Tim De Chant at Per Square Mile has noted that rich urban areas have way, way more trees than poor areas in the same city. In fact, the difference is so stark that income inequality can be seen from space. The satellite images above are low-income West Oakland and high-income Piedmont, and I probably don’t have to tell you which is which.

De Chant has collected images from four U.S. cities and two international cities, and in every one, the wealthier areas are conspicuously more leafy. Since trees increase property values, this is a classic case of the rich being given whatever they need to get richer. And considering the other things trees do for us, it’s also a case of the rich getting to be smarter, cooler, and have fewer allergies.

Forty years ago, in 1970, little Lisa Brown was riding her totally rad banana-seat bike through the woods of Cape Cod. She approached the Herring River, but the only way to cross it was a rickety plank board bridge. When Brown started out on the bridge it was two feet wide, but halfway across it narrowed to 12 inches, and she had to turn just a little bit to stay on track.

In a split second, she was in the river.

“I went in with the bike, I floated to the surface, I kicked away from the bike, and I must have pushed it down way into the mud,” she told Cape Cod Times.

Brown came out “smelling like a snapping turtle,” and her bike was nowhere to be found. Until one recent day, when her wife Deirdre spotted a glint of metal off a nearby path.

The vinyl banana seat, you’ll note, is still intact. Deirdre laughs that the vinyl is “the toxic waste of the world.” But in this one case, at least, its indestructibility has led to a reunion of woman and (definitely no longer rideable) bike.

“It was like finding a long lost friend,” Brown said.

She’s off to school, with helmet on head and doll in tow. (Photo by carfreedays.)

A small federal program is punching holes through the unsafe barricade of freeways, busy roads, and rushed drivers that surround the nation’s schools. Yet despite the program’s success, Congress is now threatening to terminate it — not to save money, but to redirect its funds toward more car-centric infrastructure.

In 2005, Congress initiated a Safe Routes to School (SRTS) national partnership. The SRTS program coordinates infrastructure improvements across the country to make walking and biking to school safer and more practical for students and educators. By most measures, the program has been a resounding success.

Testifying to Congress about a pilot project, director Deb Hubsmith stated, “In only two years, we documented a 64 percent increase in the number of children walking, a 114 percent increase in the number of students biking, a 91 percent increase in the number of students carpooling, and a 39 percent decrease in the number of children arriving by private car carrying only one student.”

Children represent over 12 percent of pedestrian fatalities. And bicycle-related injuries send over a quarter million children to hospitals annually. But SRTS currently receives just 0.2 percent of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s safety budget — and even that tiny slice is now in jeopardy.

The Senate transportation bill, currently in a conference committee, would relegate SRTS funds to a shared pot called “additional activities.” Depending on the compromise bill’s final language, states may be allowed to shift bike and pedestrian funds to road construction or other priorities. House Republicans would prefer to go one step further, eliminating bike and pedestrian funding altogether.

Walking and biking are inconvenient in the United States compared to most other industrialized nations. Most Americans live in a physical, legal, economic, and social terrain designed over a period of many decades to accommodate motor vehicles above all else, making alternative forms of transportation unpleasant and even unsafe.

For instance, a student environmental group at Bridgewater-Raritan High School in New Jersey raised money for a bike rack only to have their principal reject it, citing safety risks. Similarly, a principal at Island Park Elementary School in Mercer Island, Wash., an avid bicycler herself, vetoed a proposed bike route, pointing out that a fifth-grader had recently been killed while walking his bike through a street crossing. A principal in Walker, Mich., recently suspended a group of students for biking en masse to school.

If Europe’s experience is any guide, the success of bikeable neighborhoods will depend on the ability of communities to establish a bicycling culture. Amsterdam and Copenhagen were not always bike-friendly cities, yet today they embrace bicycling and walking as legitimate and esteemed modes of transportation.

A study [PDF] by researchers at Rutgers University and the European Commission identifies six key steps for planners and policy makers trying to design safe and convenient bikeable and walkable communities:

1. Improve facilities for walking and cycling
2. Prioritize urban designs sensitive to the needs of non-motorists
3. Introduce traffic calming in residential neighborhoods
4. Place restrictions on motor vehicle use in cities
5. Deliver rigorous traffic education to both motorists and non-motorists
6. Strictly enforce traffic regulations protecting pedestrians and bicyclists

The researchers claim that such strategies are flexible to a wide array of neighborhood layouts, simple to institute, and return rapid paybacks in terms of public safety, quality of life, and energy footprints. Furthermore, prioritizing walking and biking policies reduces long-term infrastructure maintenance costs.

