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LimeWire's Mark Gorton Brings Open-Source To Urban Planning
mytrip writes to tell us that Mark Gorton of LimeWire fame is translating his knowledge from moving bits to moving people. Taking profits earned from his software business, Gorton is applying them to projects aimed at making urban transportation safer, faster, and more sustainable. "That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens. Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area."
There's an active forum on skyscraperpage that loves watching urban development projects.
Since there's an OCD community for every field.....perhaps this can be used to draw on their contributive energy.
Isn't that term an oxymoron?
Free Martian Whores!
I'm sure there's lots of them.
Skyscraperpage is awesome, but their interest is obviously a bit narrowed lol.
Mod Parent up. I work in a college with vast amounts of students running Limewire on their personal machines. Have yet to see one without a virus or trojan. We provide Sophos antivirus for free. We require windows updates before they can join the campus wireless. we have crosstalk between machines on the LAN disabled so they can't automagicly infect each other as they did in the blaster and welchia days. It's all for not and worthless the minute Limewire is loaded. Good magic. At least with most bittorrent they stand a chance of being malware free.
Better than a capitalist hell hole. Socialist hell holes are more equitable between demons and tortured souls.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Urban planning can be good and bad. Certainly Central Park is a win, but highways largely suck when they are run through existing cities. New York's mass transit is a combination of free market and planned routes...
Personally, one of my favorite little projects that demonstrates how a lack of planning is sometimes best is at University of Maryland. They have this center mall. Basically, the kept having to re-sod it because no one would stay on the paths. During a renovation it occurred to them to just pave the deer-paths... it looks crazy but now they don't have the same sod problems.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yeah! Fuck society, I never liked people. The more people talk the more my image of 'capitalist' turns into some fat guy in a suit on a pile of money hissing at people and raking at their shins if they come close.
If it's open-source, you can always build your own without all the spyware.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Strange how running LimeWire on Linux doesn't cause any of that.
My blog
Although I would quibble with some of the Prince of Wales' suggestions for urban villages, I think they would make for a sound footing for any kind of open source urban plan, even if they're sub-optimal. Sort of like POSIX is flawed as an OS specification, but starting from POSIX or using POSIX as a guide often produces better results (such as Linux) than starting completely from scratch (the way Windows has).
I would also point out that optimizing things for mass transit requires that the area in question actually supports meaningful mass transit. Most States either restrict it to a relatively insignificant area (eg: Portland OR's TriMet) or render what is supplied useless (never, ever take a bus in Norfolk, VA, unless you've got a week's supply of food).
I grew up with British Rail, Greater Manchester Transport and - when they finally appeared - Busy Bee Buses. As much as I had contempt for them - BR once excused their late trains on the wrong type of snow, and a single inspection one year failed over 30% of GMT's buses due to brake failure - the speeds, coverage and level of service would put any American mass transit system to shame.
Would I accept the UK's level of service in the US? It wold be infinitely better, but I wouldn't regard it with any less contempt. You don't have to go far to be infinitely better than zero. It would need to be vastly more reliable and vastly more dependable and have superior coverage.
(When you look at the disused stations and abandoned rail lines in the UK, you can get a better feel for what I consider to be an acceptable level of coverage. It must be possible to dispense with cars for the majority of the needs of the majority of the people, or it's insufficient to fix the root problems and will merely delay the inevitable.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Do you really want to live in a city designed by a bunch of fifteen year olds whose idea of a great city is lifted from World of Warcraft?
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Is this the park you speak of? It looks like they just paved most of the mall leaving room around a few trees, rather than a deer path type thing.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
This logic is without flaw; I forfeit the argument.
.. or Mac OS X. Can you come preach to the kids to switch operating systems? Won't somebody think of the children? Ok, they are young adults, but still.
Urban planning can be good and bad. Certainly Central Park is a win, but highways largely suck when they are run through existing cities.
What is the alternative, though? If you have the highways avoid the major city area, you are just adding more local traffic as people try to get to and from the highway.
You mention the University of Maryland. Are you near DC or Baltimore? The beltways always confused me. Since the highways were never straight (they were big circles around the cities), you couldn't really go directly anywhere. You always had to go around the beltway to get anywhere, which probably increased total distance driven. And it's debatable if there's any traffic benefit, as traffic in the DC area is probably some of the worst in the country.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Increasing the size of a basketball team from 5 to 40 would not make it a better game.
Even increasing the size of the court 5-8 times would not make it a better game.
