New York City

GarbageScout

Freegans and Freecycle fans might enjoy the latest Google mashup: GarbageScout. Think Google maps, mobile phones, and free stuff in the garbage.

Here's the skinny:

New York City's streets are full of interesting and potentially useful things that have been thrown out.

If you see something good, snap a picture of it with your camera phone, and email it to GarbageScout. It will go up on the home page and others can go and get it.

This will reduce landfill, save people money, and clean up the streets.

(Via WC)

Perilous

New York City nonprofit Transportation Alternatives has produced this crazy 60-second video of a bicyclist trying to navigate a bike lane in Manhattan. Not for the faint of heart.

If you're into the whole NYC-biking-video thing, the New York Bicycling Coalition has a whole list of short video clips from around the city.

But first and foremost check out the TransAlt one, which they're using to lobby for better bike lanes.

Another case of copyright infringement?

Riding public transit is a good thing, right? And you would think that easily accessible maps would encourage more people to ride the bus or subway, or current customers to ride them more often. And you would also think that transit authorities would be thrilled to hear that their maps are now available to millions of iPod users. There, you'd be wrong.

From Wired we learn that William Bright, creator of IPodSubwayMaps.com, was asked to remove maps of the New York City subway system as well as San Francisco's BART. Both New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and Bay Area Rapid Transit claim that William was guilty of copyright infringement.

After complying, William produced his own map of each system. The one for BART is now available on his site, while he is awaiting legal advice on the one for NYC since his map used the same fonts and colors of the MTA.

And unlike BART, William is "offering it up there for anyone to use and modify."

Update [2005-9-26 13:55:44 by Chris Schults]: I'm not sure why, but you get "This Account Has Been Suspended" when you try to visit IPodSubwayMaps.com. Hopefully William simply forgot to pay his web or domain hosting bill while fending off the MTA and BART.

Update [2005-9-26 15:18:45 by Chris Schults]: The site seems to be working fine now.

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