Breakfast links: Art, plants and plans in the city

Art for 18th and Columbia

Adams Morgan will get new public art at the corner of 18th and Columbia. On Tuesday, you can see three possible renderings and give feedback.  (Tip: Stephen Miller)

Street art

Danish photographer Peter Funch creates amazing composite photographs of New York City street corners. He takes pictures from a single spot over two weeks, then digitally combines many people doing similar activities into one photograph. David C says, “My favorites are the people taking pictures followed by the people posing.” (Boing Boing, David C)  (Tip: David C)

Mini robots are art, too

Kacie Kinzer created small robots, each sporting a flag showing its desired destination, then set them loose in New York City. Passersby pointed the robots in the right direction, rescued them from potholes, and kept them safe from traffic. (JTS)  (Tip: JTS)

Backyard garden matchmaking

Santa Monica has a five-year waiting list for plots in community gardens, and in the past the wait has reached ten years. Meanwhile, many homeowners have backyards they’d love to turn into great vegetable gardens, but lack the time or expertise. The ingenious solution: match up gardeners and homeowners willing to let them tend a small plot on their property. (LA Times via Planetizen)

Bike lanes or bike-scooter-PUMA lanes?

You can give GM one thing: their “PUMA” two-person covered, seated Segway-like car has gotten a lot of blog attention. Bicycle Examiner worries about GM’s suggestion to allow the vehicles in bicycle lanes, saying “bicycle lanes are for bikes.” Should we really take such a uni-modal line, though? Would letting scooter users also use the bike lanes be such a problem, for example? We ought to design streets for all users to move safely. If a lot of people want to use a less space-consuming, energy-efficient form of transportation, let’s figure out the right way to design streets to accommodate them all.

Homeless newspapers growing

Circulation has grown for street papers produced and sold by homeless in dozens of American cities. Street Sense, Washington’s newspaper for the homeless, says they’re getting more, newer, and not so “down and out” vendors interested in selling the papers. On the other hand, foundation support is drying up and they have been forced to print fewer papers and use lower quality paper. (New York Times, Beyond Bread, Lynda)  (Tip: Lynda)

Free reusable bags already out

Even though the “bag bill” hasn’t yet become law, the Department of the Environment is distributing free reusable bags. Bread for the City is handing them out to needy residents, along with information sheets explaining the likely future law and the need to save this and other bags in the meantime. (Beyond Bread, Jaime)  (Tip: Jaime)

Giant subway-sized tunnel in Georgetown, but not for trains

As part of DC’s major effort to replace the Combined Sewer Overflow system with one that doesn’t dump raw sewage into the river during a heavy rain, WASA will dig a one-mile, “subway-sized” tunnel from the Key Bridge eastward. Georgetown Metropolitan hopes it won’t conflict with a possible future separate Blue Line.

Obama hyping sprawl to cut ribbons

President Obama declared the era of sprawl is over, but then immediately set up a photo op touting Virginia’s widening extension of the Fairfax County Parkway. Now, he picked an enormous interchange widening in Minnesota

Michigan to mark the stimulus having funded two thousand projects. There are still plenty of transit projects, not to mention existing job-creating transit service, that are still starving for funds.

Vehicle ownership down in DC

A TPB report shows that vehicle registrations declined 5.8% from 2005 to 2008. (WTOP, Froggie) Good thing DC isn’t part of Maryland, because the state’s formula for allocating transportation funds relies on the numbers of registered drivers in any particular area.  (Tip: Froggie)

Walking up more than biking

Walking and biking is up in the DC region, especially Arlington and Alexandria, but WashCycle digs into the data a little deeper and finds that most of that increase is walking, which already far exceeded biking.

Time to amend the Comp Plan

If meetings on 20 separate topics for the Zoning Update weren’t enough, OP is also beginning the process of amending the Comprehensive Plan. Residents and groups will be able to submit suggested amendments, which will go through a review process and ultimately Council review.