A rack in our bike room

The weather is warming up, and it seems like the city is buzzing with pedal power. At our office, the racks in the bike room sure are filling up (have I mentioned that we’re hiring?).

My NYC Biking Story

Streetfilms is celebrating Bike Month with the start of their series profiling NYC cyclists. My NYC Biking Story will introduce you to the wide array of people in the local cycling community, and to the various stories and reasons that led these folks to travel on two wheels. If you haven’t yet seen the first one – a profile of a cycling female firefighter – it’s a real inspiration.

Our goal is to produce 10 short My NYC Biking Story videos in the months of May and June, and we’re looking for sponsors to help make the full series possible. So far, four of the ten films have been sponsored. As a sponsor, you’ll be helping build the safe streets movement, and you’ll receive significant recognition. If you’re interested, please contact our Development Manager, Christa Orth (corth@openplans.org, 917.388.9066).

Streetfilms Screening the Brooklyn Museum

Of course, the livable streets movement isn’t just a local phenomenon. From the roadways of China and Copenhagen to those of Oakland and Brooklyn, recent urban development projects are making our streets safer for everyone. We’re celebrating recent successes here and elsewhere in our upcoming Streetfilms screening at the Brooklyn Museum (May 27th, 7pm).

Many of the films screened will be world premieres, and many are geared specifically toward Brooklyn cyclists. Come see what’s going on in your neighborhood! Attendance is free with museum admission, and Museum Members may reserve their tickets during public hours by calling 718.501.6371. All others, you can purchase tickets here.

Screening Location:
Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn NY

All full-time positions come complete with a great package of benefits, including health, dental, vision, 401k, generous vacation, and fun and talented colleagues. For those located in our office, you have the extra bonus of views, snacks, plants, and lots of maps.

Interested? Visit our Jobs page to learn more about working at OpenPlans, and see our current openings.

And now you can feel like you’ve attended both conferences, thanks to Robin Smith’s video summaries. Enjoy!

We will present on Simple AVL Solutions for Riders as a part of the Information Technology ITS Applications panel on Thursday at 9:00am. We will draw on our experience deploying and customizing OneBusAway for the MTA BusTime pilot in New York City and talk about the ease and value of providing real time vehicle information to riders. Click here for more information about OpenPlans Transportation offerings.

We’ll also be hosting a Tweet-up in a local bar or restaurant for members of the TransportationCamp community to get together and talk about how Web 2.0 technologies are intersecting with transportation. More details to follow, but you can ping our business development manager, Michael Keating (mkeating at openplans dot org) to stay in the loop.

GothamSchools won two first prize awards in the EWA’s national competition for education journalism. One award, in the journalism blogging category, went to our editorial staff plus our Newsroom contributor Kim Gittleson. The other, in the community blogging category, went to Community section contributor Ruben Brosbe and Community section editor Philissa Cramer.

This is the second year in a row that GothamSchools has won first prize in the journalism blogging category. Last year was the first year that the annual awards included a category for online news.

The other journalism blogging winners were Valerie Strauss, author the Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet, and Emily Alpert of Voice of San Diego for her education blog Schooled. Other New York City education reporters also  received honors, including NY1′s Lindsey Christ and The New York Times’ Sharon Otterman.

Disclosure: GothamSchools editor Elizabeth Green serves on the board of the Education Writers Association. The contest is judged by an external panel.

Streetfilms just launched the trailer for their Moving Beyond the Automobile series. Each Tuesday over the next ten weeks, they’ll be posting a new chapter about smart and proven strategies to reduce traffic and improve street safety for all users. Hope you will tune in.

The series tackles a whole range of important topics, from Bus Rapid Transit to Congestion Pricing to Car Share, showing how each can help people to use cars less – or not at all.

We would like to thank The Fund for the Environment & Urban Life for making this series possible.

Only with your help can we continue to keep making powerful, innovative films which have changed the minds of elected leaders across the world and emboldened advocates and neighbors with media tools to show what our streets can be like.

We’ve been showcasing “best practices” in the livable streets world for nearly four years and produced over 300 informative films on eclectic topics such as physically-separated bike lanes, bus rapid transit, pedestrian plazas, complete streets, unique street transformations, and ciclovias in dozens of cities and countries.  Our films have been watched over 3 million times and have been used in classrooms, embedded on blogs & websites, and watched on the big screen in thousands of places.

We do all of this inspirational work with a staff of three on an extremely modest budget. Our impact is huge: Streetfilms is changing the way many millions of transportation infrastructure dollars are spent. We’re on a mission to create better neighborhoods for you and your children to walk, bike, use transit and live.  You simply can’t find a better value for your dollar than funding Streetfilms.

If you live in the NYC area we encourage you to attend our fundraiser “Streetfilms Presents: A Reel Celebration” on Tuesday, November 16th @ 630 PM.  Our guest speaker is bicyclist Randy “The Ethicist” Cohen (see below video) and we’ll be featuring a few world premiere Streetfilms!  Tickets start at $50 & $100.  More info and to RSVP click here.

If you cannot make it or are out of town, please consider donating to our work. We promise to work hard to keep making our streets more livable for you, your children, and your community.

Thank you,

Clarence Eckerson Jr, Director of Production

StreetFilms has produced a great video highlighting the case studies and benefits of open transit data and how that relates to the broader movement around Gov2.0. Along with websites like CityGoRound.org and the developer resources exemplified by transit agencies like Trimet, BART, MBTA, and the MTA this video does a great deal to show what can be done and what is being done to leverage more innovation and access to information around public transit. If you know of a transit agency or a developer that could use this kind of insight and inspiration, please pass it on. The video concludes by looking further into the whole transportation network by asking what else we could do with access to better data in regards to traffic, safety, and more.

The video features Chris Dempsey and Joshua Robin of the MBTA, MTA Chair Jay Walder, O’Reilly Media founder and gov2.0/web2.0 thought leader Tim O’Reilly, Zipcar co-founder Robin Chase, NYC Councilwoman Gale Brewer, Paul Steely White of Transportation Alternatives, as well as Nick Grossman and Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock of OpenPlans.

Please take a look and spread the word: http://www.streetfilms.org/a-case-for-open-data-in-transit/