Posts about Video

From their writeup:

"Great neighborhoods are not necessarily what we thought they were," Wells says. "We used to think we divided ourselves in sections…you put schools over here, housing over here, stores over here. And what we found was that in order to get anywhere and to do anything, you had to get in your car…And the more that we lived in our cars and in this sort of a sectional, stove-piped community, the more we didn't see each other."

Wells gave a name to the type of lifestyle for which he advocates: "Five-minute living." Being able to walk, bike or take public transit to one's destination as opposed to driving further away offers innumerable benefits to the community, Wells says. It makes for healthier lifestyles, keeps money in the local economy and supports the growth of strong traditional neighborhoods.

In Ward 6, Wells has spent much of his time emphasizing the need to break down barriers to change and to better connect sections of the city.

Belgian group Responsible Young Drivers organized the stunt. Somehow they apparently managed to make some new drivers think they were going for a real driving test. The examiner claimed that a new law requires them to demonstrate they can text while driving to pass the test. Several insist it's impossible; one says he feels "like an idiot who can't drive" and "will stop driving" if the law goes into effect.

Video from Responsible Young Drivers via the Oregonian.

The show was famous for many things, but one is the long "walk and talk" or "pedeconference" shots where cast members walked through numerous rooms and corridors, having long conversations and even being joined by new people, while the camera followed without a cut.

Sadly, it's clear that in this video they didn't have quite a large enough set to do the kind of massive walk and talk from the show or its antecedent, Sports Night, but the good news is, people can walk much farther at a stretch in most places around the country.

We all know walking is good for health. I haven't seen any studies on the health benefits of talking at the same time, though.

In the 35 years since the last comprehensive rewrite, the zoning code has grown through countless amendments. New zones were created, text altered, and uses added and subtracted. And there's been one major change: the county has no more space for greenfield development.

When this code made its debut in 1977, the county was still rapidly suburbanizing. But in the last 3½ decades, the county has changed significantly. There's almost no open land left that's not preserved for agriculture. For Montgomery to grow, the county's planners need tools to allow infill and encourage car-oriented commercial centers to redevelop into walkable places.

This is also an opportunity to make the zoning code easier to understand and more accessible to the lay person. Just see the part of the above video where our own Matt Johnson explains the rules for height in one single-family residential zone.

The Planning Department has put a great deal of information about the rewrite effort on a special webpage devoted to the project. And they want your input on the process.

This month, the department is hosting a series of open houses around the county to talk with residents. These meetings are a great way to learn more about the project and tell planners your thoughts on the proposed changes.

Four open houses remain: Monday, April 16 in Bethesda, Monday, April 23 in Germantown, Tuesday, April 24 in Wheaton, and Tuesday, May 1 in Rockville. All of the meeting locations are transit-accessible, and run from 5-8 pm.

Jantzen writes:

The bikes don't have GPS transmitters on them, so all we know is the data for the start and end of each trip. Thus, all dots are shown moving in straight lines. The speed of course doesn't correspond to the rider's actual speed, since we don't know their routes, or whether they paused for stops along the way. ...

The CaBi data includes whether the rider was a casual or registered user, depending on whether the rider's membership was for a month or longer. The movie shows casual users with dots that fade from green to yellow. Registered users are represented with dots that fade from blue to purple. A histogram on the right records the number of bikes in use at each moment.

The movie excludes the 210 trips that began and ended at the same station. 63% of these "round trips" were made by casual users. (Casual users made up 32% of the other trips.) You will still see some dots that appear to be stationary, but they are actually moving very slowly, representing people who go far, far beyond the 30-minute time limit for free trips.

It would be interesting to see one for a weekday as well. We know weekdays look very different from weekends.

Update: Jantzen realized that the original video used data from November 20, 2010, not 2011 as he originally planned. He has now updated the video and the new video is in this post. You can also still see the original video. The new video shows data for Saturday, November 19, 2011.

The revolutionary app allows texting drivers to "see" bicyclists and pedestrians in their path, and promises to significantly cut down on incidents of drivers hitting these other road users.

Greenbelt Mayor Pro Tem Emmett Jordan, Dr. Allen Lim of Skratch Labs and author of the The Feed Zone cookbook, and cyclocross superstar Tim Johnson all shared their thoughts for the video. The product demos were done in conjunction with Tim Johnson's Ride on Washington and sponsored by Proteus Bicycles in College Park.

Small business: As in many forums, most candidates gave few specifics, and in most cases didn't sharply disagree with one another. For example, I asked all candidates to talk about a time they'd helped a local business directly. I asked this first of Vincent Orange, who often touts his work bringing Home Depot to the Rhode Island Avenue Metro area but when talking about small business, speaks much more in generalities.

Orange and the other candidates launched into generic, prepared statements about the value of small business. Sekou Biddle's answer, that he helps them most of all by patronizing them, was the most responsive. Orange was, however, able to name a lot of local businesses once pressed.

