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Comment by zachkatz | Hacker News Reader

Building a platform that accelerates the construction of protected bike lanes and car-free streets worldwide by connecting citizens, advocacy groups, cities, and urban planners: https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/15705341894974832...

(Backstory: Started a Twitter account in July (twitter.com/@betterstreetsai) posting DALL-E-generated street transformations, it immediately took off, got lots of press, etc. and made me realize how huge the demand for this stuff is.)

Feel free to send me a DM on Twitter if you're interested in helping!

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NotJustBikes channel on youtube would love this stuff

He's definitely seen the account, we made one of his hometown ("Fake London," Ontario) and he retweeted it: https://twitter.com/betterstreetsai/status/15541736198734520...

Hm, have you talked with the bike lane uprising folk? I think you'll find that these problems are way, way more political than they seem. Good luck, though.

I've run large bike lane/car-free streets campaigns before [1] and have talked with a bunch of activists from groups all over the country, so I have a good deal of experience here.

You're right that these problems are political—in fact, they're entirely political!—but the reason they're so political is because there's no existing platform for capturing latent + kinetic demand, so electeds (even the ones who want better streets—we've heard from many of them on Twitter) have absolutely no idea how much political support they have—and they need that support to take bold action. We're solving that problem!

[1] https://bikeportland.org/2020/04/24/grassroots-push-emerges-..., https://bikeportland.org/2020/05/20/its-official-pbot-consid..., https://bikeportland.org/2021/02/02/support-builds-for-bike-...

FWIW, I consider bikelane uprising an org/platform that's capturing that sort of latent/kinetic demand you're talking about, which they've been able to take their work to electeds, who in-turn take action on creating new bike lanes, fixing road damage, raising accountability for companies that park in bike lanes, etc. The emotion they work from is discrete anger and frustration, which tends to ignite action from a bunch of folk to make calls to electeds and such. If you can find a way to bring out that raw feeling on top of what I personally feel as nostalgia for the future in what you're building, it can almost definitely lead into some great stuff. Just don't forget about the politics :)

Yep, absolutely! Our plan is to integrate existing local advocacy orgs into the platform—so we automatically benefit from their political connections + bandwidth, while they benefit from our tools + reach. Perfect win/win to Get Stuff Done.

Volts podcast had the dude who did bike lanes in east bay area on. It was an interesting interview, directly relevant to this space

DALL-E also can transform American suburban shopping centers into mixed-use urban attractors.

https://aixd.substack.com

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