Rise and Shine is a regular morning roundup of links. Tips if you’ve got ‘em.
- Cynthia Dill, Maine’s 2012 Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, didn’t do that well in the race, getting just 13 percent of the vote, but she writes now of her life as an Airbnb host, “it turns out that I’m not such a loser after all.” Proof? Reviews like this one from one Christine from Brooklyn: “Cynthia took great care in giving us fresh dishes and rinsed out the coffee pot for us each morning.” Concludes Dill, “As long as we can reinvent ourselves to serve and bring comfort to others, the American Dream lives on, I’m happy to report.”
- “Food truck” is becoming something of what “fixed bike” once was: shorthand for a sort of slightly strained urbanism. Proof? Presumptive New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio had the Red Hook Lobster Pound truck and other mobile food vendors outside his Brooklyn election party last night, and it was mentioned more than once in press coverage of the evening.
- Greater Greater Washington’s Dan Malouff has a preview of what the National Capital Planning Commission is likely to say about increasing D.C.‘s building heights.
- The Atlantic Cities’ Eric Jaffe reviews how all those “cities of the future” are coming along.
- Milwaukee is putting down 27 miles of new bike lanes in “‘low hanging fruit’ locations,” under, mostly, a federal grant on congestion and air quality.
- San Francisco city supervisor David Chiu unveils an online tool for participatory budgeting.
- A deep dive into the ornithological app eBird helps explain how data reuse can make citizen-science — not to mention mass on-the-ground collaboration — successful instead of just neat.
- And a Toronto councillor persuades condo developers to give a million dollars to Bixi, the city’s shaky bike share program, in return for having to create fewer than the legally-required number of parking spots.
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.