Articles by Alan Durning

Is your town?

What if cities had no sidewalks and everyone walked on the road? Or, for urban recreation, they walked on a few scenic trails? What if the occasional street had a three-foot-wide "walking lane" painted on the asphalt, between the moving cars and the parked ones?

Well, for starters, no one would walk much. A hardy few might brave the streets, but most would stop at "walk?! in traffic?!"

Fortunately, this car-head vision is fiction for most pedestrians, but it's not far from nonfiction for bicyclists. Regular bikers are those too brave or foolish to be dissuaded by the prospect of playing chicken with two-ton behemoths. Other, less-ardent cyclists stick to bike paths; they ride for exercise, not transportation. Bike lanes, in communities where they exist, are simply painted beside the horsepower lanes.

People react reasonably: "bike?! in traffic?!" And they don't. "It's not safe" is what the overwhelming majority say when asked why they bike so little. (As it turns out, it's safer than most assume -- on which, more another day.)

So what would cities look like if we provided the infrastructure for safe cycling? What does "bike friendly" actually look like?

It’s as bad as it looks.

Approaching the summer "driving season" when gas prices often spike, President Bush has pumped up a new set of energy proposals. Even the mainstream media regard them as window dressing. (Witness the Washington Post.) But I'll take the proposals as serious and comment.

1. The Bush administration proposes to allow oil refineries on abandoned military bases, claiming that limited refinery capacity is driving up gas prices and that it's hard to get permission to build new refineries. Military bases, as federal property, are exempt from most local regulations.

Canada’s Kyoto “plan”

Ottawa officially unveiled its plan for complying with the Kyoto Protocol yesterday. The Globe and Mail and Vancouver Sun (subscription required) have good coverage. Unfortunately, the news was mostly drowned out by a continuing scandal that may trigger a new federal election.

The upstaging of the announcement is disappointing, because the Kyoto "plan" deserves an intense public debate--something it's unlikely to get during the hockey brawl of a Canadian federal election.

I put the word plan in quotes because Ottawa's proposal is terribly short on specifics. It largely consists of more than $1 billion a year in federal funding to invest in greenhouse gas reduction projects. That's enough money to get something done--an excellent start and a miraculous achievement when compared with US intransigence. But it's also almost surely doomed to be inadequate, because it doesn't do much to make prices tell the truth. And it's lame compared with what's going on in Europe.

I've argued that feebates--point-of-purchase incentives that are an elegant combination of fees and rebates--could be the turbocharger that can deliver on Canada's Kyoto promise. And Ottawa has promised to consider them. Read more about that here.

Efficiency: the profit center

The School District in Olympia, Washington, provides an encapsulating anecdote of the continuing, Brobdignagian, untapped potential to save energy at a profit, as the Olympian reports. Newly hired resource conservation manager Brittin Witzenburg has implemented changes in her first four months on the job that will save the school district $21,000 a year, every year, for many years to come. And she's barely even begun.