Things Are Good

Big Brains Encouraging Bringing Bicycles into the Mainstream

Bicycle

Bicycling is a fun and healthy way to get around town, but some people still aren’t convinced that bicycling is a solid transportation solution. Outside magazine asked some rather smart people who love bicycling what would make bicycling more attractive for cities. Some answers are neat and others are very practical. I suggest you get out there and ride!

6. Solicit Public Input
Brian Wiedenmeier, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition

Pilot projects can help us learn about how treatments are applied, and we should solicit feedback from people walking, driving, and biking in and around new infrastructure. This spirit informed the design and construction of San Franciscoâ€™s first physically protected intersection at Division and Ninth Streets. Popular in Europeâ€™s most bike-friendly cities and increasingly seen in progressive U.S. cities, protected intersections take the chaos out of crossing the street. With physical barriers and wider turns for drivers, these protected intersections reduce speeds, calm traffic, and offer bicyclists and pedestrians a clear, protected route through the intersection.

New bank Account Morally Monitors Your Purchases

Aspiration financial firm is a B-corporatoin that wants to help people “vote with their wallets”. It’s incredibly hard for individuals to stay up to date on the damage that large organizations do despite that a lot of people care. Consumers want to punish companies for some of their actions from United kicking people off airplanes to Shell lying about climate change. This means there’s an opportunity for Aspiration to help people divert money from companies that make the world worse, and the company is growing as a result.

Called Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM), the program analyzes not one, but thousands of data points to generate two scores for companies: The â€œPeopleâ€ score gauges how well companies treat their employees and communities, and the â€œPlanetâ€ score assesses companiesâ€™ sustainability and eco-friendly practices. Every time an Aspiration customer swipes the debit card associated with their account to make a payment toward a company, that companyâ€™s Planet and People scores are funneled into the customerâ€™s personalized AIM score, which reflects the positive (or negative) impact of where they shop.

â€œPeople have been hungering for this exact kind of information,â€ Cherny says. â€œWe see this in our customers, we see this in all these surveys that are coming out about how younger people especially, but consumers overall, are thinking about how a company behaves and how its products are created as they make decisions on where to buy. But until now, they havenâ€™t really had the information to be able to do so.â€

The Future of Economics is a Doughnut

Economists have focussed on just one thing for the last hundred years or so: making money. That might sound fine, but classically these economists have ignored the societal and environmental costs of their proposed money making schemes. Their willful ignorance has unleashed climate change on us all, and that’s precisely where Kate Raworth comes in. Raworth proposes that 21st century economics focusses on the inequality and lack of equilibrium in the world. Once we focus on balancing our global economic system with our global life systems will we all benefit (instead of just the rich getting richer).

Humanityâ€™s 21st century challenge is to meet the needs of all within the means of the planet. In other words, to ensure that no one falls short on lifeâ€™s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice), while ensuring that collectively we do not overshoot our pressure on Earthâ€™s life-supporting systems, on which we fundamentally depend â€“ such as a stable climate, fertile soils, and a protective ozone layer. The Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries is a playfully serious approach to framing that challenge, and it acts as a compass for human progress this century.

A Bold, Bodacious Beard Club

beards
Beards are wonderful. I say this not has a biased individual who has a beard, but has a person who understands that beards are more than they seem. In the province of Newfoundland there is a beard club that spends their time making the world a better place. The best part of beard club is that you must tell everybody about, and that anybody is welcome – no beard even needed!

“Instead of paying dues or anything, like a lot of groups do, how about we give back to the community? And one of the great ways, especially with [Hai’s] history with Project Kindness, is volunteering,” he said.

“So once a month we’re gonna get together, do some volunteering, do some volunteering on our own. It’s just a great way to give back to the community.”

Group members share some beard-care tips amongst themselves, and are hopeful the trend expands further.

Treepedia Lets Cities See Where Trees are Needed

MIT tree

Treepedia is a new tool from MIT that uses Google street view to evaluate what the coverage of trees are in specific areas. It lets you know what your neighbourhood is like and doesn’t just bias cities with big inaccessible parks. This means that cities (and people!) can use this tool to find where trees are most badly needed from the perspective of a pedestrian. Trees are more than just pollution-fighters, they make cities prettier and friendlier.

â€œStreet greenery is a really important part of the urban environment,â€ says Xiaojiang Li, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT who helped develop Treepediaâ€™s Green View Index, a measure of the tree coverage in a city overall and in any area within the city that a user wants to examine.

Trees provide shade for pedestrians in the summer and help to lower urban temperatures, Mr. Li says. They also help prevent water runoff during heavy rain and clean the air.

The MIT team used the Google photos instead of satellite imagery to â€œreally measure how much greenery people might seeâ€ as they move around a cityâ€™s streets, Mr. Li says. Treepediaâ€™s Green View Index doesnâ€™t take city parks into account for that same reason.