You know what makes me mad? Lousy design.

Take the Atlantic’s latest missive on how it’s unfair to incarcerate like half of the population of the City of New Orleans. Important issue, no doubt, and maybe it’s just me, but hiring a new graphic designer might make a bit more sympathetic to the cause. Without cheating, see if you can make sense of this map. Don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house and all that, but screw it, I need to rant once in awhile.

• Spatial data should almost always be normalized by population. As the article points out, this makes the info for the Ninth Ward look janky. So fix it. Not that hard.
• If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it, even if you get to use a neat looking graphic. Look at the little person icon in each block. Now count how many blocks have more than one. Not helpful. Like pie charts. Or bar charts with two data points.
• You can’t read the legend. Or a good portion of the data labels. Again, easy to fix.
• The other images on the site are low-res. Actually, I’m kind of impressed – normally people upload images that are way too big. But really, don’t flaunt if if you just don’t got it.
• The callout on the right doesn’t help anyone understand the map’s spatial context. How many people out there know that Central City is shaped kind of like a slice of pizza? How many people care? Show of hands?

Seriously, though, it’s kind of an interesting article. Read it. Oh, and thanks to Dug for finding this for me.

Looks like we’re finally earning out keep as the capital of the Left Coast. New York has one-upped us for too long on reappropriating unused asphalt (thanks to that pesky Janette Sadik-Khan), but San Francisco just unveiled plans for its first street pedstrianization project, at the corner of 17th and Market.

The opinion among my planner friends is that the very low volume of ped traffic on 17th makes this a less than ideal choice. But I’ll bet that it’ll pick up pretty quick, what with all the traffic between the suntanning salon and Twin Peaks bar . . . .

Credit where credit is due – even though one of our roommates works for the city, I found this on the always information Streetsblog.

Maybe spreading common sense ideas and stating the obvious is a way for San Francisco’s most widely read fishwrapper to avoid the fate of other dailies, but I guess it’s good that they finally figured it out:

MAYBE HAVING 26 TRANSIT AGENCIES IS BAD FOR BAY AREA COMMUTERS. Like, duh.

Sarcasm aside, turns out that MTC is making noise about actually fixing the problems of route overlap, uncoordinated planning, and general inefficiency in our public transportation network. Maybe the new plans will work better than Translink did. One can hope.

Over the transom courtesy Talking Points Memo.

This is probably the most ridiculous RFP I’ve ever seen. Big bucks, too.

Being able to leverage your social network for rides in the name of being green is a great idea. Palo Alto based Zimride allows you to use your existing social network via facebook to find shared rides. You can both offer rides and indicate you are looking for a ride. They’ve even got an android app that claims to help you lookup carpool possibilities while you are out.

Within a minute of visiting the site, I was able to find several potential rides to San Jose and other points south (Luckily I work out of Blnktags converted live/work warehouse in San Francisco). You can easily search for a recurring rideshare partner or just a one-off trip.

Zimride’s business model is innovative too. According to Techcrunch, the servce is capped at fifty people from any one business or school. Once fifty people have signed up, Zimride approaches the business or school directly with their paid options which all more people to use the service. Several universities are already onboard, including Stanford and UCLA. The cost is $9500/year which is a lot less than each school or business developing and maintaining their own in-house ridesharing system. I was pleasantly surprised to find University of Wisconsin La Crosse (the college from my hometown) on the shortlist of featured networks.

Next time I need to get somewhere that BART & Caltrain don’t easily reach, I’m going to try Zimride.

I just saw a very interesting post with scaled maps of major subway/metro systems of the world over at fakeisthenewreal.com.  BART appears to be the largest system in the world by reach.  BART is sort of a hybrid between a traditional metro system and a commuter rail system. I’m never sure if its the best of both worlds or the worst. A few examples are below for comparison.

Paris

New York

London

San Francisco BART

See many more at Fakeisthenewreal.com.

I’m not really sure what that line is heading down Market St diagonally in the western section of the BART map, but either way it appears to be larger than all of the others. I wonder what all of these maps would look like if you included commuter rail lines as well.

