Climate Buildings
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A bill of goods: With their latest transportation bill, GOP sides with the suburbs
House Republicans rolled out a proposal for a new transportation bill on Tuesday, and if you believe what they say, the future looks a whole lot like the past. But bike boosters, pedestrian advocates, and environmentalists won’t go backwards without a fight.
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Maine to create car-free town with ‘really narrow streets’
Residents of the yet-to-be-built town of Piscataquis Village, Maine will keep cars from overrunning their town by making their streets too narrow to shove any but the cutest vehicles down them, reports Market Urbanism.
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Rocky’s road: One of the country’s greenest mayors guns for the White House
Rocky Anderson is running for president, and the third item on his to-do list (after getting the money out of politics and pulling the United States out of foreign wars) is fighting climate change. How cool is that?
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Virtuous cycle: 10 lessons from the world’s great biking cities
A six-month tour of the best cycling cities on the planet turns up some handy tips for U.S. bergs. Among them: Build bike infrastructure and they will come riding -- and if they ride, they’ll push for more bike infrastructure.
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New York City could open up 1,200 acres of rooftops for farming
Given how valuable space is in New York City, the city's rooftops are strangely empty. But a proposal from the city's planning department could change that by making 1,200 acres of commercial rooftops available for urban farmers to open greenhouses across the city.
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Almost all U.S. car use is within an electric car’s range
Because it takes longer to fill up an electric vehicle than to fill a gas tank, and because EV infrastructure is still limited, the most common criticism of EVs goes something like “OMG RANGE ANXIETY.” And, sure, no one wants to get stuck in their big metal bucket on the side of a highway until […]
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Swedish cities could connect via bike superhighway
In Sweden, city planners and the country’s traffic authority are looking into building a four-lane bike superhighway between the university town of Lund and Malmö, Sweden’s third-largest cities and one of its most diverse. Cities like London have invested in protected lanes that they call “bike superhighways,” but this one would be one of the […]
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Critical List: Shale gas could squash renewables; scientists fiddle with photosynthesis
New York City promises to double the percentage of waste diverted from landfills within the next five years.
Increasing shale gas production could squash renewable energy development.
The Obama administration released a draft plan for protecting the country's oceans.
Scientists are fiddling with photosynthesis in order to make biofuel. -
A traffic light that knows the difference between bikes and cars
No matter how strong a cyclist's legs are, a bike cannot go as fast as a car. Duh, right? But traffic lights are not as smart as humans, and they do not instinctively understand that. So they’re programmed to assume leg-powered vehicles can make it safely through lights in the time allotted to things with engines. Luckily, some human was smart enough to invent the Intersector -- a traffic light that respects the difference between bikes and cars.
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Photographer turns unrelenting boringness of suburbia into art
Jason Griffiths is an assistant professor of design at Arizona State, and apparently living in the middle of all that desert sprawl got to him after a while. In the early aughts he jumped into a car, drove all over the country, and made a discovery so banal it’s practically a tautology: Suburbia is the same everywhere.