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Welcome - my name is Kevin Klinkenberg, and this site "The Messy City" is my blog and company website. I started blogging on urban planning and design issues in 2007, and began working in the field in 1993. Please feel free to connect with me on any of the social media sites listed here. Thanks for reading.

The sharing economy meets the sharing economy

Courtesy of Kansas City B-cycle

Courtesy of Kansas City B-cycle

From the department of ideas I love: the bike share program in Kansas City is using crowdfunding to try and expand the system. Nancy Scola at Next City writes about it:

They hope to crowdfund parts of the system using the home-grown civic platform Neighbor.ly. B-Cycle, which calls itself "the country’s only advocate-owned bike share system," just kicked off simultaneous mini-campaigns, ranging between $50,000 and $250,000, to bring anywhere from one to five stations to 10 different Kansas City neighborhoods.

Sarah Shipley is communications director for BikeWalkKC, the umbrella group that runs B-Cycle. The campaigns’ goal, she says, is more than just raising money. For one thing, it’s to surface the sometimes-challenging mechanics of running a bike share program. For another, it’s to help create a cycling culture in a city that only three years ago was "a no-man’s land for bikes."

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How to change your city, quickly

Questioning the virtues of high-speed rail