If the United States Congress is serious about cutting costs, it may eventually have to stand up to thirsty car-culture lobbies and back infrastructure that pays durable dividends.

On Monday, 64 Kenowa Hill High School seniors biked to school in Walker, Mich. Nice, right? Well, the principal didn’t think so. She suspended the kids for the day and threatened to keep them from walking in their graduation ceremony. Somehow, this one story manages to encapsulate everything that is wrong with American attitudes towards biking.

The group ride was conceived as a less-destructive alternative to the traditional vandalize-the-school, get-everyone-out-of-class brand of senior pranks. Skipping lightly over the fact that a few dozen students riding bikes qualifies as a “prank” rather than a “Monday,” these kids actually deserve a lot of praise for organizing a group activity that’s healthy for them, the planet, and the community, instead of just pulling fire alarms.

And indeed, they got some praise — the mayor even showed up to hand out donuts. But when the “bike parade” arrived at school, the principal had a major freakout and sent the kids back home.

Someone with a cell phone captured her panicking over the risk the students took:

“If you and your parents don’t have sense enough to know your brains could end up splattered on Three Mile and Kinney, Fruit Ridge, then maybe that’s my responsibility,” she is heard telling students on the cellphone video obtained by 24 Hour News 8.

Now, the kids were actually pretty safe because they had a police escort to school. The worst consequences of the biking were some traffic delays, which made some teachers and students late for school (which I believe is one of the classic senior prank goals — delay of class, if not all-out chaos that means all students miss a day of school). But it’s sad in its own way that for just a small portion of this school’s students to safely arrive by bike, they needed a police car guarding their rear. And it’s way sadder that the kids arranged a safe, healthy, sustainable, mayor-approved activity and got punished for it.

Update: The principal apologized for freaking out.

And here is my face right now: 8O

Seriously, I thought the bike-hugging dog was the pinnacle of two-wheeled canine amazingness, but that bitch rides bitch! Norman here can PEDAL. And he looks like a muppet!

Like other stuff that is good for your health (not smoking, sobriety, living slow, and dying old), bike helmets are uncool. But you can’t really enjoy your coolness with a giant crack in your skull. How do you protect your noggin without sacrificing your mojo? Swedish company Hovding has the answer: airbag bike helmets.

Unless it’s called upon to perform, this helmet stays safely stowed in a futuristic-looking black collar that you can pretend is a scarf. (Hovding also offers printed shells that go around the collar, to make it even more chic.) But if you get hit, presto, it bursts open like a popcorn kernel:

(Fast-forward to 00:36 for the slow-motion version.)

Hovding’s been working on the Invisible Bike Helmet since 2005 — Grist even wrote about it years ago. At that time it only came in black and could only be purchased by Swedes, but now Hovding is preparing to launch the product in the United Kingdom. It’s possible to order it online, but be warned, you will pay a price not to wear a geeky helmet. And that price will be $560, before tax and shipping.

Almost all buildings have the potential to become energy-saving superstars. (Photo by Kevo89.)

In the 12 years since the debut of LEED certification, the green-building stamp of approval has become the holy grail for every earth-loving contractor and home-builder. But while brand-new, Dwell magazine-worthy eco-structures are a flashy way to highlight new construction practices, the greenest buildings, it turns out, are almost always old ones. By fixing up an old building, you’re saving the planet all the costs of growing, manufacturing, and shipping new building materials all over creation, putting yourself decades ahead of a new building in terms of mitigating climate impacts.

LEED has a special set of awards (silver, gold, platinum) for existing buildings that have energy efficiency retrofits and other upgrades, but these rising energy-saving superstars haven’t seen much limelight — until now. Next month, the first annual EBie Awards will recognize impressive environmental performance improvements in existing buildings (existing buildings – E.B. – get it?).

“There’s not been enough recognition of the talent and skills that go into making effective change through existing buildings,” says Russell Unger, executive director of the Urban Green Council, which created the awards. “By bringing these incredible case studies to light, we’re hopefully encouraging duplication. People will start asking themselves, ‘Why can’t I do that, too?’”

The shift in focus from new green building to retrofitting existing buildings is already underway, spurred by a lack of capital for new construction and a realization of the huge benefits of rehabbing older buildings. Unger says that last year alone, New York City had 22 LEED-certified existing building projects, compared with 24 over the previous four years.

One of the main reasons these projects haven’t gotten more attention is their total lack of sex appeal. The 18 EBie finalists include an elementary school, a hospital, an art museum, and an affordable housing complex. If these buildings have one thing in common, it’ that they look more or less the same as they did before.

