It’s hot off the presses! As part of Making Policy Public, I collaborated with street vendors, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), and The Street Vendor Project to research, compile and design this guide to street vending in NYC. It clarifies the rules so NYC’s 10,000 vendors can understand their rights, avoid fines, and earn an honest living. The thick document of city regulations that vendors have been using is full of intimidating jargon and unformatted lists that would make even the most patient person cry. As a result, vendors are getting fined $1000 for simple things like parking their cart too far away from the curb - a rule that can only be followed if you know it exists. 

We’ve translated the most commonly-violated rules into diagrams and minimal text in English, Bengali, Arabic, Chinese, and Spanish. It also includes a big-ass poster full of fun facts on the history and challenges of NYC street vending, vendor types, personal vendor stories, and policy recommendations.

We’re passing them out to street vendors for free. Unfortunately I’m all the way up in Finland now, but if you’re in NYC and feeling frisky this weekend, please help us out!

CUP Call for Volunteers!

What: Helping with the one-day, citywide distribution extravaganza for Vendor Power! – a new illustrated guide to city vending regulation for New York’s 10,000 street vendors.
When: Saturday, March 28, 11:30 am - 2 pm
Where: We’ll meet at the Street Vendor Project, 123 William St., 16th Floor, in Lower Manhattan. Following a brief press event, volunteers will take the guides and fan out to vendor-dense neighborhoods across the city.

If you can’t make it to Lower Manhattan on Saturday, you can also pick up guides ahead of time at CUP and then distribute them in your neighborhood on March 28.

No free streaming tv here! Hello bit torrents…

U.S. magazines cost as much as books! Now eating while reading Time is for fancy days…

There’s no peanut butter and people think PBJ sandwiches are grody! Gots to tell people what time it is…

What are your favorite places in Helsinki? Add it to the collaborative Google map here!

How do you feel comfortable in a city? For me, part of it is knowing what direction I’m facing. This was an easy thing to do in NYC where I was always aware I was walking north on Mott or west on Spring. As one of the first planned cities, Helsinki actually has a grid too, but they decided to make it hard and rotate it 45 degrees in a major part of downtown:

I live all up in the angle so I’m directionally-challenged out the door. What I imagined as west-ish is other people’s north-ish, and the calculated person’s northwest. It’s not so easy to give directions this way - add a few northeasts, southwests, and street names like Ruoholahdenkatu, and it turns into soup real fast. Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell’s interesting theory on why Asians are good at math (from his book Outliers) - Chinese number words are so brief and can be said so quickly that a Chinese person is almost always likely to quickly remember a sequence like 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 while an English-speaking person only gets it right half the time. And numbers beyond 10 are all logical (12 is literally ten-two) so math is made easy while English-speakers need a split second more to translate “twelve” in their mind.

So here, like in other places, landmarks and geography come more into play - go “away from Kamppi” or “towards the water,” which reminds me of Shawshank Redemption when Tim Robbins tells Morgan Freeman to find the funny rock in the stone wall near a big oak tree that looks like something out of a Robert Frost poem. Maybe this will make for a more poetic understanding. Or just more glancing at my mobile phone map.

Crashstat.org combines Google maps with DMV stats on pedestrian and biking accidents so you can see which NYC intersections are danger zones. Since 1995, there have been 35 injuries and 2 fatalities just two blocks from my old apartment. And that doesn’t count tramplings-by-fellow-pedestrians on Canal Street… Made by Transportation Alternatives.