With more options that ever for getting around cities, and finite space, the question of how we use this infrastructure, and who controls it, is more important than ever. By regulating how these new transportation options evolve, cities can potentially bring about a more sustainable, multimodal, and less car-centric transit future. — curbed.com

A Crunchbase News analysis of residential-focused real estate startups uncovered a raft of companies with a shared and temporary housing focus that have raised funding in the past year or so.

This isn’t a U.S.-specific phenomenon. Funded shared and short-term housing startups are cropping up across the globe, from China to Europe to Southeast Asia. — TechCrunch

Using lidar-equipped robots, Doxel scans construction sites every day to monitor how things are progressing, tracking what gets installed and whether it’s the right thing at the right time in the right place. You’d think that construction sites would be doing this by themselves anyway, but it turns out that they really don’t, and in a recent pilot study on a medical office building, Doxel says it managed to increase labor productivity on the project by a staggering 38 percent. — IEEE Spectrum

strict zoning laws in the Bay Area make it almost impossible to significantly expand the housing stock there. [...]

As a result, the tech boom simply means that housing gets less and less affordable for anyone who doesn't work in tech or already own a home.

A lot of people are blaming the tech boom itself for the Bay Area's housing problems. But the technology boom is only a problem because the region's housing markets are functioning so poorly. — vox.com

Since summer 2015, [Alex] Rodrigues and his team [at Varden Labs] have been tinkering with autonomous golf carts on university campuses...On the one hand, campus transit agencies, and particularly university ones, are uniquely posed to experiment with pricier autonomous vehicles...But these shuttles will also need maintenance...Plus, driverless shuttles will be the diving bell for a tricky, tricky question: how important are bus drivers? — CityLab

For a fledgling startup, finding an office in San Francisco can be a real nightmare. Rents are now climbing past $60 a square foot, second only to Manhattan in the US [...].

This means young startups have to get creative if they insist on staying within the city. And Westfield, one of the world’s largest mall operators, has a solution for them: Bespoke, a 37,000-square-foot coworking and event space within its shopping center in downtown San Francisco. — qz.com

As New York City’s burgeoning tech economy continues to grow, startups face the same challenges for office space they would anywhere else—but have the added challenge of Manhattan-level price tags, vying for space with law firms, banks, and other well-financed tenants.

An absolute lack of space is not the issue, however. New York’s low 10 percent office vacancy rate may be second only to Washington, D.C.’s 9.6 percent, but an enormous amount of inventory is going up [...]. — urbanland.uli.org

Using digital fabrication and some clever tricks we're able to manufacture beautiful, low cost structures which easily bolt together. You design for it like it's a big imaginary 3D printer then you and your friends get together and bolt your house together! [...]

It works like a techno version of a barn raising. — Arcology Now

We’re supposedly in the midst of a design renaissance, where beyond the cliché Steve Jobs and Apple ecosystem example, we see a design-centric focus in everything from soap (Method) and thermostats (Nest) to email (Mailbox) and even baby food (Plum Organics).

And yet, there’s a dearth of designer founders. — wired.com