Affordable housing: Peter Shapiro had thoughtful recommendations for how to promote housing affordability, drawing on his experience with Arts District Hyattsville when he served in Prince George's County. Perhaps because of his experience as an elected official in the past, Shapiro gave more specifics about actions he has taken or policies he would implement on this and some other issues.

All candidates raised their hands when asked if they would restore the Housing Production Trust Fund; hopefully Orange, in this budget cycle, and whoever wins the race, in the future, follows through on that promise.

Ethics: Shapiro went the furthest on campaign finance reform, criticizing the current council for not taking stronger steps and arguing it should pursue a public financing system for elections. Biddle called for reforms to money order contributions, the source of the latest scandal.

Orange, as he has in the past, emphasized his advocacy for banning outside employment for councilmembers, but hasn't agreed to support limits on corporate contributions. He defended his decision not to cosponsor Mary Cheh's recent campaign finance bill as "self-serving," since Cheh holds other jobs as a law professor at GW and teaching bar review courses. (Tommy Wells, the one co-sponsor, does not have any outside employment).

Transportation: During a section on transportation, it came out that of the candidates, only Sekou Biddle is a member of Capital Bikeshare, and only he and Peter Shapiro subscribe to Zipcar. Biddle even pulled out his CaBi key, on his keychain, and his Zipcar membership card right on the stage.

I asked candidates about how we could help cyclists and drivers better understand each other's needs and concerns. Without being "gotcha" about it, I wanted to give Vincent Orange a chance to speak to what he had learned from the January 1st episode where he parked in the 15th Street bike lane, was called out on Twitter, and apologized. Orange said that he hadn't realized on which side of the white stanchions he should park, and that now he does.

Biddle proposed having driver education include information on how to deal with bicycle infrastructure and people riding bikes. This would only be a small start, since many DC drivers move in from other states, but it was a thoughtful response on the topic.

Biddle was also most able to talk about the role of buses in helping connect communities. I asked candidates to name a bus line that they feel works well in DC, partly to see how many could name a bus line at all. Orange gave an example of a bus line, the X2, but couldn't name it without help from a staffer who shouted it out unprompted.

Holness, marriage, and the Redskins: Dr. E. Gail Anderson Holness, generally considered a long-shot candidate, gave some reasons to appreciate her candidacy, but also some reasons for concern. As a resident of Ward 1, she lives in the most urban neighborhood among the candidates, and says she rides a bicycle and takes many forms of transit regularly. She was able to name many bus lines and talk about them in depth.

However, Holness was the only candidate of the four not to encourage Maryland residents to vote to keep the new same-sex marriage law. She also said on last week's WPFW debate that she supports giving land to the Redskins for a practice facility, on the theory that the master plan calls for recreational space.

The plan does ask for recreation space, but intended to serve local residents, not to be a fenced-off facility that only serves a professional team. I pushed on this issue, asking her why she would fulfill a neighborhood request in this way. She didn't have a good answer and seemed confused by the policy details.

The other candidates all reaffirmed their opposition to the practice facility. Orange said he would support bringing the actual team back and potentially using public funds, if it were part of a plan to create a "livable, walkable" community around the stadium as the District is doing at the ballpark.

"Livable, walkable" actually is a phrase Orange spoke at least 5 times over the course of the debate. It's a testament to the phrase Tommy Wells coined for his campaign slogan, and the policies behind it, that Orange has latched on. Hopefully this means he genuinely supports the principles of "livable, walkable" communities; either way, he clearly believes it's a growing political force.

Kwame's revenge: Speaking of Mr. "Livable, Walkable" Wells, the forum's most dramatic moment came near the end, when Orange suggested that Wells should have at least toned down his criticism of Kwame Brown's Lincoln Navigator scandal, to avoid losing his committee and his opportunity to advance his agenda. Shapiro quickly disagreed, arguing that Wells was right to speak up and that it shows the "dysfunction" in the current council that others did not come to his defense.

Did the forum help you make up your mind? What stuck out as most meaningful to you?

It's a new take on the argument, and it forces us to think somewhat differently about the debate.

Normally, we talk about reducing the number of things that pollute (or reducing the amount that each pollutes). And while most people agree that a cleaner Earth is a better Earth, not everyone agrees that the cost is worth it.

But if we were suddenly faced with a world where everything had a tailpipe, we might feel differently.

Of course, the point of this ad is actually to make us wonder what would happen if everything didn't run on gas. (And also to sell their new electric car.)

TIMEMAPS lets you distort a map of the country based on how long it takes to reach any point from a starting location. It also animates how that map changes over the course of the day.

The animation begins at 1:23. Note how regions not accessible in the middle of the night become accessible as the animation gets toward the morning. Meanwhile, the map steadily shrinks, as transit options become more frequent into the daytime.

If someone did the same for a US city, it might be interesting to do the same for driving times, and see how space actually grows during rush periods, as more people traveling and more congestion makes places effectively farther away.

A similar site we've discussed before, the Travel Time Tube Map, similarly distorts the iconic London Underground diagram to reflect the actual time to reach each station from a chosen starting point.