If you’re that person who’s always asking for a ride or help moving, or you’re just too crazy busy to go grocery shopping or clean your own house, there’s a range of apps that could make your life a whole lot easier. Moving beyond the usual suspects like Uber and Amazon Prime Now, these city-centric apps streamline urban lifestyles, giving you assistance with things like transit planning, sharing rides, choosing a place to live, hiring people to assemble your IKEA furniture or getting liquor delivered to your doorstep.

Via Ride-Sharing App

Based in New York City, Via is a cab alternative in the vein of Lyft and Uber, but offers ride sharing, so you get into a car full of multiple passengers and pay less. The service charges a flat $5 fee for each of the first five rides and $7 thereafter (or still $5, if you buy the rides in advance.) Passengers are asked to meet their drivers on a street corner instead of being picked up at a specific location, and if you’re late, you have to wait for the next vehicle. It may not be the fastest way to get somewhere if you’re in a hurry, but it’s a cool alternative to city buses for everyday rides.

Urban Engines App

Which public transit route should you take at rush hour to avoid slowdowns? How did last night’s storm affect light rail service? Depending on what’s going on in the world, the flow of traffic changes. The Urban Engines app takes a variety of data points in big cities like Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Toronto and Los Angeles and uses them to determine which routes are best at which times. Best of all, it has an X-ray mode function that superimposes maps, bus or train routes and stops over the city as viewed through the camera lens of your phone, so you can easily find stops around you. It also continues working when there’s no mobile service as long as it has the right maps downloaded, so it won’t cut out underground.

Instacart App

Get groceries delivered from local stores (maybe even ones that aren’t included with Amazon Prime Now’s similar app service) via Instacart. The whole process is surprisingly fast, partially due to the fact that Instacart typically reserves its own checkout aisle at each participating store, ushering its shoppers through the lines. It’s pretty ideal for those times when you just can’t be bothered to leave the house (like when you’re sick, suffering from a hangover, or just really busy.)

Drizly App

Who doesn’t want wine, beer and liquor delivered to their door on demand? Drizly is an alcohol delivery app partnered with liquor stores in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, D.C. and other cities, with a goal of building the biggest online catalog of booze available for delivery in the U.S.

Hello Alfred App

These days, you can even order housekeeping and butler services on demand. ‘Hello, Alfred’ is an app that connects you to ‘carefully vetted’ helpers who visit your home once a week according to your desired schedule, doing chores like cleaning, grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning and shipping your packages.

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Whatever You Need On Demand 10 Apps That Streamline Urban Life

Unlike all of New York City’s flashy and well-known museums, this particular exhibition space is grungy, quirky and easy to miss. Located in an abandoned freight elevator on the edge of the Tribeca neighborhood in Manhattan, Museum measures just 80 square feet and is covered by a pair of unmarked, heavy iron doors when it’s closed. It contains collections of objects just as unconventional as the space itself.

As stark and unfussy as its name, Museum is intentionally hard to find. It’s only open to visitors on the weekend, but you can peer through a series of viewing windows to get a look at the contents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Photographer Garrett Ziegler captured these images of the space and its humorous, oddball display pieces.

The Museum exhibits consist of urban curiosities, found objects and funny vintage items in addition to art pieces. Want to know more about a particular piece? You can call a toll-free hotline (888-763-8839) and enter the item’s identification number (the exhibits change frequently, and are currently different than those pictured).

“Life exists all around us, and the proof of our existence is both beautiful and absurd. Our footprint, which is often overlooked, dismissed, or ignored, is intriguing, and always worth exploring.”

Advertising is so ubiquitous that billboards aren’t even restricted to fixed positions anymore; they’re often found moving from one spot to another on trailers, always in search of those all-important eyeballs. Inside these trailers are little spaces that, one would imagine, are too small to be of any real use. But Belgian artist and hacktivist Karl Philips has taken some practical function from these ugly urban fixtures by turning them into tiny ‘parasite apartments.’

The series, entitled ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,’ consists of three billboard trailers which have been hacked into living spaces just the right size for a single-person mattress and a small collection of possessions.

Billboards take up a considerable amount of space, and it can be argued that most of them don’t have a positive impact on society. By turning them into houses, the revenue from the ads goes to the people who live within.

According to Philips’ biography, he is particularly interested in the margins of society, focusing on “themes such as gaps in legal, economic and social systems, the omnipresence of advertisement, unrestrained capitalism and consumerism, etc.” His previous work includes a parasite apartment built onto the back of a conventional billboard, invisible from the street.

It’s not just a skate park, it’s an architectural landmark. Factoria Joven (“youth factory”) is a skate park and climbing wall in Merida, Spain, which opened in  March 2011. Its bright, modern geometric design was inspired by the construction methods used to create Chinese dragons.

Architects José Selgas and Lucía Cano of SelgasCano Studio took on the challenge of creating an urban gathering space for young people which could be constructed of inexpensive building materials.

Made largely of vivid, lightweight polycarbonate and completed in just 13 months, Factoria Joven has quickly become everything the project collaborators wished for, bustling with athletic activity day and night.

In addition to a large climbing wall and space for biking and skating, Factoria Joven includes a computer lab and dance studio, meeting rooms and spaces for street theater, video, electronic music and graffiti.

Can you control a crowd with nothing more than an optical illusion? A group of researchers at Tokyo’s University of Electro-Communications think so. They are developing a lenticular lens sidewalk that would keep people moving in both directions on their own side of the walkway.

(all images via: DigInfo)

Lenticular lenses use a type of optical illusion involving a curved edge and an underlying image to simulate movement – just like those “moving” Valentines and stickers many of us played with as children. The theoretical walkways would use simple images of stripes moving toward the right to keep people on the right-hand side of the walkway.

How would moving stripes control a crowd? It’s simple: most of us use visual cues to keep us balanced while we walk. As we see the stripes subtly moving to the right, we naturally follow the movement with our eyes and then our bodies. Pedestrians may not even be aware that they are being sneakily guided.

The walkways would also be a great benefit even if people were aware of them and knew how they worked since they could be used as a sort of low-tech guidance system. In a crowded situation where people are disoriented, the moving stripes would act as a simple way to guide them in the right direction. The display uses no electricity so it would be relatively simple and low-cost.

Since lenticular lenses have not been used in this way before, it is not yet clear how well they would hold up to continued pedestrian traffic. Research into the crowd control capabilities of this intriguing idea is ongoing; don’t be surprised if you see a “moving” sidewalk like this in your city one day soon.