Rise and Shine: Payless Parking, Panoptic Police and China’s Urban Planners

Your morning link roundup from The Shared City.

A Car2Go car in Birmingham, England; credit: Elliott Brown.

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Rise and Shine is a regular morning roundup of links. Tips if you’ve got ‘em.

  • Car2Go, a German company that offers quickie car rentals, comes to London. One eye-catching feature of the service is that you can, but city for agreements, leave it in any municipal parking spot, no meter paying needed. Car2Go’s tiny cars are already on the streets in North America, in places which include Washington, D.C., Toronto and Denver.
  • Rialto, Calif., is the “poster city” for the sort of wearable police cameras that has become an issue in New York City’s stop-and-frisk debate. All of its officers wear the cameras all the time, and the police chief says that omnipresent video causes police law enforcement and the public to “behave a little better.”
  • In the New York City Democratic mayoral debate this week, every entrant said that he or she would be willing to let the public know at all times where he or she was. The question was a thinly-veiled ding on the Bermuda-loving Mayor Bloomberg, but also one of the early requests of the open government movement that has largely fallen away.
  • What happened when New York City Public Library installed a photo booth.
  • The cab driver who seriously injured a British tourist in New York City says that the involved cyclist might be to blame: “I personally feel that if that man on the bike didn’t bang on my car, maybe this would not have happened.” Mohammed Faysal Himon also told the New York Post, “I need a more suitable job. There’s too much stress when you’re driving in the city.”
  • BerkShares, the Berkshires’ local currency, turns seven.
  • TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm and Alexia Tsotsis report that Google Ventures has invested about $258 million into Uber, “its largest deal ever.”
  • New York City bike store owners say that Citi Bike has been good for sales, bad for rentals.
  • AdAge covers Airbnb’s bid to make a film entirely out of user-created Vines.
  • The Communist Party-run China Youth Daily argues that the way around cookie-cutter cities is to have mayors willing to listen to urban planners.
  • And the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency approves electric bike share, because, hills.
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    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.

Tags: shared city

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