Lily Bernheimer

Some good news comes to us this week of an Upper West Side synagogue's support for Livable Streets. From Gil Kulich on the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance group blog:

If you want to use the Livable Streets Community site to organize in your neighborhood, this week we've got a great example of what you can do with your group.

Our New York readers who've been keeping close tabs on the stalled MTA rescue will want to check out the South Bronx Livable Streets group this week, where Susan Donovan has been blogging about the saga, including yesterday's protest at Senator Ruben Diaz, Sr.'s office. The group is also a great place to join up with others working on issues such as waterfront access in the Lower Concourse rezoning.

Livable Streets Community member Dan Latorre has gone above and beyond the call of duty in his activism this month. After prodding Transportation Alternatives' Brooklyn committee to organize their work through a Livable Streets Group, he set up two online conference sessions to teach other members about the array of tools offered and what they're best suited for. The group's 19 members are now busy using their blog and wiki pages to share meeting minutes and other information, and manage their various initiatives. Now, he and fellow group member Kevin Vincent are spearheading a brilliant project to deliver bulk orders of bike rack requests to the DOT.

Here's an interesting dose of outside-the-box transportation thinking that recently bubbled up from the Livable Streets community. Smart ParaTransit -- a group that "targets new ways of getting people in and around cities in road vehicles, smaller than full sized buses, driven by real human beings, dynamically shared with others, and aided by state of the art communications technologies" -- is intrigued by the potential of Google Latitude:

As impassioned LSN members continue to hash out the pros and cons of the "pedestrian peek-a-boo" featured in Robin Urban Smith's daylighting Streetfilm, an uplifting success story has come to light.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the roller coaster we've been riding over the last few weeks, there's a lot of interesting activity starting to take place in the Livable Streets Network online community. And you can join us.