Of course, increasing the maximum roster from 15 or so to say 40 might have beneficial impact. If you can get the benchwarmers to accept their roles as rarely playing. then you have to ask, what *is* their role?
TFA seems to imply that more people involved in the planning process is better. I doubt it much.
While it sounds all nice and open-source-cozy-and-warm, too many chefs spoil the soup. In the input end, more opinions, points of view, and unique ideas could yield some interesting options and maybe a new and better way. But as the planning process goes on, sooner or later decisions have to be made. The crowd is not necessarily better at making these decisions, nor does it make better decisions. Even the smaller group doesn't necessarily make better decisions when you increase the size of the group.
And opening up the planning process to all comers doesn't even guarantee you get good and talented people involved. You just get more. More is not always better. Knowing when it is and is not is key.
Some things might benefit, but the reality is that injecting an open-source solution into the urban planning process presupposes that urban planning is failing because of lack of involvement. Maybe it's failing because of acceptance. Or lack of adequate funding. Or a flawed vision.
Packing us into cities may be more effecient, but as a lifestyle it is not univerally admired.
Saying we should not be commuting so far to our jobs doesn't change the fact that many of us just don't want to live near where we work. And sometimes our jobs can't be relocated closer to our homes.
Way it is. Duh.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
About 30 minutes south.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Building a city flow is very different than building data flow.
The number one difference is that cities take pride in their monuments and historical buildings, which tend to become the source of traffic bottlenecks. It would be best if our cities could move with traffic demand, and scale with traffic demand. But currently that is impossible.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Bah, try this link instead.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
... from LimeWire?
Cantankerous old coot since 1957.
There are certainly some of those types out there, but their shrill voices make them appear a larger group than they truly are.
The root of capitalism is really nothing more than the belief that I know best how to spend my own money. If I am right then I should reap the benefits, and if I am wrong then I will suffer the consequences. Freedom and personal responsibility. That doesn't make me a greedy asshole, but neither does it prevent assholes from talking the same talk.
Your brain is not a computer.
What is the alternative, though? If you have the highways avoid the major city area, you are just adding more local traffic as people try to get to and from the highway.
Well, Manhattan hasn't suffered THAT much for lack of any central highways. Personally I think it improves the standard of living and discourages car ownership... both worthy goals.
You mention the University of Maryland. Are you near DC or Baltimore?
I have family and friends there, but no... I visited the U of M when I was looking for colleges in the early 90s, and they were very proud of their newly renovated mall.
For the record, the beltway makes me want to curl up in a ball and die. Boston, Philly, New York... none of them can hold a candle to the crazy ass drivers circling DC. They must offer a degree in pointless swerving and weaving. In 30 minutes of traffic I'll see those aggressive drivers get maybe 30 seconds ahead of me - really amazing.
But they do have highways through town... it's just that 29 going north is not a highway and it becomes a nightmare. But you can come into town on a highway from the south, northeast, or from the west.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Doesn't matter that no one else gets to work on time as long as I do...
Just get rid of the zoning laws so my work doesn't have to be 30 miles away from my house. Traffic problem solved.
Man I hate City Planners..
"Ohh no no no nooo citizen.. *THAT* does not go *THERE*. :snobbish laugh: You see it is only *I* who have been given the divine authority to plan this city, only *I* that has the wisdom to know where you should build your house! You wouldn't want some rabble present trying to build a.. :gasp: pig Farm next to your condo would you. (you interject something about land values and how pig farms would probbly choose cheap land..) YOU DISREGARD citizen such things! For it is *I* your majestic CITY PLANNER who decides these "land values" you speak of!"
Ya know.. When we decide to rid ourselves of 1/3 of our useless population.. these bastards should be first on the ship.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
The problem with driving in DC is that everybody thinks that the fate of the free world depends on them getting to wherever they are goin, and they drive accordingly. Of all the places that I have lived DC has the scariest drivers. And most of them think that they are better drivers than people in other cities. The crash statistics discredit that idea though.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Urban planning can be good and bad. Certainly Central Park is a win, but highways largely suck when they are run through existing cities. New York's mass transit is a combination of free market and planned routes...
The reason why highways and cities seem to clash so violently has to do with how the routes were "planned," or actually, that they were not really planned at all.
The US Highway Plan went through three phases. The first time, it was going to be a smaller network of mostly toll roads. With each phase, the number of miles grew, and the tolls lowered, until the 1956 plan had a large network of free roads. Each iteration was an attempt to address objections of Congresscritters.