Thanks to the Transportationist for pointing these out.

Stop the presses! BART is now twittering. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know that you could ride the train all the way to Black Rock City.

Growing up in the South has always made me a little defensive about transportation planning in places not on the Left Coast, but turns out Virginia might have found a way to force those pesky local governments to stop building cul-de-sacs.

How, you might ask? From the Washington Post:

“So now, Virginia will maintain only new subdivision streets that meet its connectivity, road and sidewalk requirements. That’s a big stick, because unlike in Maryland and most other states, the Transportation Department maintains and plows almost all of Virginia’s roads, including streets with as few as three homes. ”

That last part is the real kicker, since I’m not sure how many other states have such all-powerful transportation agencies. But it’s a good start.

Thanks to Brendan’s old professor-turned-blog-mentor, David Levinson, aka The Transportationist, for the heads up.

A while ago I posted to my personal blog the instructions for pushing nightly backups of all files and databases to Amazon S3. This has proven to be a fairly popular post.

At BlinkTag, we’ve used various versions of this script to help most of our clients make nightly backups. In several instances, this has proven to be invaluable when content gets lost or overwritten. The script, while somewhat inefficient, keeps a full backup from every day so its possible to revert the site back to any previous days status.

The script could work for backing up any site, not necessarily just wordpress based sites. It can grab any database you’d like an bundle it with the backup.

View the wordpress backup script
Let us know in the comments below if you have questions/comments or creative uses for this script.

Maybe I’m feeling just a little vindicated, since I almost got arrested a few times poking around Boston’s Red Line for a grad class on transit scheduling, but this is kind of cool.

According to this story, a bunch of nerds at MIT found security vulnerabilities in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA)’s sort-of new fare card system, and were almost sued for daring to talk about it at a convention in Las Vegas. But like the good little engineers they are, they decided to cooperate with authorities and work to make the system better instead. I wonder what a bunch of Harvard kids would have done in the same situation?

Remember Avego?  The company that makes a ridesharing iPhone ap?

For some reason I’m subscribed to their newsletter, and a few news items came over the transom.

First, they’ll be opening up a DC office to lobby federal, state, and local agencies to adopt their technology.  The guy who runs it is named Jason Conley, and, apparently, he used to work for the Dept. of Homeland Security. Scary.

Even scarier?  You can even pick up “ghosts” along route.  I quote from the email:

“Ghosts are simulated riders that request transport as you drive along your favorite routes. They are easy to recognize by their names, which always end in “RIP”. You can pick up, drop off and rate ghost riders as you would with real people. The only difference is that the ghosts don’t pay with real money.

Currently, the areas where most ghosts have been spotted include Washington D.C., New Jersey and Miami.”

About what I’d expect from a former DHS guy (just kidding).  In all seriousness, this might just take off.

For those of you who’ve ever wondered why the dividing line between the Mission and SOMA is so janky.  It’s cool living in an area where people bother to keep track of this stuff.

In a misguided attempt to prove he’s still alive despite not having been seen in public for several months, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is learning to blog.  In a move worthy of Kim Jong Il (who has also resorted to computer fakery to prove he’s not dead), he was even helpful enough to include an image of his signature.

I’m sold!

Aside from the fact that people older than my grandma are firing up the ole’ computer and maybe even using The Twitter, there’s some other funny bits about Fidel’s missive.  From nytimes.com:

“A blog post bearing his byline was published on Tuesday on the government Web site CudaDebate.cu, under the headline “Reflexiones del compañero Fidel: CAMBIOS SANOS EN EL CONSEJO DE MINISTROS” (”Reflections of Comrade Fidel: HEALTHY CHANGES IN THE COUNCIL OF MINISTERS”). Perhaps influenced by his reading of other bloggers, Mr. Castro seemed to signal his very strong agreement with these “HEALTHY CHANGES” by leaning on the caps-lock key as he typed.”

Sound like en email you ever received?