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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.
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.
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)
This logic is without flaw; I forfeit the argument.
No, the Oxy Moron is the person who hires an urban planner.
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)
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.
Bah, try this link instead.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I prefer to discourage car use if possible. The roads need to be big enough to handle taxis, buses, deliveries, emergency crews, trash, etc... personal cars should be last on priority and limited when possible. Of course this means leaving provisions for mass transit, even if they are not actively planned.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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/
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?
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
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?
I've always wished the Los Angeles Basin were encircled with a trench full of molten lava.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
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!
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.
Actually, the number one difference is that in road traffic, the packets can think, and decide that they're more clever about which route to take than the information available.
For example, for years and years now, there have been live signal systems that are capable of gathering traffic data and making realtime adjustments to signal timing to optimize flow. But they don't do that; instead, they use the traffic data to make changes to the established timing, but keep it basically the same from one day to the next. Why? Because if a person hits the same light at about the same time every day, and *sometimes* it's a short red and *sometimes* it's a long red, their frustration increases, and they're more likely to run the light if it's "taking too long."
Packets will patiently wait their turn, "trusting" the system to do things right. People, not so much.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
As always, there's an appropriate xkcd for this situation. http://xkcd.com/277/