Rise and Shine is a regular morning roundup of links. Tips if you’ve got ‘em.
- The bikes in Chicago’s new bike share program, Divvy, are the same color blue as the stripes on the city’s flag. Except, there’s one lone red bike, the same color as the flag’s stars, loose in the system. It’s called the “unicorn,” and anyone who spots it and posts a photograph of the sighting is eligible to win a prize. People seem to be having fun with it.
- Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is using the term “protected bike lane” wrong, says Streetsblog Chicago’s Steven Vance.
- Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva makes a plea for “a discipline that doesn’t really exist yet, a merger of urban design and urban planning with urban informatics, with networked public space.”
- Chicago’s Wrigley Field is getting one of the city’s “people spots,” as in “temporary platforms adjacent to sidewalks, typically within existing parking lanes” that “create seasonal space for outdoor seating and dining.”
- By the end of the month, Boston will have bike helmet vending machines known to attract “casual ridership.”
- Grist’s David Roberts wants to live in a baugruppe. What’s your ideal living situation?
- Patch, the AOL-owned network of local news (and news-like content) sites, is the victim of a poor content management system, editors say.
- North Walsham, in Norfolk, England, is offering up a government-funded pop-up space, but hasn’t yet found any takers.
- In perhaps what is perhaps a necessary step toward full-fledged cultural phenomenon, this Harvard senior is writing her thesis on “the transformation of the public’s attitude towards food trucks from denigrated ‘roach coaches’ to pop culture phenomenon.”
- Kansas City’s food trucks will “circle their wagons” quite literally for a fundraiser for one of their own, the owner of The Funnel Cake Truck, whose house was destroyed by fire.
- At the news that 41 percent of city food trucks have gotten health code violations in the last two years, the Boston Globe editorializes that they should spend less time being offended and more time “scrubbing their counters.”
- Pittsford, N.Y., is coming to terms with its own food trucks. Both of them. “They’re just kind of coming by storm, you see the across the country, these are big on the West Coast, but you are just starting to see them this way,” says the chair of the city rules committee. “Now we need to start putting things on the books.”
- The cover story of the latest San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alternative weekly, is called “Into Thin Air,” and it argues that “‘Shareable housing’ is causing apartments to vanish from SF’s rental market.”
- Yellow cabs circled Seattle City Hall to protest ride sharing. The city council president called the debate “one of the most complicated issues I’ve worked on,” adding, “no one’s happy with the current situation.”
- And a Lyft driver in Los Angeles reports that cab drivers don’t give him a hard time because he’s generally dressed as Batman.
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.