Rise and Shine is a regular morning roundup of links. Tips if you’ve got ‘em.
- For every bike that was shared in the U.S. in 2012, there are two today.
- Part of that is due to the new Bay Area Bike Share program, launched today in San Francisco, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose.
- Some people aren’t thrilled with the new bikes’ color — sea foam — and are advocating instead for the safety-conscious “international orange” of the Golden Gate Bridge.
- A fun fact tied to a prior Bay Area debate on color: The U.S. Navy is said to have wanted to paint the Golden Gate Bridge yellow and black — thought that may be apocryphal, as it goes unmentioned in this 1935 “Report on Color and Lighting” by the bridge’s architects.
- “Hackerspace” — as in “a place in which people with an interest in computing or technology can gather to work on projects while sharing ideas, equipment, and knowledge” — has been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. But here are two things to keep in mind: The ODO is not the Oxford English Dictionary, and “dad dancing” also made it in, and that’s not really a thing.
- In an interview with the New York Tech Meetup, Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio brags that as a result of his online Landlord Watch List “over 300 buildings got heat, hot water, fundamental health and safety repairs.”
- Meanwhile, in his own interview with the same group of local technologist, Republican candidate Joe Lhota brags that he was the person who “bought NYC.gov.”
- The New York Times finds that all of the mayoral candidates agree that bike lanes should be done the right way, not the wrong way, and there should be the right number of them, not more or fewer.
- Fareed Zakaria’s “GPS” program on CNN tackles why people are increasingly moving to “amusement park”-like cities — and why some are sticking to the suburbs.
- Janelle Orsi, “the sharing lawyer,” zeros in on cottage food laws.
- Uber is sued for allegedly nudging customers into withholding tips, but the company points out that the rate is set by default to a healthy 20 percent.
- And Slate’s Matt Yglesias makes the case for app-summoned autonomous cars remaking the American city.
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.