City envy: we want to house the homeless in tube carriages like Washington DC

Turns out tube carriages can be more than just places to hone your eye-contact-avoidance skills. An architect in the US capital has dreamed up a much worthier use for them: as accommodation for homeless people.

Arthur Cotton Moore has drawn up plans to transform decommissioned subway carriages into one-person homes, each with a bedroom, living room, kitchenette and bathroom. He told The Washington Post that the idea came about after the city council announced its intention to retire some of its subway cars. It isn’t so far-fetched, as the cars provide ‘a very nice enclosure which is watertight and has lovely windows’.

The scheme is just a sketch at this stage, but DC’s Metro service told press that it ‘will consider any viable proposal for other uses of the cars’. Next stop: social change?

Here are 28 ways to make London better. And on a more frivolous note, we also fancy Tokyo’s flying cakes.