British Ministers are considering making motorists legally responsible for accidents involving cyclists or pedestrians, even if they are not at fault. Government advisers are pushing for changes in the civil law that will make the most powerful vehicle involved in a collision automatically liable for insurance and compensation purposes.
Popularity: 20% [?]
Harvard Park has been a no-man’s land after dark for decades. Its location, at the borders of rival gang turf, has made it more a demilitarized zone than public space since the inception of this city’s oldest and most entrenched street gangs. So there was a giddy excitement among the thousand or so South Los Angeles neighbors who came last week to celebrate the park’s inclusion in Summer Night Lights, a program designed to combat gang violence by keeping lights on until midnight in some of the city’s roughest parks.
Popularity: 42% [?]
First, they took away the cops parked at key intersections and replaced them with with mounted, overhead cameras. This idea didn’t start in my city, Seattle, but when it turned out to be a revenue-generator, even if it reduced safety, City Hall took to it with a vengeance.
Popularity: 54% [?]
Green space is out, high-rises are in as ‘garden’ community razed to sow prosperity.
Popularity: 37% [?]
Studies have shown that hospital patients make a speedier recovery when they have a exposure to living vegetation, like trees and flowers. And certainly great metropoli are made even more liveable by their extensive parks and gardens. Now it seems that plants can also deter burglars. Sort of.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Elderly people who live below the poverty line and perceive their neighborhoods to be dangerous are more likely to have a mobility disability. Researchers suggest that even perceiving one’s neighborhood as unsafe can ‘get into the body’ and, ultimately, prove hazardous for elder health.
Popularity: 21% [?]
To survive, everyone needs to have a place to be and to sleep, eat, and, let’s face it, go to the bathroom. For most of us, that place is the home. As rising unemployment pushes more people out of their houses and apartments, however, and growing numbers of Americans cannot find a place to perform these essential functions legally, they will have little choice but to break the law. And so some of them are turning to a strategy that has cropped up repeatedly in American history—squatting. Governments are sometimes tempted to respond to a spike in this form of outlaw residency by simply forcing squatters out. The better strategy, however is to treat squatting as a symptom of a simultaneous failure of both the market and the government. Viewed in this light, an outbreak of squatting is a sign that governments should change their housing policies to make it easier for poor people to find the housing they need—as law-abiders instead of renegades.
Popularity: 17% [?]
Nationwide, an estimated two-thirds of the people who leave prison are rearrested within three years. A disproportionate number of them come from a few urban neighborhoods in big cities. Many states spend more than $1 million a year to incarcerate the residents of single blocks or small neighborhoods.
Popularity: 22% [?]