A round-up of city stories we enjoyed elsewhere this week.

  • Vox has rounded up an excellent list of really, really bad maps. For example, this atrocity:

The more you stare, the wronger it becomes.

Vox also took the mature decision to blast some of their own maps, which incorrectly show Ohio reaching across Pennsylvania to prod New York state in the side. For some reason though, while the site’s writers laughed at European’s attempts to label maps of the US, they didn’t feature any of the similarly ludicrous maps of Europe hand drawn by Americans. Odd omission, that.

  • Meanwhile, several towns in New York are threatening to secede from the state entirely. The reason? They’re desperate to continue fracking, but the state’s governor has banned it. From Newsweek: 

Two months after Governor Cuomo banned hydraulic fracturing in New York, 15 towns in the state are threatening to secede and join neighboring Pennsylvania, where fracking is continuing full steam ahead.

The towns are all members of the Upstate New York Towns Association, which is researching whether secession would be economically advantageous for the municipalities. The towns sit atop the Marcellus Shale, a geologic formation rich in natural gas.

  • Amsterdam has run out of bike parking – which isn’t that suprising, considering they have more bicycles than people. CityLab has the lowdown on the city’s plans to tackle the shortage, which including building a huge underground parking garage and even floating canal islands filled with bike parking. 

 

No more room: bike parking in Amsterdam. Image: Getty.

  • This thorough piece from the Guardian investigates São Paulo’s water crisis, in which millions of the city’s residents only have water for a few hours a day. From the piece: 

The sudden nature of the crisis has left people struggling to cope with the reality of the taps running dry… Residents of São Paulo are making their own arrangements: storing water at home, and in some cases drilling homemade wells. In part a result of badly stored water, instances of dengue fever spread by mosquitoes almost tripled in January, compared with the previous year.

The city’s main reservoir is 90 per cent empty, and marches and protests against the shortage have erupted over the past few days.