Matthew Roth

Car sharing is a growth industry, as pioneer City CarShare would tell you, and it has beneficial environmental and economic impacts. Studies of car sharing services like Zipcar and City CarShare show that for every car that is shared, up to 15 private vehicles are taken off the road. Owning and operating a personal car is the second-highest family expense behind owning a house, and the highest expense for people who rent.

Safe streets advocates often ruefully say, "if you want to kill someone and get away with it, do it in a car." In fact, unless alcohol is involved, very few motorists who kill vulnerable road users -- like pedestrians and cyclists -- are charged with a crime, even when they break traffic laws in the process.

Though it may seem esoteric, one of the biggest impediments to designing streets for people is the over-reliance on design standards that have long privileged movement of vehicles over any other consideration on the streets. That's why advocates cheered when U.S. DOT Secretary Ray LaHood published a policy paper recently that, at least in word, placed bicycles and pedestrians on equal footing with motorists.

I've railed on General Motors and Segway in the past for the myriad impracticalities of their tandem Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility (P.U.M.A.) prototype. Now they're at it again, making headlines today by unveiling the first three models in their new Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V, pronounced "envy") line, including the Jiao, which is Chinese for "Pride."

A bill introduced last month by State Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto), who has been a steady advocate for reducing the dangers of distracted driving, would increase first-time and repeat fines for drivers who text while driving or who don’t use hands-free devices, and would extend the prohibition of cell phone use to cyclists. This last move has cycling advocates baffled and on the defensive.

With national data transparency efforts like President Obama's Open Data Initiative and municipal projects like New York City's Big Apps or San Francisco's Data SF, government agencies across the country have been opening their raw data sets, some more reluctantly than others. With the debut of City-Go-Round and media coverage generated about transit data transparency, many transit operators have taken steps to release their schedule and route information to third party developers, who in turn use the data to develop an array of applications to improve rider experience.