Free City

The New York Times reports that four City Council members will let their constituents decide how to spend $1 million, in a process known as participatory budgeting. Open meetings will be used to generate ideas, after which constituent volunteers will develop proposals for how to use the money. The four were inspired by similar processes in Chicago and in other countries. In one council district in Chicago where the alderman had instituted participatory budgeting, the constituents not only determined that some of the money should be used for sidewalk repair, they walked the sidewalks to determine where their money should be directed. Continue Reading »

The Bloomberg administration announced recently that it had chosen the new model for the New York City taxi cab, the minivan-like Nissan NV200. The van has a number of interesting features, including outlets and USB ports for charging cell phones and PDAs, and sliding doors for reducing dooring of pedestrians and cyclists (OK, neither USB ports nor sliding doors are exactly rocket science). The van also gets a respectable 25 mpg. Certainly not revolutionary, but a significant improvement over the roughly 15 mpg of the fleet-dominating Ford Crown Victoria. Not as good as the one-third of the fleet which are already hybrids Continue Reading »