Regarding Park Slope's Yellow Umbrella Plan

Park Slope's yellow umbrella experiment—where customers along select 7th Ave. stores are invited to borrow free yellow umbrellas as long as they return them—seems doomed to fail. While I'm usually the last one to knock socialistic experiments, the market actually does a good job in delivering umbrellas to people when they need one.  In New York, a $5-10 umbrella is seldom more than a block away.

In my fantasy, businesses would adopt the "rain solution" offered in Edward Bellamy's classic Looking Backward. In the 19th century utopian novel, local businesses rolled out motorized, retractable awnings whenever it rained and these awning covered the entire sidewalk. This solution, one of Bellamy's characters explained, was far better than umbrellas, which break easily, make it hard to see, and are rather anti-social (since they poke and drip water on others). Of course, this plan doesn't make much economic sense, but, hey, it's just a novel.

(Via The New York Times)