reason behind the relocation.
Another example of New York as a multicultural, multi-scene high tech hotbed, competing against the monocultural Bay Area.
Mapping New York’s startup scene. Richard Florida has a great piece on why timing is right of NYC’s tech move as the new Silicon Valley.
WATER WASTED:
More than 37,800 liters of water is lost via leakage every minute as it flows through New York State’s aqueducts into the city, according to IBM. The wall visualizes a calculation of that volume of water corresponding to the volume of the data wall. “Essentially we’re filling the wall with digital water,” IBM’s Lee Green, vice president of brand experience and strategic design, explains.
(via Sensors and the City: IBM Exhibit Visualizes Today’s Urban Problems—and Potential Solutions)
(Source: stoweboyd)
Janette Sadik-Khan, Bicycle Visionary - NYTimes.com
Frank Bruni via NY Times
Biking, it seems, is an uphill ride, due largely to mathematics and a sort of Catch-22: with only a small percentage of Americans using bicycles as their primary method of transportation, there’s no huge public outcry for — or immediate political benefit to — remaking city streets so that they’re a little less friendly to cars and a lot more hospitable to bikes.
But without that hospitality, primarily in the form of better bike lanes and more bike racks, biking isn’t convenient and attractive enough to win all that many converts and thus a political constituency.
So if a city believes that biking is part of a better future, it must sometimes muscle through a reluctant, rocky present. That’s precisely what Bloomberg and [Janette] Sadik-Khan have done, in a fine example of the way the mayor’s frequent imperiousness and imperviousness to criticism can work to the city’s long-term advantage. If anything, the two of them should move even faster and more boldly, but that’s pure fantasy, given the opposition, bordering on hysteria, they’ve met so far.
[…]
In the end the resistance that she and the city have encountered has to do mostly with parochialism and selfishness. Some New Yorkers seem offended by the notion that we should be more like such biking havens as Copenhagen, Paris, or for that matter, Portland, Ore.: life here is too urgent and blunt and brutal for such crunchy-granola niceties. Besides which, no one wants to give an inch, literally: not the Prospect Park West gripers who lost parking spaces to the bike lane, not the drivers of delivery trucks whose jobs are sometimes complicated by such lanes, not the Manhattan traditionalists who feel that sharing just a few of Central Park’s transverse paths with cyclists — as the city decided in July they must do — requires too much in the way of vigilance from people ambling among the trees. The complaints were loud and passionate.
We just need to keep pushing, pushing, pushing.
Yes, even in New York City, car culture is deeply rooted — so we are pleased that Khan and her team are trying to undo the damage of decades of automobile hegemony. Does Khan always succeed? Of course not. But she is fighting a battle that must be fought if we hope to regain control of our streets and neighborhoods.
Romesco, Union Square, NYC, 2 Dec 2009
Strange Exterior
Meat Packing District, Bollard
The Pork Shop, NYC
Gallons of watches, NYC
NYC wall
Chrysler Building