But the last plan, when it was first introduced, left the major urban areas blank on the proposed map. The Federal highway planners thought, strangely enough, that the urban routes should be planned at the local level, based on local knowledge and needs.
What Congressional representatives saw, though, was a bunch of rural roads and "nothing" for their cities. They didn't want to vote for a plan that left them off the map.
So... the Feds drew in lines in the cities, and the routes were now a matter of Federal law, whether they "worked" or not. :-/
Personally, one of my favorite little projects that demonstrates how a lack of planning is sometimes best is at University of Maryland. They have this center mall. Basically, the kept having to re-sod it because no one would stay on the paths. During a renovation it occurred to them to just pave the deer-paths... it looks crazy but now they don't have the same sod problems.
This illustrates a really general principle of usability, though. Any system or resource has to account for how it will be used. If it doesn't, then it will be misused. This is not just a feature of urban planning, but of computer software, library books, school desks... anything you can name. If you supply a classroom with only right-handed half-desks, and the chairs are movable, then left-handed students will probably pick up their desks and turn them sideways. If you make it require five clicks to log your input correctly, but you can do it "wrong" in only three, it's going to be done wrong over and over again. And so on.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I go to BCIT, and I wish they would do that same. All their paths go around medium-sized grassy areas that just end up being mud-pits during the spring. Glad to see somebody clued in...
Given the state of Limewire I'm not sure I'd want them involved in Urban planning.
'And over here we have the hot teenage girl has shaking orgasm memorial park, and across the way is wicked remix plaza, and 700 fake Main streets that give you cancer if you drive on them'
I have nothing compelling to say
Most of them have children.
It's odd that the news in TFA is mainly about OpenGeo, but it doesn't link to http://opengeo.org/ The article says "using OpenGeo, an open-source visualization tool for GeoServer data", but OpenGeo's website says it's consulting and support services, not a tool. I suspect the journalist just got confused?
I had a sidebar on Open Source software in my comp exam for my Urban Planning degree in 2004. My assigned topic was to do a writeup on new technologies available for general-population paratransit implementations.
I think I need to send this link to my advisor...
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
What Congressional representatives saw, though, was a bunch of rural roads and "nothing" for their cities. They didn't want to vote for a plan that left them off the map.
I don't think that this is universally true, though. For instance, here in NYC Robert Moses had a lot of pull regarding highway placement... to the detriment of entire neighborhoods. Now I'm not one of those that claims that the problems of the Bronx are due to Mr. Moses, but I will claim that most of NYC would be better off without Mr. Moses's handiwork. I'd rather have a waterfront park on the East River than FDR drive, and it's hard to see how the BQE improves Brooklyn.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
My apologies, thanks for the link :) Much more understandable now. I haven't spend much time in Baltimore, so I was just going with what Google found.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Nice. I looked up University of Maryland on Google maps and couldn't figure out what the parent was talking about.
-Peter
Your right... maybe we should get a bunch of volunteers to come up with a new name for it.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You want the same people who will be hopping around in their underwear, half-drunk, screaming at a television screen this sunday to be involved in how our roads are designed, our bus schedules, rail lines, and more? Allow me to interject some reality here -- there's a reason the public sector only allows people with the word "Engineer" in the job title to work on these projects. They cost millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, they effect millions of people, and a screw-up can cost lives or be a logistical nightmare for decades to come. Just think about your morning commute now, and then realize that this situation was created by some of the brightest and most educated minds we have in society today. These people model these problems on supercomputers, applying sophisticated algorithms and methodology that takes months, sometimes years, of slaving at a desk every day, 9 to 5, to effect a merely "acceptable" solution.
Of course, try telling this to the average driver and you're likely to get a string of obscenities and an "I could do better attitude." With all respect, no sir you cannot. Not anymore than how most of the population thinks they'd be a better president, or a better quarter back, or much of anything else. There are some classes of problems that cannot be solved by simply throwing more people at it. A thousand people working on a problem isn't necessarily likely to come up with a better solution than a hundred, or even ten people, working on the same problem. It's about suitable labor, which is a quality issue, not a quantity one.
You people should know better than to suggest this. I do not want Joe Average doing urban development, especially when he has enough trouble just getting through rush hour traffic without going postal on someone. And so we come to the part of the discussion where rationality ends and zealotry begins. There are some things that open source methodology will be suboptimal for. Specifically, things that require extreme specialization and/or have exacting standards generally won't have a healthy community of open source developers. There's only so many people in the world with the time, resources, and dedication to perform a given task, and open source development requires a certain critical mass to be reached to succeed.
