Gizmodo Australia » san francisco

Why The SF Bridge Broke

Brian Lam — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:23:37 +0000

San Francisco’s Bay Bridge is still closed after a quick repair job fell apart. Terrifying, since my hometown is known for, you know, earthquakes, and this bridge is just falling apart even without them. Here’s a pretty good visual/text explanation of what is happening. [sci-experiments via TokyoMango]

Bay Area Architects Seek To Re-purpose Bay Bridge As Recreational

Jack Loftus — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:00:00 +0000

The Bay Bridge is falling down, falling down, so that a bigger, better bridge—one not prone to falling down during an earthquake—can be erected in its place. If two architects get their way however, it might become this.

“Imagine housing, recreational and cultural facilities connected to a continuous, lushly planted, green strip, floating above the water-an aerial garden, as the city’s newest park through which you could walk and wander and enjoy the most spectacular views of the bay,” reads an excerpt from the proposal by architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello. The image here depicts a “tennis court, bicycle path, and observation module.”

This image is an outdoor auditorium.

This final image shows off the Bay Bridge’s swimming pool and some living/recreational quarters, as well as the green grass that would line the length of the “unwanted” bridge. One “little” caveat: In the event of a major earthquake, the Bay Bridge would probably survive, but as a result of the catastrophe would be unusable thereafter. This is precisely why the idea is all but certain to be rejected (at least for this bridge, in this area, anyway). [BLDG Blog]

San Francisco Sets An Example, Opens City Data For Anyone To Use

Jason Chen — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 23:20:00 +0000

SF Mayor Gavin “Handsome” Newsom just announced via Techcrunch that the city will start placing crime, health and other city data online for people to use. What’s it for? Think iPhone apps that show restaurants’ health code ratings, for one.

There are even more possibilities. You can imagine apps taking crime rate statistics and mapping it out, showing users the safest places in the city to live—or even drive through. The more datasets there are (over 100 right now), the more possibilities there are for programs. So we’re all for cities putting their data online for users to freely access. [Techcrunch]

San Francisco Bus Stops To Offer Free Solar-Powered Wi-Fi

Dan Nosowitz — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 21:40:23 +0000

By 2013, San Francisco is planning to construct 360 new Municipal bus stops that’ll further the causes of both solar power and blanketed Wi-Fi at the same time.

The stops, which should cost around $US30,000, may seem expensive, but they’ll be pretty energy-efficient. The energy not used by the stops will be fed into the city’s power grid, and the stops themselves will use LED lighting, nearly four and a half times more efficient than the current fluorescent. Is it shameful to admit that I’m way more excited about blanketed Wi-Fi coverage than energy efficiency? Because I am. [Popular Mechanics]

Hula Dancers Mob San Francisco Apple Store

Danny Allen — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 07:04:53 +0000

Not Hulu…Hula! As in the Nā Lei Hulu I Ka Wēkiu dancers. A crew of 40 started a hit-and-run Hula in San Francisco on Saturday, made their way downtown, and made a fun visit to the Apple Store:

From all reports, everyone got a kick out of it, but when the smiling dancers made their way across the road to the Westfield shopping mall afterwards, security there gave them the boot. Kill joys!

T-Mobile Stages Random Aerial Marketing Assault On San Francisco

Adrian Covert — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 01:30:00 +0000

I have no feezing clue what staging a massive airshow in San Francisco has to do with the myTouch 3G or how T-Mobile expected people to connect the two — oh wait, because now I’m writing about it!

I’m also sure the giant party they threw in the Embarcadero, complete with T-Mobile and myTouch branding, helped to justify that $US18,000 pricetag as well. Anyways, the SF Chronicle says T-Mobile dropped 100 little men out of the sky in four different locations across the city, and one of them was ELVIS and another had a DSLR attached to his HEAD. CRAZY!!!

