World Wide Wednesday: Say no to free parking, hawks and baggy pants

Each week we will be focusing on blogs from around the world dealing specifically with urban environments. We’ll be on the lookout for websites outside the country that approach themes related to urban experiences and issues.

• Streetsblog NYC features a response from Donald Shoup (UCLA professor and author of The High Cost of Free Parking) to Randal O’Toole (Senior Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute) about his misconceptions of the role of government intervention in parking. Shoup makes a number of interesting points – notably that mandatory parking minimums often force developers to provide more parking spaces than they would voluntarily provide in a free market setting. “Off-street parking requirements,” he writes, “thus change the way we build our cities, the way we travel, and how much energy we consume.”

• The New York Times offers up an overview of the envelope-pushing changes to Broadway and a window into its past. Incremental changes to the famous street have increased public space, improved cycling and pedestrian safety and decreased travel times. The changes have overcome some of the challenges intrinsic to the diagonal formation of the street, a relic of an 1815 agreement to bend Broadway in order to save midtown orchards.

• A Calgary suburb hasn’t had the mail delivered in weeks, reports CNN. A series of attacks on postal carriers in the area by Swainson’s hawks have been deemed too great a threat to continue delivery. Despite the use of protective gear including bike helmets, the hawks continued to dive bomb postal workers without provocation. Wildlife biologists urge Canada Post to wait out the threat – winter migration is nearly here.

• Dublin, Georgia, will join the ranks of Riviera Beach, Florida and Flint, Michigan this week when Mayor Phil Best is expected to sign an ordinance that prohibits the wearing of saggy pants. Though similar bans have been declared unconstitutional and some argue that the ordinance unfairly profiles certain cultural groups, others see the end of baggy pants as a positive step. CNN quotes one local citizen: “It’s just disrespectful by showing your drawers to people.”

• The Design Observer Group has a remarkable video produced by a group of students from Brooklyn and the Center for Urban Pedagogy entitled, The Good, The Bad and The Empty. The students interview a variety of community leaders about why there are so many vacant lots in their neighbourhood.

• Photographer John Szot has an excellent series of photographs of dilapidated sites in Detroit including: the Thornapple Valley Slaughterhouse, the Dequindre Cut, a motorpool facility near the Eastern Market, the Fischer Body Plant, and the Packard Auto Plant.

Photo by Patriciadrury