Ronda Kaysen, reporting for the New York Times:

While rural communities struggle to fill empty stations, New York City has a different problem. Property values are so high that stations are being converted to more profitable uses, like high-rise buildings, giving drivers fewer places to fill their tanks. The city had 809 gas stations in 2011, down from 872 in 2006, according to the Department of Consumer Affairs. Of the remaining gas stations, only 44 are in Manhattan.

Decreasing profits on gas, rising property values, and lower demand due to fewer and more fuel efficient cars are putting pressure on big city gas stations. No one is pretending that this is the beginning of the end, but it does seem like yet another negative feedback loop for cars in large cities like New York. Fewer cars mean fewer gas stations, which makes gas harder to find, which makes owning a car less convenient. 

Remember John King’s lament about San Francisco’s hard to find privately owned public spaces? Most signs identifying the spots were less than noticeable. Well, King’s exposé of sorts spurred city hall into action. Not only will the signs become larger and more plentiful, there will be a web mapping app to help San Franciscans and visitors find these hidden treasures.

Michael Keller and Yolanne Almanzar, again for the New York World:

WNYC’s Brian Leher Show and The New York World are collaborating on a project to map and report on New York City’s Privately-Owned Public Spaces, aka POPS. We want to figure out how public these public spaces really are. Through zoning incentives, New York’s city planners have encouraged private builders to include public spaces in their developments. Many are in active public use, but others are hard to find, under heavy surveillance, or essentially inaccessible.

Yes, that’s right: A crowdsourced web map of privately owned public spaces. Shouldn’t all places with POPS have a web map so people can find them? And shouldn’t private developers fund the creation and maintenance of those web apps? The financial benefit developers receive for providing a modicum of public space is enormous.

Francis Reynolds, writing for The Nation:

But the problem with privately owned public spaces is that they’re no substitution for purely public spaces, because First Amendment protections don’t really apply when the owners of a space are non-governmental. Jerold Kayden, a professor of urban planning and design at Harvard’s Kennedy School, says that these spaces “occupy a somewhat murky terrain in terms of what activities and conduct of public users within the space should be acceptable and what goes beyond the pale.”

Read that first sentence twice. It’s an important one.

The Occupy movement really brought some of the issues with POPS into sharp relief. Take this piece by Jill Colvin for DNAinfo. She points out that the legal murkiness that surrounds Zuccotti Park, the epicenter of the Occupy movement, including whether police had the authority to kick out protesters. Whether protesters intentionally occupied that park based on its legal limbo is unclear, but it ended up being a savvy choice.

I should point out that one legal loophole often means there are others, ones that may not work in your favor.

Privatization of public space isn’t just an American trend. Take a look at this sampling from Great Britain, compiled by Jeevan Vasagar in his reporting for the Guardian:

It appears from the scale of the change that privatisation of space is now the standard price of redevelopment. There are privatised public zones across Britain, including Brindleyplace in Birmingham, jointly owned by the property firms Hines and Moorfield, and Liverpool One, owned by the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor estate. In Exeter, Princesshay is described as a “shopping destination featuring over 60 shops set in a series of interconnecting open streets and squares”. The spaces here are owned and run by the property group Land Securities and the Crown Estate, which manages the monarch’s property portfolio. Land Securities also owns Gunwharf Quays in Portsmouth, a waterside complex of shops, bars and restaurants. Bishops Square, which includes Spitalfields market, two squares and historic streets in east London, was sold to JP Morgan asset management in 2010.

Yolanne Almanzar and Michael Keller, writing for the New York World:

In exchange for this sliver of sidewalk, public records show, the developers of 180 Water Street received permission to build nearly 47,000 square feet of office space that would not have otherwise been permitted by zoning. Multiply each of those square feet by the current asking price — which we calculate at about $455 per square foot — and the value of privately owned public spaces to property owners comes into sharp focus.

John King:

The Roof Terrace at One Kearny shows why we’re lucky that San Francisco requires downtown developers to provide space in their projects that is accessible to the public at large.

It also is a case study in why the generation-old guidelines must be improved.

Consider this background reading for today’s upcoming posts. Privately owned public spaces, also known as POPS, have proliferated in recent years. They’re required by laws written with the best of intentions, but the result has been spaces that are often ill-defined: How are they advertised? Who has jurisdiction? Should you have to sign in at the door or not? 

Dan Turning, writing for the L.A. Times:

As I write this, it’s 97 degrees in the San Fernando Valley. That doesn’t mean Al Gore is right and George Will is wrong. It’s the mountain of temperature statistics that make Will wrong.

Willful ignorance is a hell of a drug.

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Fiona Harvey, writing for The Guardian:

To attribute recent extreme weather events – rather than events 10 years ago or more – to human-caused climate change is a big advance, and will help researchers to provide better warnings of the likely effects of climate change in the near future. This is likely to have major repercussions on climate change policy and the ongoing efforts to adapt to the probable effects of global warming.

NOAA:

During the June 2011-June 2012 period, each of the 13 consecutive months ranked among the warmest third of their historical distribution for the first time in the 1895-present record. The odds of this occurring randomly is 1 in 1,594,323.

Hillary Rosner interviews journalist and photographer Michael Kodas about this year’s massive Western fires. They discuss how development patterns, climate change, and our fleeting collective memory of disasters will conspire to make matters worse. 

Matthew Yglesias thinks building skyscrapers would solve the problem. He reasons that denser living makes it cost effective to bury power lines. 

Ted Burnham, writing for NPR:

Now it appears that, even for a single disease or condition, the balance between nature and nurture isn’t fixed place to place. That’s what researchers at Kings College London, writing this week in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, are showing with maps that identify hotspots in the U.K. where either genetic or environmental factors dominate.

One of the main environmental factors? Income.

Residents of every city I’ve lived in have had the same existential crisis—where exactly are the boundaries between neighborhoods? Nate Berg reports on a attempt by two cartographers to solve those riddles in Boston using crowdsourcing.

Monica Stephens:

So in honor of the 4th of July, we selected all geotagged tweets[1] sent within the continental US between June 22 and June 28 (about 10 million in total) and extracted all tweets containing the word “church” (17,686 tweets of which half originated on Sunday) or “beer” (14,405 tweets which are much more evenly distributed  throughout the week).

I don’t tweet about either subject, but I grew up in Wisconsin and now live in Massachusetts. You can probably guess which side I’d fall on.

Nitpick: Continental U.S. should include Alaska. They mean contiguous.

David Derbyshire, writing for the Daily Mail in 2007:

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere. It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision. Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom. He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.

(Via Frank Jacobs.)

Lisa W. Foderaro, reporting for the New York Times:

“Tree pruning is something where you don’t see the impact of deferring until there’s a tragedy,” said Councilman Brad Lander, a Democrat from Park Slope, Brooklyn, who joined with members of both parties to press for restorations to the parks budget. “As incidents have shown, there’s a real risk, and, hopefully, getting pruning back on a better schedule will mean New Yorkers will be safer.”

Alex Schmidt, reporting for the California Report:

(Via Jon Christensen.)

A sad coda to the loss of Lonesome George, the last of his subspecies of Galapagos tortoise.

(Via Hillary Rosner.)