The neighborhood where I live is relatively dense but is under-developed in terms of small spaces where people can interact on the street; kids play in the street and adults walk and bike but it’s not really a social space.

re: walking and biking – I think cars are very overused. Why do people use a car to drive a mile for an errand, it’s like like trying to cut dinner with a chainsaw – you destroy the experience you’re trying to have.

I’m now living just outside of Granada in a small town of about 15K people and thought it would be interesting to apply Speck’s criteria from your review. Of course, Granada and this town have been around longer than the USA has been a country, and I don’t intend to prescribe what works here for America. Obviously, the cultures are very different. Gas prices ($7.50/gal), and average Spanish purchasing power (1.1 gal per hour worked) have a huge impact on walking and driving, too. I suspect there are other criteria to making cities walkable and wanted to give that some thought.

First let me preface my observations describing pedestrian traffic here. I was initially concerned that this village might be dead and devoid of people on the streets. To my surprise this was hardly the case, and since this is also a late night culture, people are out walking until 11.30 or midnight. The streets have a constant flow of cars, but you always see people walking, and all ages.

Useful. Within just a few minutes walk from anywhere in town, you can accomplish most of life’s daily routine. There are schools, a place of worship, clothing stores, food stores, pharmacies, a medical clinic, tobacco stores, playgrounds, sports fields, and styling salons. There is a tendency for people who are mobile to shop at big box stores in Granada, so there is a campaign here and in other small cities to encourage people to shop local with incentives or contests. I suspect most locals don’t work in town and either drive or take the bus, which is a 35 minute ride to the city center.

Interesting. This is such a subjective term, but I understand what is boring when walking. Buildings and population concentrations here are more dense than in much of the USA. Lots of open space in the valley surround Granada and its towns. Walking is interesting because there aren’t big boring stretches of walls, parking lots or setbacks, rather a patchwork of multi-family and single family houses, shops, bars, restaurants, plazas, fountains, street landscaping, etc.

Safe and comfortable. Walking here and almost everywhere in Spain seems less stressful than what I’ve experienced on the west or east coast of the USA. Overall violent crime in the streets is much lower, although in bigger cities, pickpockets are a potential threat. Driving here is expensive, and they also have a very tough point system that is enforced. Drivers mostly yield the right of way to pedestrians where there are no lights. Spanish drivers are not wild drivers and don’t have a reputation for being crazy drivers. Pedestrians benefit from their restraint.
Comfortable is where I would say in this town the sidewalks have their shortcoming. Sidewalks are quite narrow and barely enough room for two to pass shoulder to shoulder. And yet, this doesn’t seem to deter the locals. I guess they are used to it. And I know they expect to run into each other, so to speak. Which leads me to what I think is missing in terms of another important criterion.

Social. Even in world cities like NYC, you can have a sense of community based on your walking routines, even if you take public transit, with driving much less so. And for some people this is a huge advantage of walking, running into familiar faces and maybe even a neighbor. If I never saw a familiar face ever, I would think I don’t really live there. The Spanish street is still a place where people hang out, small groups of friends, older retired guys just chatting, families out walking for a late dinner at 10, and even legal public drinking, el bottelón. Imagine that in the USA! I don’t think so.

As Americans become more settled, leave the outer suburbs, and as gas prices continue to increase, and traffic continues to frustrate drivers, I can see an increase in the trend towards less dependency on cars and more walking. Adina, I think you lead an exemplary life in terms of using your bicycling and walking. In the meantime, I need to go walk over to the bank and pay my internet bill at the ATM which scans bills with barcodes for payment from my debit card.

By thinking about buses as a low end product, SamTrans may be losing opportunities to serve a higher end market, and our region is losing out on the ability to serve smaller companies (since the Google and Facebook shuttles are private, and don’t serve smaller employers)

One of the points that Walker makes is that people focus too much on technology rather than on what service the technology can provide. For example, the reason buses are slow is that they get stuck in car traffic. A BRT system, with dedicated right of way and signal pre-emption can be fairly speedy.

Rather than thinking about a bus as a low end product, we should think about ways to make buses a useful part of the system by providing distinctive service, and by connecting to other parts of the system.

Some of SamTrans’ most successful lines are the ones that connect to BART and Caltrain. In that case they are acting as a system.

But I disagree in that I don’t think SamTrans is REALLY focused on a coverage basis. The huge cuts over the past several years have definitely moved SamTrans toward a ridership instead of covership basis, with emphasis on ECR corridor service instead of connecting/east-west lines. It would be nice — as you said — if Caltrain and SamTrans were thought of as a single system (hopefully with an integrated fare structure). Then, whenever someone suggested Caltrain (or even BART in the North County) as an alternate service for north-south travel, it would be reasonable. But telling a low-income person to take that Menlo Park-San Bruno trip on Caltrain (cost $6.75 each way) instead of SamTrans ($2) just doesn’t fly.

That’s why, if push come to shove, SamTrans SHOULD stop contributing to Caltrain and concentrate on buses. Caltrain already has 51% farebox recovery. Let’s bump that up and take less from Muni, VTA and SamTrans.

I think that Google+ will eventually be self-limiting in part due to the limitations that people have on adequately monitoring the quality of the comments on their threads. In the absence of tools to manage spammers and trolls, comment threads tend towards chaos. I think you’ll find that as the population of Google+ enlarges towards the size of the entire net, that it will start to attract opportunists who will be parasitic on the largest voices and start to clobber the quality of the “engagement” that they have.

Broadcast media like Twitter already have part of this problem with spammers hijacking threads and at-replies, and there’s no reason to believe that the same population won’t take every opportunity to colonize Google+ with the same set of techniques.

There are a couple of parts to the question. The first is does she and others in her non-techy circles know about and want to try Google+, and do they have the Facebook sharing problem that G+ is designed to address. The answer is clearly yes. The second is will she actually find Google a usable tool to address those concerns. We’ll see!

I’m guessing the G+ rollout naturally begins with techies because that group is eager to get on board and will help get the G+ community rolling quickly. Also, they will help groom the product into a more mature state by reporting flaws and providing useful feedback. We can work with the product in an unfinished state, whereas the more general public might find it lacking initially and just bail.

Facebook’s core is its advertisers, not its users. They want more of whatever demographic group gets them the most ad revenue.