– Your Bright Brothers Team
David Romako / Josh Yeager /  Brandi Walsh

Back in the day, folks would get all gussied up for a fabulous flight; with smiling stewardesses in smart suits and matching hats serving up expertly crafted highballs and fancy shrimp cocktail. Nowadays, you’re likely to see many a schlump in sweatpants and Crocs queued up as your TSA neighbors, but that’s not all that’s changed with flying. Today, in addition to policing passengers, airlines are also grappling with business models that heavily contribute to carbon emissions. Outcry for their reduction is leading to all sorts of new measures to make an educated public aware of the deleterious effects of air travel on our planet. In our last edition, we reported that Google will now include emissions information on its airline fares search engine. Belgium approved a 4- to 6-Euro tax on short haul flights (under 500 km), designed to boost the appeal of alternate types of transportation, like rail, while helping to cut down on carbon emissions. And these sobering images, graphs and charts from The Guardian demonstrate how climate change-induced weather shifts are already poised to make parts of the planet unlivable by the next decade. They say that “some like it hot,” but really, how hot is too hot?

From crystal islands to intercity forests to a gondola system crisscrossing the Los Angeles skyline, to an epic carbon-filtering skyscraper — cities of the 21^st century will radically alter the urban landscape in ways we have never imaged. In this piece from TimeOut, take a gander at some revolutionary plans underway in cities around the globe. The article estimates that by 2030, cities (which tend to be powerhouse polluters) will be bigger, greener and taller too — with “plenty of anti-car measures, ‘urban forests’ galore, and loads and loads of solar panels.”  Get inspired and (re)imagine which of these cutting-edge trends could become a reality near you.

Photo credit:  Shimahara Visual, courtesy Aerial Rapid Transit Technologies LLC

Public transportation authorities around the country are scrambling to figure out how to handle a shortfall in fares and funding since the pandemic greatly impacted ridership. Despite the budgetary crunch, many cities are ditching the fares in favor of transit equity. From Alexandria, VA to Detroit, MI to San Francisco, CA, transit agencies are tinkering with removing fares from the equation to offer a truly public amenity. In this article from Tucson, AZ-based KOLD, it is noted that the city’s Sun Link streetcar is breaking ridership records after the city council’s decision not to implement a fare because of the COVID-19 pandemic more than a year and a half ago. Leaders at Sun Link now worry ridership will drop once a fare is required again and are discussing ways to ensure volume remains. The upside? The city’s system has seen record ridership with a fare-free model, with more than 9,000 riders on family weekend alone — the highest single-day ridership seen in years. Rhett Crowninshield, the transit administrator for the city of Tucson said, “Parking isn’t a hassle and you can jump on and jump off, I think it’s an awesome alternative and that’s why it’s so popular,”. What’s the public transit situation like near you, and do you take it for work, running errands or even leisure trips around town?

Photo credit: Downtown San Francisco

Since 2012, Monument Lab, a Philly-based “arts and history studio nonprofit” has been moving the needle and making visible some of the truths about monuments in our society. Designed to “cultivate and facilitate critical conversations around the past, present and future of monuments…” — in 2020, the nonprofit was awarded a transformative grant of $4 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to support the production of a definitive national audit of the nation’s monuments, which was recently released. What it found, in an exhaustive study of nearly 50,000 monuments in all fifty states, is that our collective narrative is “male, pale and stale”. Meaning that we overwhelmingly immortalize white men, and that the most common features of American monuments reflect war and conquest. Find out who the top 50 individuals recorded in US public monuments are (you may be surprised) and give their interactive map a whirl. It’s powered by 42 data sources created and maintained by federal, state, local, tribal, institutional, and affinity organizations.
 
Photo credit: Monument Lab

The future of streeteries hangs in the balance. Some cities did away with them after vaccines started rolling out. In other places like D.C., San Francisco and Philadelphia, efforts are in process to formalize and make them permanent offerings, but there’s a lot of red tape, minutia and nitpicking that come with that approach — and money. A lot of money, especially if you’re a small business just trying to survive and negotiate the fickleness of a pandemic-leery public.  In this GrubStreet interview with the owner of a Brooklyn restaurant that opened mid-pandemic, he estimates they’ve spent about $30K on build-out of their heated streetery, with about half of that going towards heating infrastructure. And while many guests still prefer to dine outside, there’s a highly vocal group that finds them to be noisy, annoying and rat-infested — and they want their parking back. What’s your take on this on-going saga of savory sustenance, and what’s the situation like where you live? We’d love to know.
 
Photo credit: Colin Clark, GrubStreet