Stay Free! Daily

Advertising's scary new weapon: sonic beams

Just when you thought you've see it all, along comes a terrifying new form of advertising. An A&E billboard on Prince Street (bet. Mulberry and Mott) in Manhattan is using ultrasound waves to beam audio to hyper-targeted areas along the sidewalk below. If you've seen The Men Who Stared at Goats, then you'll recognize this as military technology that uses "your skull as a speaker." In other words, it beams hypersonic sounds to scare victims, make them nauseous, or cause them to faint. Yes, exactly the sort of thing we want on our streets!

Steve Lambert was able to get his hands on this demo video of the A&E ad, so you can see how it works. Hopefully neighborhoods groups (NYC Streets? Municipal Art Society? Project for Public Spaces?) will see this for what it is—a potential public health hazard—and pass ordinances banning this stuff.

(Via The Anti-Advertising Agency)

311 street photo project could use your help

Steve Lambert and I are working on photo project called "People's 311" and are asking New Yorkers to submit photos of 311 conditions in their neighborhoods. To give you a rough idea of what we're going for, see flickr.com/groups/311/.

In order to launch this right, we need to get a lot more photos up (cell phone cameras are ok!). Here's what we need photos of:

* potholes
* sidewalk or bikelane hazards
* illegal outdoor advertising
* dead or dying street trees
* peeling paint in public places (subways)
* damaged or open fire hydrants
* missing or dangling traffic signs
* fallen over newspaper boxes
* illegal dumping

...and the like. You can submit them via our flickr pool. If you know how to map photos in flickr, please do.

We'll also be doing a web page (http://peoples311.com) describing the project. In a nutshell, People's 311 is a crowdsourcing response to Bloomberg's 311 Scout program, which he announced last week.  He'll be sending city workers out to "drive every city street on a monthly basis" to report 311 problems.  Seems like something citizens could help with...

NYC's new 311 plan

On WNYC today, I heard about a new Bloomberg plan to create teams of "SCOUT Inspectors," who will drive across every city street once a month and report on quality-of-life matters: overflowing trashcans, street potholes, and the like. This struck me as strange: Isn't this what 311 is for? Are there not enough problems reported to 311 that the City needs to hire investigators to drum up more work? Is there something I'm missing here or is this some lame PR move?

If Bloomberg is serious about fixing public streets and spaces, there's got to be better way of going about it. Here's one thought: why not try crowdsourcing and utilize the cheap labor of motivated residents? A website that allowed people to submit photos of 311 conditions (potholes, overflowing garbage, SUVs blocking sidewalks), along with the locations, would be neat. If substantial numbers of people participated, the City wouldn't need to invest so much in SCOUTs and would be better equipped to prioritize what needs tending to.

City officials would never go for it, but if such a photo pool was public, it'd be a neat tool for keeping tabs on the city's progress... not unlike Uncivil Servants. On my block, several bricks in the street are missing, making it dangerous for bikers; and there's a dead (or dying) street tree. Photos of this kind of think would, if collected in large numbers, be helpful to city agencies, whether they realize it or not.

I'm tempted to try launching a flickr pool and seeing if other people are up for documenting city decay. It'd also be fun to solicit and include photos of things that the city doesn't normally count as a quality-of-life violations: illegal street advertising, for instance.

Anyway, if anyone has any thoughts on the above, please be sure to comment.

No Fare Hike? Thank Mickey Mouse.

One MTA board member suggested a new way to avoid a fare hike last week -- plaster the Times Square subway station with Mickey Mouse and friends. The Times' Cityroom quotes the boardmember, a Mr. Norman Seabrook:

I would rather try to sell 42nd Street’s subway system underground to Disney for $60 million a year and have them paint it any way that they want to paint it. They spend $100 million for one minute to be on the Super Bowl on a Sunday. I think that they would spend X amount of dollars in rent for that terminal. I think 34th Street would do it. I think other businesses around the state and the city would do it. That would lessen the burden on the public.

I already nearly close my eyes for the two-minute shuttle ride from Grand Central to Times Square when the interior of the cars are completely coated in ads for Delta Air or HBO. I suppose I'd grin and bear it if that meant my daily rides stayed $2 each. But the MTA needs billions, not millions, to accomplish its huge capital improvements -- 2nd Avenue subway anyone? And I don't think even Disney could bail the city out of that one...

An SUV experiment

For those of you in New York, WNYC's Brian Lehrer show is looking for people to participate in a crowdsourcing experiment, By Thursday, they want you to count the SUVs on your block and to report back to them with your findings. In order to use your info, they'll need the following:

1. Your neighborhood
2. Your block (street and cross streets)
3. The number of SUVs parked 
4. The total number of cars parked.

I plan on participating myself, though I'm not quite sure what the point is. According to the website:

We’re trying to find out just how much gas-guzzling SUV use there is throughout the New York area, with all the talk of environmental sustainability in the city.

If they think people are hypocritical about driving SUVs while professing a love of the environment, they would do well to read James Surowiecki's column in a recent New Yorker.

