6 Freeway Removals That Changed Their Cities Forever

6 Freeway Removals That Changed Their Cities Forever

It seems counterintuitive, right? Rip out eight lanes of freeway through the middle of your metropolis and you’ll be rewarded with not only less traffic, but safer, more efficient cities? But it’s true, and it’s happening in places all over the world.

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A New Geo-Tagged Storytelling Site Might Be The Ultimate Travel Tool

A New Geo-Tagged Storytelling Site Might Be The Ultimate Travel Tool

How do we discover new cities to visit? How do we remember where we’ve been? With all the tools at our fingertips, I’d still argue it’s actually not all that easy. Hi, which just opened to the public today, is a beautifully designed way to find, share, and tell stories about places.

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Depth Maps Hidden in Google Street View Create Flickering Ghost-Cities

This is awesome: Patricio Gonzalez Vivo found a way to scrape Google Street View for its depth map data, then rebuilt the streets as ghostly spatial models in openFrameworks. The weird and flickering results, seen in the video above, are like a holograph dreaming of electric streets, with facades and sidewalks tuning in and out as if being tuned on shortwave radio.

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A City by City Guide to America's Filthy Porn Searches

A City by City Guide to America's Filthy Porn Searches

Our favorite depraved data crunchers at the Pornhub Insights blog are at again, this time in collaboration with our other good friends over at Digg. And what do they have for us today? A city by city rundown of America’s favorite special alone time smut.

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Climb into a sinkhole of bureaucracy in Pennsylvania (no, really, it’s a cave), explore San Francisc

Climb into a sinkhole of bureaucracy in Pennsylvania (no, really, it’s a cave), explore San Francisco’s most storied structure (not the Golden Gate bridge), and jet off to to Myanmar (or is it Burma?). Plus, SCARY CLOWNS! In this week’s Urban Reads.

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Why Do Drug Stores Put Soap Under Lock and Key?

Why Do Drug Stores Put Soap Under Lock and Key?

The last time I bought body wash at a downtown CVS, I had to call over an employee just to unlock the glass case. What? Why would anyone want to steal plastic bottles of soap worth a few bucks at best? The answer might surprise you.

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Hollywood, Sex, and You & Me: What's Ruining Our Cities This Week

Hollywood, Sex, and You & Me: What's Ruining Our Cities This Week

Why Honolulu police can have illegal sex in the name of law enforcement, how one L.A. neighborhood has chosen to destroy America, and who might actually be responsible for destroying the planet (spoiler: it’s us). It’s a rather depressing What’s Ruining Our Cities!

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Calm Down, People: Citi Bike Is Gonna Be Just Fine

Calm Down, People: Citi Bike Is Gonna Be Just Fine

New Yorkers are freaking out about a Wall Street Journal story today that says Citi Bike is in trouble, "moving quickly to raise tens of millions of dollars" to save the system, which has been devastated by an unusually brutal winter.

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This Beautifully Simple App Wants to Change How Public Transit Works

This Beautifully Simple App Wants to Change How Public Transit Works

Public transit is a hard problem. Imagine how difficult it is for a city to meet the needs of millions, all of whom want to go different places at different times. And, inevitably, you’re left standing on the platform. Ototo wants to change all of that.

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Smog is Forcing France to Rethink its Love of Diesel

Smog is Forcing France to Rethink its Love of Diesel

Last week, the smog in Paris got so bad, city officials made public transit free and banned half the city’s cars from the road. The vehicle ban only lasted a day , with the reduced traffic and changing weather patterns alleviating the smog situation. But why did the smog get so bad in the first place? Blame France’s long love affair with diesel-powered vehicles—an affair the country will probably have to end, or at least modify, to prevent further smog emergencies.

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