The Toronto Star: "Life in suburbia costs more than you'd think."

Bart Thielges: "In the 1980s the CSAA [California State Automobile Association] dropped the documentation of pedestrian overcrossings (POCs) from their city street maps. When brought this up with one of the cartographers in the San Francisco office, he told me that this was a new CSAA policy, not a mistake. Fortunately POCs are beginning to reappear in CSAA maps printed in 2000 and later."

Planetizen: [Illinois] suburb plans to raze entire downtown and build a new one.

The Los Angeles Times: "'Come to California,' Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger urged the world more than once in his State of the State address this month. But most residents are not happy about this trend." Especially because each person who comes to California expects an uncrowded highway in a single-occupancy vehicle despite the enormous cost of providing this. (via BATN)

Speed cameras still have some bugs to work out. Here's the story of a motorist clocked by one camera, supposedly while doing 406 mph.

Today Blogger allowed me to turn on a new syndication feed for this blog, coded in the XML schema known as Atom. Here's the URL: http://urbification.blogspot.com/atom.xml. Please drop me a line if you are able to successfully subscribe to Urbification in your favorite aggregator. (Mine is Newzcrawler, and the feed failed to validate even though the latest version is supposed to support Atom.)

Park Smart Technologies is a New Hampshire-based company hoping to bring smart cards to parking meters. Bring it on! (via Payments News)

Life in surburbia isn't what it used to be. The New Jersey Star Ledger reports that a Milburn, NJ mall has suspended pre-opening strolls by seniors during Homeland Security orange alerts.

Mary Battiata, writing in the Washington Post about the traffic calming changes taking place along U.S. 50 in rural Virgina: "If you want people to drive at 25 mph, you don't build a road that looks like it's designed for 60 mph. Instead, you design it so it looks like you should drive 25, and then, as it turns out, people do."

The New York Times: "Loft districts and gentrified neighborhoods have been transformed so quickly, and by such similar kinds of people, that they are often as homogeneous, with respect to age, race, income and education, as a 50's suburb. Gentrifiers acknowledge this lack of diversity, and it's a painful admission because 'diversity,' after all, is what they say they like about the city."

NBC: "Ohio drivers caught driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol after midnight Wednesday could spend the first part of 2004 driving with special red-letter license plates."

Press release from August 2003: "The Network of Employers for Traffic Safety (NETS), a broad-based coalition of employers dedicated to highway safety, advises the nation’s employers that distracted driving crashes are no accident and emphasize the need for all employers to take a proactive role in reducing the 4,000 to 8,000 crashes per day attributed to distracted or inattentive driving."

The San Jose Mercury News reports that after years of construction, a widened freeway, which recently opened and was promised as relieving congestion is actually now more congested, having attracted more new travelers than the expanded roadway could hold. This traffic phenomenon, known as "induced demand," has been seen elsewhere as well, such as I-270 in Montgomery County, Maryland. (via BATN)