As Surowiecki points out, Americans overwhelming support fuel-economy standards, even though they continue to buy gas-guzzling SUVs. But what looks like a contradiction makes sense when you realize that Americans associate big cars with safety (erroneously, but with reason). So while they'd prefer that gas-guzzling tanks not be on the road, they don't want to be dwarfed by these vehicles if they are.

Surowiecki compares the situation to the National Hockey League in the 70s, when hockey players voted for the league to require helmets, even though most players personally chose not to wear them. Helmets protected players from head injuries, but gave them a competitive disadvantage: it was harder to see in them, for example. As long as some players wore helmets and others didn't, the players who didn't had an advantage. But if rules required everyone to wear the helmets (which they eventually did), everyone benefited from greater safety and a level playing field.

So, while owning an SUV in the city may seem to make no sense whatsoever, a healthy percentage of SUV drivers would probably welcome SUVs eradication. (The rest, we can presume, are self-centered, delusional pricks.)

(Via Streetsblog)

Very Proffessional

23rd & 8th, NYC

The Official Whiny Blog Post of New York

I heard a radio commercial this morning that concluded with, "That's why, in our opinion, Subaru is the official car of New York." Corporations routinely pay huge sums to be recognized as the official so-and-so of whatever. A very quick Web search of the New York Yankees finds they have an official airline; an official athletic apparel and footwear company; an official printer, copier, and SLR camera provider; an official amino-acid sports supplement drink; and the list goes on and on. But apparently Subaru believes if you toss in an IMHO, you can circumvent those pesky contracts and fees.

Now, you might be thinking, "Jack, lighten up, you take commercials too seriously and as a result seem humorless." Hey, I'd let it slide if it was totally innocuous like "the official super-fun vacation getaway of summer!" But New York City actually has a rapidly growing number of official designations, from an official flag and an official journal, to more modern products. So I just think Subaru should keep their eyes on their rearview mirror—New York City's legal eagles may soon be after you. As for me, I'm still working on the paperwork to become the official so-and-so of whatever.

New York's Rules on Behavior

In the wake of 9/11, the New York subway system instituted a number of security rules—random bag checks, essentially—to the mostly unenforced safety and courtesy rules. Because random bag checks are only going to stop terrorists unwilling to turn around and walk one block to an unmanned entrance, the MTA has a much-maligned If you see something, say something program, deputizing us all. So, how's that working?

Last night, riding the Q train home after a show, I saw an open seat on the train but there was a bag on it. I started with the usual passive-aggressive maneuver—moving towards the seat and staring at the bag's likely owner. She didn't flinch, so I had to go to the more aggressive request that she remove the bag. But it wasn't hers. And the guy who was sitting in the perpendicular row of seats also disclaimed ownership. So I tucked the "bomb?" under the seat and we rode on.

While we're on the subject of unenforced safety rules, I'd like to welcome back the age of public urination in New York. Last week I saw a guy slide behind a beam at the W.4th Street station relieve himself around 6PM, well before he had a chance to get himself drunk enough to make it even halfway acceptable. This past Tuesday, on E.4th St., a guy took a break from cashing in his cans at the Avenue A Key Food and hid between two cars to pee. Well, he "hid" to the extent that "flagrantly exposing himself to the women in the Go Girl nail salon (and me)" counts as "hiding." One more and we've got a trend.

NYT op-ed on Congestion Pricing

Sunday's New York Times had a couple of Op-Eds about Mayor Bloomberg's plan for congestion pricing in New York City. One of them, by Ellen F. Crain, makes almost no sense at all. Crain argues that congestion pricing will inadvertently lead to more traffic in the outer boroughs because "drivers will be looking for parking near subways there to take them to Midtown."

I'd love to ask Ms. Crain where all this presumably free and easy parking in Brooklyn is. I'm in Flatbush and even here free parking is slim pickins. The plumber across the street sometimes sits in his car for an hour just waiting for a space to open up. The idea that swarms of people rich enough to keep a car in the City would drive to another neighborhood, search for a space to park, then board the train for a 35-minute ride to the city just to save $4 (assuming the subway and back is $4) takes some imagination. I don't know about the other boroughs, but I'm going to guess that the closer one gets to the city and the subway, the harder it is to find free parking.

The entire Op-Ed rests on this claim, which is totally unsubstantiated in any way. It also doesn't acknowledge that there's a pretty easy workaround: get rid of free parking!

The High Cost of Free Parking

Slate has a nice column about Donald Shoup's pathbreaking book The High Cost of Free Parking, called "Why Parking Your Car Is More Environmentally Destructive Than Driving It."

Urban on-street parking is almost always underpriced, which is why you can almost never find a spot. In many cases, it would be better to have no on-street parking at all, freeing up that real estate for expanded homes, shops and cafes or additional driving lanes.

Clearly, the New York City administration could stand to read Shoup's book. A new study out illustrates much unnecesssary  parking and driving in New York, including this factoid:

The average cost of parking on-street at a meter is $1.73 compared with $21 to $27 (depending on duration) for off-street parking in the Manhattan central business district.