100 Ideas™

This collection began as an theme for an exhibition of our design work; why not use the opportunity of a public show as a chance to reinvent the format of 'here is the past work we have done'. A better idea seemed to be 'here is a the work we would love to do'.

100 Ideas is the beginning of that tradition.

Every week we will add another of the collected ideas to be published in our new book, "100 Ideas for New York", due out this year.

100 Ideas for NY™

100 Ideas in PRINT
100 Ideas for NY
001 Sidewalk Tourist Lanes NY would wither without tourists, but they do drive us crazy... [more]
002 Free Citywide Wi-Fi While it was once enough to get radio and television broadcasts for free, we now need free Wi-Fi... [more]
003 Glass Manhole Covers Like life under the oceans, more than half of The City is underground... [more]
004 Beautiful Traffic Lights The original NY traffic signals were monumental Beaux Arts platforms standing in the middle of the avenues where police manually changed signage... [more]
005 Automated Garbage Garbage collection, in spite of the white trucks and Helvetica, has to be the worst job in New York... [more]
006 Bike Loops Everywhere Bicycles are among the best ways to see The City, but bike racks are never in the right place... [more]
007 Taxi Offices Often, when asked where I am calling from, I say “my little yellow office”... [more]
008 Barcelona Chairs for Parks Parks need furniture out on those lawns, but it has to be robust & secure; in short, it needs to be bulletproof... [more]
009 Beach Streets Filling a few local streets with sand for the summer and declaring them “Beach Streets” would bring a bit of summer to The City’s interior... [more]
010 What We've Lost There is so much built history lost in New York, often replaced by the very buildings we now adore. Historical viewing binoculars throughout the city would connect then and now... [more]
011 Free Ferries to All Boroughs Ferries and other craft once plied the city's waterways in such numbers that the water was more crowded than the land... [more]
012 Motorcycle Lanes on Avenues They are not bicycles. They are not cars. But they may be the worst of each... [more]
013 Taxi Ratings Everyone prefers a safe, fast, odorless cab with a driver who knows the city. In the market economy this would mean that the A-rated driver could demand a higher rate... [more]
014 Interactive Subway Maps If Google Maps, iPhones and every GPS can do it, how hard can it be to make it work where you really need the help? Large scale interactive subway maps could make the most complicated system in the world easy to negotiate... [more]
015 Dating Cars on the Subway Subway cars could be the new bars, without the minimum cover charge and all the loud music... [more]
016 Chess Games on the Subway We should encourage geniuses to go underground for rolling chess games... [more]
017 Park Avenue Needs a Park The length of the Park Avenue median was once a walkable, sinuous path. It made sense to call it Park Avenue... [more]
018 Street Lighting for People Cobra head fixtures (and they are nearly as dangerous as they sound) are the standard fare for City streets... [more]
019 Sidewalk Benches Somehow nearly all the benches in The City are related to parks, or to the extremely odd medians on upper Broadway... [more]
020 Hybrid Taxis The only vehicles that should be aimlessly cruising the streets should be hybrids, or better yet, electric... [more]
021 Blueprint Streets The city should make much of itself visible: government (transparent, ideally), construction sites (papered with schedules)... [more]
022 Street Clocks It is hopelessly sentimental and, with cell phones everywhere, probably completely unnecessary, but... [more]
023 Collapsible Bike Helmets If our very own bike system is to succeed then we must solve the problem of headgear... [more]

Your Ideas

Jeff Greenspan's Tourist Lanes
Urban Field Glass Project
SubwayCrush.com Mike Bodge and Matthew Haggerty have taken our idea of subway dating cars and put it online... [more]
Tourist Lanes Redux A letter to The New Yorker on the occasion of the Tourist Lane cover by Bruce McCall... [more]