September 21: SEPTA’s YAC pushing bulk fare deals for universities | How to petition for traffic calming | Stober floats participatory budgeting

SEPTA’s Youth Advisory Council, the organization charged with representing young people’s perspective to the transit authority, started a Change.org petition for a new SEPTA School Partnership Program for bulk purchasing of discount transit fares by the universities. Last year we told you about how that works in Pittsburgh.

Lauren Ancona’s all-encompassing Pope map page now has a useful calendar of traffic restrictions.

The Streets Department released some guidelines for petitioning for traffic calming changes in your neighborhood. To see what kind of traffic calming is still possible in an older city, check out the latest Streetfilms video with Iain Simmons showcasing some recent street design changes in central London. Before anyone living in Philly’s gridded areas gets any ideas about requesting speed humps though, we confirmed Streets has a policy of not installing humps on street segments with less than 1000 feet between traffic control devicies (stop signs, signals, etc.) The average city block is 550 feet long.

OCF Realty visits the new East Passyunk Avenue gateway and points out, among other things, that the Indego station envisioned in the original plans hasn’t been installed, due to space considerations.

Randy LoBasso at the Bicycle Coalition looks at the new Census commuting numbers and says Chicago is getting closer to overtaking Philly as the number one big city for biking.

Andrew Stober released some ideas for the city’s capital budget, including introducing participatory budgeting for small projects using City Council’s Activities Fund. In NYC, livable streets projects have fared pretty well when residents vote on how to spend the money.

What makes a “smart city?” Joe Cortwright argues it’s less about technology than “density, diversity, design, discovery and democracy.”

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