I just saw the website Transportation for Communities - Advancing Projects through Partnerships (TCAPP). The website "has been created to enhance collaboration in transportation decision making". My major research interest right now is improving collaboration in transportation planning so I was quite interested in seeing what the website had to offer.
In summary, it is a very good description of the transportation planning process (although specifically designed for highway projects many of the concepts are quite similar for public transport). The main purpose seems to be to help citizens better understand the transport planning process and it does a good job. It also includes a tool to help either stakeholders or practitioners "identify what is going wrong in a process". That's quite an interesting and helpful feature I think. Other interesting features are the decision guide and case studies.
The website does not provide Web 2.0 tools that actually enable citizens to collaborate in the transportation planning process as I have proposed, but is a very valuable addition to the "library" of information needed to help support an integrated set of applications (see illustration above).
This is a wonderful video, not just because he shows several clips featuring Vienna musicians, but because it so clearly illustrates different management styles and the art helps you distinguish what works from what doesn't. I was saving this until I really had time to watch and enjoyed it immensely.
The article is especially interesting to me because is uses transportation, particularly privatization of transport services, as an example to explain the need for considering social benefits rather than very strict adherence to market-based economic considerations. Judt's example of private shops in a public railway station is excellent.
I read about the article in the equally interesting opinion article The Public Works by Nancy Levinson in Places. The article outlines how some of Judt's ideas could be thought about by designers (architects, engineers, and planners).
In October I blogged about the California High Speed Rail seminar organized by UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies. The seminar was videotaped and the tapes are available from the ITS News Bits website.
I have been working with Nadia Naik from Californians Advocating Responsible Rail Design on ways to use Web 2.0 techniques to improve the California high speed rail system planning and design by increasing the ability for citizens to collaborate in the planning process.
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