urbanSTL

It’s hard to absorb how much childhood norms have shifted in just one generation. Actions that would have been considered paranoid in the ’70s—walking third-graders to school, forbidding your kid to play ball in the street, going down the slide with your child in your lap—are now routine. In fact, they are the markers of good, responsible parenting. One very thorough study of “children’s independent mobility,” conducted in urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods in the U.K., shows that in 1971, 80 percent of third-graders walked to school alone. By 1990, that measure had dropped to 9 percent, and now it’s even lower. When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way that we think.

San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood; Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Kendall Square; Lower Manhattan: These are the dense, walkable neighborhoods that have become the new hubs of America’s tech scene, as the center of gravity for venture investment and start-up activity shifts from suburbs to urban centers.

His job is director at the University of South Florida's Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR, pronounced cutter, not cuter) — home, Bittner says, to the largest collection of full-time faculty studying public transportation in the country. That's 43 faculty researchers and about as many student-researchers, working on 180 projects, as well as a new division devoted entirely to driverless cars called the Autonomous Vehicle Institute, which Bittner was integral in developing. This is how far ahead CUTR plans: there are 23 saplings planted on the front lawn.

By the time those saplings mature, driverless cars may be here, and, like horseless carriages a century and a half earlier, they will be a quantum leap removed from their predecessors. We are just now taking the first baby steps towards that leap. Only four states (California, Florida, Michigan, and Nevada) allow driverless cars. And the federal government has only authorized a handful of public-road test beds — Tampa has one — for so-called "connected vehicles," which are not necessarily driverless.

JuanHamez wrote:Can Free College Save American Cities?
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... 05366.html

For weeks there were whispers. And then one night in November 2005, hundreds of parents, teachers, and students crammed into a boardroom at a drab administration building south of downtown. Janice Brown, the superintendent of the Kalamazoo schools, had an announcement to make, and it was even more surprising than the rumors that had been flying around town: Kalamazoo, small, struggling Kalamazoo, best known for its strange name and the industries it was no longer home to, was about to launch the most generous municipal college scholarship program in the country, an audacious experiment not only in education reform but in re-engineering a troubled town

It might be a bitter pill for an urbanist to swallow, but the adversary here isn't officialdom, or the "automotive interests," or any other monolithic bogey man; it's the very people whose lives said urbanist seeks to improve. Americans don't drive because they lack an alternative. We drive because we love our cars, no matter the price — we cherish the individual freedom they offer over convenience, frugality, common sense.

A Texan will not walk if he can ride a horse. "People's attitudes haven't changed," he says. "You are dead in the water in Houston if you don't have a car." But the people themselves have changed — no American metro has grown faster than Greater Houston over the last quarter-century, making it one of the most diverse areas in the United States — and they might be taking the city with them. Stephen Klineberg, co-director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, divides Houston's history into three periods: the sleepy streetcar town, the city structured by the freedom of the automobile, and the metropolis yearning for freedom from the automobile. "There's a vision: retail downstairs, residents upstairs, shade trees, sidewalk cafes," says Klineberg. "This is, in general, a city self-consciously reinventing itself for the 21st century."