Soooo some one sent this picture to me, was it actually produced by the STM?
i dunno, but what i do know is that who ever made this is awesome.
That’s my mayor!
Nice article about a local Canadian mayor trying to make his neighbourhood a nice place to be as opposed to a rat run for commuters…
LUC FERRANDEZ’S last bicycle was a Kona, a sturdy model with thick tires, ideal for hauling heavy loads. During his 2009 campaign as the Projet Montréal candidate for the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, he would hook it to a trailer piled with a laptop, a projector, a collapsible screen, and (this being Montreal) a couple of bottles of rosé. After setting up his equipment next to a café terrace or a depanneur, he would distribute paper cups and launch a PowerPoint slide show of streets and squares in Copenhagen, Paris, and Madrid, as well as historical photos of local boulevards, all unencumbered by traffic. He figures it was these partys de trottoir, or sidewalk parties — during which he made the case that Montreal could be as clean, green, and safe as any place in Europe — that won him the mayoralty of the city’s most populous district.
I looove it. Making transit miles trackable allows a competitive element (if you are predisposed to such things). The stats that Bixi collects and makes available on your account makes it seem like biking is one big video game (possibly one of Frogger lineage)
The Atlantic reports on a great idea for promoting public transport from a guy called Balaji Prabhakar, professor at Stanford University!
His big idea is to create “frequent commuter programs” in which people who travel on public transit would be rewarded for patronizing the system varying amounts depending on when and how far they travel. Prabhakar thinks the system could help create greater public transit usage and simultaneously decrease congestion. And he’s deploying behavioral economics to transform the small monetary rewards a city could offer into something more.
