Complaints about parked cars blocking fire hydrants have more than doubled since the start of the pandemic — with critics blaming the surge on bike lanes and even a lack of cops, records show.

The number of 311 calls on blocked hydrants has been skyrocketing for years, with 11,886 reports in 2014 ballooning to 64,346 in 2020 to more than 100,000 every year since, according to an analysis of city data by The Post.

If Americans are to address a rising tide of urban dysfunction and implement high-tech, smart cities, they must focus not only on digital technologies but also on the culture of digital citizenship.

That’s the prescription of Park Jung-sook, secretary-general of the World Smart Sustainable Cities Organization, or WeGO, a global association of over 200 cities worldwide.

“Data is the blood of a smart city and data is generated by smart citizens,” Ms. Park says, “so the social contract is more important than ever.”

A mystery company backed by Silicon Valley billionaires has been snatching up land in a northern California county in an apparent bid to build an entirely new city in the state.

The New York Times reported those investors include some of the Valley's most recognizable names, from Marc Andreessen to Laurene Powell Jobs.

The company, Flannery Associates, has spent $800 million to purchase thousands of acres of farmland in Solano County, which sits northeast of San Francisco, court documents obtained by Insider show.

The promise of cities is that they have a lot more stuff to do, things to buy and sell, places to work, and people to meet than towns and villages. It's why large metros manage to be richer, more attractive places than smaller, isolated communities, despite all the traffic, noise, crime, pollution, and general urban dysfunction that inevitably comes with them.

When people drop the inverted commas from an awkward idea, something has changed. Witness the 15-minute city, which for years was known as “the 15-minute city”, because no one really understood what it meant. Suddenly, everyone from rule-making guru Jordan Peterson to Conservative MP Nick Fletcher seems affronted by their varying understandings of what low-traffic, liveable city neighbourhoods are designed to achieve.

As a long-term advocate of low-impact urban living, I have campaigned for more than 40 years for better walking, cycling and green space provision, both for local food growing and leisure. Gradually, we have seen shifts in the reallocation of urban space to pedestrians and cyclists. Lockdown and the climate emergency have made many realise that this trend needs to accelerate.

Since the mid-20th century, urban highway construction has worked as a powerful tool to segregate American cities and demolish communities of color. These imposing roadways served as a physical barrier to reinforce racist policies like redlining. As a result, walls of concrete and veils of smog and pollution grew to separate Black and brown communities from white.

I’ve lived in Houston for most of my life, and there’s never been a time when I’ve reasonably been able to walk anywhere. Houston is practically the poster child for American urban sprawl — the landscape is dominated by spread-out neighborhoods with single-family homes and massive “stroads” (street-road hybrids with the worst aspects of both) lined with strip malls and expansive parking lots, connected by miles and miles of highways. It’s an environment designed to be solely traversed by car, not by foot.