Hollie Brown is a project developer for Schneider Electric, which did a retrofit for the Dallas Museum of Art, one of the finalists. She doubts much of the Dallas public is even aware of the impressive changes their museum underwent — a testament to the skill of the construction team, but also an example of how under-the-radar green retrofits remain, in part because they achieve such significant savings through practically invisible changes. The retrofit involved implementing strict humidity controls, important for the art’s physical preservation, and had to take place without disturbing the exhibits.

“None of the retrofits [we made] were terribly exotic,” says Marc Zuluaga, director of multifamily energy services for Steven Winter Associates, which oversaw the rehab of a Brooklyn affordable housing complex, another finalist. The apartment building got new windows and a more balanced, functional ventilation system, both of which subtly improve comfort and quality of life for residents in addition to lowering the owner’s energy bill. But “it’s not necessarily something that tenants feel or see on a day-to-day basis,” Zuluaga says.

Just because these retrofits are not immediately visible doesn’t mean the savings they achieve are minor, however. Unger says that when the judges decided on a scoring scale, they assumed the highest energy savings they’d see would be 40 percent. But multiple projects showed savings of more than 50 percent.

By helping spread the word about these potential savings, the EBies could help convince banks and other lenders that retrofits are solid investments. Brown’s company, Schneider Electric, retrofitted the Dallas Art Museum as part of an energy conservation performance contract, which guarantees the project will pay for itself within 10 years by taking a huge bite out of the museum’s utility bills. Zuluaga’s company, Steven Winter Associates, did a study for Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and Living Cities to analyze the energy savings achieved by over 200 multifamily housing units, and found the buildings reduced their fuel consumption by an average of 19 percent.

“Almost all buildings are going to have opportunities to improve efficiency that will save money and be a far better investment than the stock market,” Unger says.

With the EBies highlighting the upper end of what’s possible, we should see support for existing building retrofits grow. For this year, though, EBie finalists will mostly enjoy basking in some long-deserved glory. Those who can make it to New York for the awards ceremony on June 28 will enjoy a “VIP day” with a fancy lunch, a tour of the World Trade Center site, and a walk down the “green carpet.” And then they’ll return home to — hopefully — toil in a little less obscurity.

Just don’t hold your breath for the TMZ post-show commentary.

Subway and bus ads are the latest battleground between New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s health department and soda makers. The newly formed New York City Beverage Association is taking a huge mass transit ad buy as part of a $1 million campaign to rebut the city’s claim that soda is unhealthy.

For months, the city has been running public service announcements linking sugary drinks to mountains of fat and waterfalls of sugar, including a graphic video (below) that claims drinking a can of soda a day can add 10 pounds in a year by showing a man pouring fat out of a can of soda and drinking it.

Health Department Commissioner Thomas Farley elaborated on those objections in a statement to Transportation Nation: “Americans are literally drinking themselves fat, consuming 200-300 more calories daily than 30 years ago, with the largest single increase due to sugary drinks.”

Farley also defended the city’s anti-soda campaign in light of the Beverage Association’s public relations offensive. “The Health Department will continue providing New Yorkers with the facts about the dangers of this overconsumption.”

The Beverage Association is fighting back with ads of its own on 570 subway cars, 75 buses, and 120 subway platforms. The ads claim soda makers are fighting obesity and other health risks by offering low-calorie drinks, smaller serving sizes, and clearly displayed calorie counts.

Despite the timing of the ad campaign, association spokesman Stefan Friedman insisted his industry isn’t quarreling with the health department.

“Look, we face some issues with the city but it’s important for us to tell our story,” he said. “All evidence is clear that the obesity epidemic comes from a number of different sources. Sugar-sweetened beverages comprise just 5 percent of the American diet.”

Friedman added the beverage industry directly employs more than 8,000 New Yorkers and contributes $1.5 billion dollars to the local economy.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of our Ask Umbra advice column, and to celebrate, we’re pulling one particularly poignant question or tidbit of eco-advice out of the archives each week. Today, May 18, is Bike to Work Day. After we hung up our helmets and checked out the news cycle, we took a trip down memory lane with this Umbra video classic on commuting by bike. 

What’s that you say? You’re already in your cubicle, miles from your trusty single-speed? We have two more weeks of National Bike Month. Even if you missed the chance to ride with all the cool kids today, there’s still plenty of time to get your fixie fix.

Find more of Umbra’s pearls of wisdom here.

Oh sure, you could hang around with lizards and cavemen and pink-haired spy chicks and that irritating “Fran” woman, trying to save a few bucks. Or you could cut to the chase.

We haven’t been able to find the original source for this picture — we first saw it tweeted by @frucool — so if you’re responsible, pipe up! And also, put it on a T-shirt, because you’ll get rich, and on a bumper sticker, for irony.