- Chicago aldermen have been unable to get a hearing on a transparency ordinance that would require the city council to hold a hearing on proposed public-private partnerships, aka P3s.
- The Miami Herald makes the case for boats as a natural market for peer-to-peer sharing, given that the 12 million boats registered in the U.S. sit unused for an average of 339 days a year.
- This weekend Portland hosted the first ever Roam Mobile Food Conference, a celebration of truck-based cuisine.
- Four Seasons launches roaming food trucks, part of the hotel’s efforts to “keep [its] chefs engaged in something that is very relevant.”
- The Dallas mayor’s office is looking into whether the city manager was in cahoots with taxi company officials in a crackdown on the hired-car company Uber.
- Uber has been showing up at college orientations.
- With data showing that its initial ridership is coming in below the level of either D.C. or New York City, bike advocates worry that the new Bay Area Bike Share is, with just 700 bikes, starting off too small to give itself a chance.
- The Washington Post’s Leah Binkovitz documents how Washington, D.C. became the country’s pioneer bike share city.
- From 7:30am to 8:30am on a recent Friday morning in Iowa, a grand total of zero cyclists used the new bike lane on Cedar Rapids’ H Street.
- Health officials in central Texas say they’re worried about a new state law that allows samples and demos at farmers markets.
- A filmmaker on the Obama ’08 campaign launches Tarbell Cocktails and Conspiracy, a crowdfunded “member-based political salon” in Lower Manhattan that has ambitions of serving as a hub for “grassroots politics, civic innovation, electoral reform, environmental activism and better urbanism.”
- The Panther bikes used in Tel Aviv’s Tel-O-Fun bike share program may be even heavier than Citi Bike’s 45-pounders, but they do come with a neat built-in bike lock.
- And a recent college graduate who attempted to share his way across the United States’ sparsely-populated middle concludes that “the trip was a pretty big failure.”
Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.