Climate Cities

Taking the subway: You're doing it wrong

It's supposed to be instead of your car.

Stopping bad things and starting good ones

On Moving Planet Day, Sept. 24, people around the world will get on bikes, skateboards, and their own two feet to put fossil fuels in the rearview mirror.

Tea Party: Don't build public transit, because the terrorists might attack it

Apparently public transit is now helping the terrorists win. That's according to a Tea Party group in Georgia, at least. The group wants to 86 a light rail project because "when they [THE TERRORISTS!!] blow up a rail, that just brings the system to a grinding halt." So we should not build rail in the first place, because in the event of terrorism it would cease to work. Makes sense!

To be fair, the dude who said that also seemed to be ok with a bus system, because in his words "if the terrorist blow up a single bus, we can work around that." 

You want a war on cars? Fine, here's your war on cars

The Stranger, Seattle's alt-weekly, has had it with the nasty attacks from car-loving, carbon-spewing, anti-bike crazies. The city's bike advocates have been accused of waging a "war on cars," and after too many hours trying to defend itself, the Stranger got angry:

For cars we have paved our forests, spanned our lakes, and burrowed under our cities. Yet drivers throw tantrums at the painting of a mere bicycle lane on the street. ... No more! We demand that car drivers pay their own way, bearing the full cost of the automobile-petroleum-industrial complex that has depleted our environment, strangled our cities, and drawn our nation into foreign wars. Reinstate the progressive motor vehicle excise tax, hike the gas tax, and toll every freeway, bridge, and neighborhood street until the true cost of driving lies as heavy and noxious as our smog-laden air.

Other demands: mass transit should serve the masses, and walking and biking should be safe. Maybe it is war.

NYC's bikeshare will have 10,000 bikes

New York is a big city, and most of its residents really hate driving (for good reason). So it seems appropriate that the city's planned bikeshare program, launching next summer, will be by far the largest in the U.S. Its 10,000 bikes will dwarf the 1,100 available from D.C.'s Capital Bikeshare, currently the country's largest. And the range will go from the Upper West Side all the way down into Brooklyn.

Critical List: Enviros want Lisa Jackson to stay; a Penn. town could ban fracking

Enviros are hoping Lisa Jackson, their one stalwart ally high up in the administration, will keep on keeping on, despite the White House's decision to undermine her work on smog regulations.

A Pennsylvania town could vote to ban natural gas drilling.

One organizer of Rio+20, a U.N. summit next year on climate issues, says the conference should split environmentalism away from climate change issues. Basically, he says, we’re at the point where it’s much more important to embrace sustainability and prepare for climate change than it is to resolve the Green vs. Brown faceoff.

Gaze upon the eight circles of commuting hell

Take solace, Los Angelenos, in others' pain: In the larger scheme of horrible, horrible commutes, Los Angeles barely rates as moderately painful. On IBM's Commuter Pain Index, L.A. rates a 34. New Delhi, at 72, is more than twice as torturous, and in Mexico City, which ranks the worst, the pain index hits 108.

No matter where you live, though, commuting just sucks and makes the rest of your life suck as well, Infrastructurist reports:

The gas tax is actually super low, thanks to inflation

Eric Cantor thinks that bike sharing is siphoning off way too much of the country's gas tax revenue. And for a Republican like him, raising the tax is out of the question, never mind that, as Greater Greater Washington's Matt Johnson points out, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the gas tax has gone down by 34 percent since 1994, the last time it was raised. And, again in inflation-adjusted dollars, the gas tax was actually highest in 1960. 

Bikes find a way in San Jose

Rapid growth and a gaping class divide don't make biking easy in San Jose, Calif., but a few committed cyclists push back against the city's car-centric culture.

Right up your alley: the hidden housing trend

Building houses along alleys is a great way to unobtrusively increase density and provide more affordable housing.