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title: Organic Urban Planning
categories:
- uncategorized
content-tags:
- tagless
---

It's occurred to me recently that while intelligent zoning seems to be a critical ingredient of livable cities, perhaps the less draconian [invisible hand][1] of informed consumers would be a more effective agent of change.

   [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand

For example, I'd love to see a service that uses drive time calculations (as mapping sites to) refined by [traffic data][2] to evaluate commute time regionally.  The user could enter where they work, what time they commute, and perhaps other routine destinations such as school, daycare, family, etc.  Then a map of their region could be generated with some sort of [visualization][3] of the weekly travel time investment of moving home to any location.

   [2]: http://demo.kivera.com/traffic.jsp
   [3]: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/HTML_papers/pexel/pexel.html

Imagine if travel time investment was translated to height and the map rendered as a 3D terrain.  Near work (or between work and the kids' school) would be the lowest point, and mountains would arise around.  Low-traffic highways would cut valleys into outlying areas, and highly congested neighborhoods would become peaks.  Personally, I'd want to count time spent on a bus or train as low-waste (I can work on a PowerBook while seated) but time spent waiting for a transfer as wasted.  This would cause mass transit routes to cut far-reaching grooves.

Add in other factors (school district ratings, tax and crime rates, property values, population density) and you could have a total "stress map".  Providing this as metadata to MLS searches would make it easier for home shoppers to make enlightened decisions.