Then they wrote some fancy stuff in the sky using smoke, and everyone oggled for a second, then ran to the nearest T-Mobile location to buy a myTouch 3G for each member of their family (CHARLES BARKLEY! MYFAVES!). Well done, Catherine Zeta-Jones. [SF Gate]

San Francisco To Provide Home For New UN Global Warming Center

Adrian Covert — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:00:00 +0000

San Francisco and Supermayor Gavin Newsom announced plans to take the pollution-mired Hunter’s Point Shipyard and build a $US20 Million, 80,000-square foot UN Global Compact centre, which will serve as a “climate change think tank and green tech incubator.”

Construction on the building will begin in 2011, and finish in mid 2012, serving as office space for the Global Compact, as well as house a conference centre. The city also hopes the centre will encourage other sustainable resource-oriented orgs to populate around the area as well.

And if you remember previously, Hunter’s Point was home to child pranksters who would go around turning off the power switches on San Francisco’s hybrid buses. This latest announcement seems all too appropriate. [Inhabitat]

Insecure Electronic Parking Meters Can Be Hacked For Infinite Money

Jason Chen — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 16:02:00 +0000

Two presenters at Black Hat 2009 just demonstrated their ability to hack into parking meters in San Francisco (and theoretically anywhere with this kind of system) to give unlimited money on their parking payment cards.

The two figured out how to do this by intercepting the types of signals that get transmitted on a working card, then programming a fake card to reproduce those same signals.

They found that the card has a stored maximum value and only writes how many times the value has been decremented.

In essence, they found a way to give themselves free parking for as long as this system is in place. They declined to detail how exactly you can reproduce this, because they don’t want people ripping off the city of SF, so their sole purpose is to get SF to fix their meters to that this can’t happen. [Hackaday]

$US1 Billion Electric Car Charging Grid Planned For San Francisco

Sean Fallon — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:40:00 +0000

In keeping with its progressive reputation, San Francisco is looking to pave the way for widespread electric vehicle adoption in the US. A Palo-Alto start-up called “Better Place” has received the green light from all three of the Bay Area’s big city mayors to begin carrying out an ambitious plan to build a network of 250,000 charging ports, 200 battery-exchange stations and a control centre that keeps the system running smoothly. And if that wasn’t enough, they hope to have the entire thing up and running by 2012.

Naturally, a project this vast isn’t going to be cheap—$US1 billion is a lot of money to burden the taxpayers with. Fortunately, that won’t be a problem because the project will be funded with an incentive plan directed at companies who install the chargers. Building permits will also be expedited to help move things along. Better Place will also be working with Renault-Nissan to distribute electric vehicles in “much the way telecoms distribute mobile phones. Customers will subscribe to drive a certain number of miles and get an electric vehicle at a discounted price. Better Place will own the battery.”

Better Place already has similar systems in the works for parts of Europe, but getting a foothold in the US will be their biggest challenge. As San Francisco mayor-extraordinaire Gavin Newsom put it, the goal is to “make the Bay Area–and eventually California–the electric vehicle capital of the US”. [Better Place via Mercury News via Treehugger via DVICE]

Mobile Millennium Project is a Poor Man’s Traffic-Relaying GPS

Gizmodo US Edition — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:30:00 +0000

On Monday Nokia, NAVTEQ and UC Berkeley will launch the Mobile Millennium project which will use GPS data from thousands of mobile phones to gather traffic information in the San Francisco Bay Area. By having users relay and access the information, it will enable them to find and avoid traffic congestion, similar to the Dash Express GPS system. I’d participate, but I wonder how much researchers would benefit from my daily commute from bed to kitchen table.

In order to get the needed information, the project uses a Java program that participants can download onto their phone.Traffic is then calculated using an algorithm researchers have developed. The software is eventually expected to work on most GPS-enabled phones on GSM networks. The project will not require many users, but does require them to be spread out for better results. Mobile Millennium plans to post the data it receives on the Web, but users who have the Java software will have be most up-to-date. The information culled will be kept anonymous. Because the software uses a lot of data, only users with unlimited data plans are advised to sign up because you certainly don’t want to end up with a $US218 trillion phone bill. [Mobile Millennium via IT World]