Plot a supply and demand curve and if you find those people come at a very high cost any open source development will be labored and frustrated. All open source does is severely cut the labor cost. It does NOT solve the problem of lack of suitable labor resources. This is why open source excels at general purpose systems and applications. Open source is (as a rule) quite flexible. Which is also exactly why it's ill-suited for highly specialized systems with exacting standards -- there are few labor resources in the market to support it. Ergo, those resources are at a premium. Open Source as a broad concept takes under- or un-utilized labor and creates goods and services from it. You won't find much open source development from resources that are being heavily utilized. Or, in plain-english -- college students, the unemployed, part-time workers, etc. That is your labor capital for open source. Not the engineer making $150k a year designing fire-control systems under contract for the military. Chances are, the more established and well-paid you are in the field, the less likely you are to be investing in open source projects.
So there you have it. Before you hit reply, I just want to remind you that these are general statements, so before you present your edge case in some half-hearted attempt to prove the entire argument wrong, please consider the bigger picture.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Wow, pretty cool to be on Slashdot (I work for The Open Planning Project).
With regards to open source, we try to tackle the problem from all sides. We try to create free and open standards for data, we lobby for said standards in government usage of data, and we try to supply the best of breed open source software that uses that data.
For the most part, the various governments aren't competing with each other for software, so open source makes tons of sense. In addition, the software support business model works very well for governments, because they want to keep this going, and most proprietary shops get bored with supporting a single large customer.
With regards to urban planning, our original plan was just to open up the urban planning data and see where that got us, but we've actually been spending a lot of time looking at other cities that have already have better urban planning. Amsterdam, Paris, Bogota. Jan Gehl (one of the great moving forces behind better urban planning) basically said that since you can never satisfy all desire for cars (which make up a minority of the population anyway) it's better to scale back just a tiny bit the attention spent on cars and instead concentrate on the people. Since cars take up so much space, scaling back on cars just a small amount opens up huge possibilities for people.
And also, working for TOPP is great! We do cool things, work on open source, support great causes, and the parties are kick-ass too!
I think that's the key statement. And you have to look at it systematically, not emotionally. It's very hard to do. But try this:
A car is just a tool for moving people around. There are several other tools that can also move people around. The car-tool is very useful for thinly-spread populations that have lots of space to give over to the car's use and who have lots of individual resources to support their individual car.
But, as soon as they need to move into a space that is reasonably congested with other people, and with other things (buildings, trees, baby carriages, what-have-you) their car is no longer an optimal tool and, in fact, requires a disproportionate amount of space and systematic resources (traffic management, police, ambulances, and so on).
So, yeah. We have to get over the idea that someone who can drive their car up to the edges of the city, must therefore be able to drive their car *into* the city. Once we do that, lots of opportunities to better get them to where they want to go (along with everybody else) are available to us.
Most people are stupid. I would wager more than 65% of the population has an IQ of less than 100.
Hmmm... I'd venture to suggest that one definition of "stupid" is failing to do some very basic research on an assertion. By definition (and constant recalibration of tests to keep it this way), 100 is the median IQ score, with half the population falling above it and half below (which is the definition of "median", but I wasn't counting on you to look that up yourself, either).
Trying to get people who know nothing about the issues to make suggestions is just going to be a nightmare. Believe it or not there is a science to this and a long history of empirical learning that someone really needs to understand to make real planning and design judgments.
I'm a highway designer and I go to public meetings all the time and you wouldn't believe what some people suggest. There was one guy one time that was convinced that all exit ramps from Freeways should be on the left. He thought this because he's an idiot that doesn't understand the issues. The problem is idiotic ideas presented by a person that can work a crowd can become popular, even if they are stupid, again because individuals don't understand all the issues.
So why is the solution to keep the issues obfuscated from the general public? If some good, easy-to-use, reasonably accurate simulation tools were available to the general public, so your guy at your public meeting could *see* what happens when you move the exits to the left (and maybe he'd also get a ballpark on how much that would COST), he wouldn't even suggest it.
I'm not disagreeing that the general public has a really strong inclination to think they know exactly how to solve transportation issues, and that their ideas can sound completely idiotic to someone with some training in the field... but just because someone's never heard of latent demand or doesn't know the difference between a horizontal and a vertical curve doesn't mean that they can't *possibly* have valid input into the process.
And, as you know, they DO have input into the process, by law. But it's often of very poor quality. A project like this could improve the quality of that input, increasing the signal to noise ratio for those of us who have to implement plans that, let's face it, are supposed to work for "those people."
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
Linux car bombs are pretty tough to do right though due to the lack of drivers.
I would wager more than 65% of the population has an IQ of less than 100.
The median IQ is 100. By definition. So you'd definitely lose that wager.
As always, there's an appropriate xkcd for this situation. http://xkcd.com/277/
That's why it's more secure.
wow i knew linux was good but it can drive cars now too? that sir/madam/asshole is truly amazing, where can i find out more?
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
I've always wanted to see roller coasters take you to work... Like "Loop the Loop" for Chicagoans... Could raise funds that could be injected into developing the rest of the transportation system, and would sure beat every commute I've ever been in...
That's because the software developers mentioned don't start by looking at what's needed to support a planning process (which is a GIS system like GRASS GIS that can do calculations and ways of getting location-specific data into it quickly, do calculations on the resulting dataset, and then keep track of various scenarios and display the results), but what they'd like to develop and what they know how to develop. Which just so happens to be some kind of web-based song-and-dance display software. The good old "I've got a hammer" syndrome, with this particular hammer being the Web.
Web display software is useful for when you have something to display on the web, usable when you want to allow private citizens to scribble their views on a map, but utterly useless when you want to know what kind of impact a proposed measure has on say, the traffic situation, accessibility, safety, noise and light, drainage, soil load, micro climate aspects like wind-flow, etc. etc.
Now communications is often useful, but would-be city planners may find that communication serves best when actually you have something useful to say in the first place. And this sort of software doesn't help with that.
If only they had seen their way clear to link a Grass GIS database to a web display in a two-way fashion, that might have been worthwhile because it would have provided synergy. Unfortunately, what they did does not provide synergy. Instead it partly reinvents the wheel (geographic layers) in a halfhearted and incompatible-with-existing-software fashion and it hogs the limelight. As a consequence I don't really see what this web display is good for.
Reminds me a lot of Architecture for Humanity. Also check Cameron Sinclair's (founder of AfH) talk at TED in 2006.
Mark Gorton seems to be getting into another open source project too, LimeBits. It says it's in alpha, but it's some sort of javascript website sharing exchange. It links to limelabs.com, a Gorton operation.
Here's why: The paths there are not for motor vehicles but for pedestrians. Now pedestrians really don't *need* any paths. To them paths are an optional extra so to speak, because they are free to choose their own route through a 2-D piece of grassland that's otherwise empty. So there are no obstacles that must be avoided and no constraints that must be heeded. In addition, pedestrians very seldom need traffic control, and then only at very high densities and usually in confined areas. They also need no rules of precedence, and no safety features whatsoever. Paths also come at zero cost. So what pedestrians will do is to pick routes that minimize their walking distance and perhaps some other things. Just like the boundaries of soap bubbles the resulting paths are anything but straight.
So ... this case is absolutely loaded with positive factors in the form of lack of constraints, absence of the need for safety considerations, lack of costs for change etc. And yes, in such a situation you can't do better than just let people pick their own routes and pave the tracks they create.
All those who feel that there might be something in doing away with Urban Planning and letting "freedom" reign might do well to realize that urban sprawl which is so prevalent in US cities (and which is a direct result of a lack of urban planning) is what's causing our traffic congestion in the first place.
It does that in three ways. First off, it ensures that population density is so low that you can't run fine-meshed public transport services without incurring a huge loss. Traffic flows are just too thin. So you either have poor service or huge expenses (read subsidies).
Secondly it creates travel distances well in excess of what you can walk, so that it's motorized transport or nothing. Cycling is often not an option due to climate factors factors alone (cold winters, hot summers), and quite without considerations such as safety (no cycle lanes and lots of dangerous traffic (cars)) and security (you're easier to mug on a bicycle than in a car or a bus).
Thirdly it makes for road networks where arteries have to take the load from a huge area that's shot through with secondary roads and then carry that load to the central business district and industrial areas where it's concentrated both in space and in time (because everyone needs to come in at work at the same place and during a fairly narrow time window).
If urban planning sometimes has a bad reputation, perhaps that's because it has to work with cities as they are now (and have developed organically (read: without planning)) and perhaps steer their development just a little bit, politics allowing. You are only very rarely able to design something from scratch. And when you do, the design is usually ok, but soon superseded by development activity in all places where no such activity was foreseen (or where it was planned that new development would be prohibited).