Climate Cities

Phenomenal cosmic skyscrapers — itty bitty environmental savings

Urbanists such as Ed Glaeser argue that tall buildings will save our cities. But they won't save the earth.

Metal-wheeled bike! Sure, why not?

  It's Friday, so here's a pointlessly pretty bike. It has metal wheels, because apparently you can make working bike wheels out of nothing but sprung steel, so why wouldn't you? Also I suppose it keeps you from getting flat tires. It's not the next big thing in bikes. It is not going to get […]

Meet NYC's most-used turnstile

Public transportation aficionados have a new pilgrimage destination: A turnstile at the bottom of the escalators at the Columbus Circle stop of the New York subway. That's the most-used turnstile of the most-used transportation system in the country.

Move to New York, save the planet

New York City's transportation commissioner wants you to come clog up her roads and subways. "If you want to save the planet, move to New York," Janette Sadik-Khan said at a Clinton Global Initiative panel discussion on Tuesday. Thanks to dense, car-light living, she said, New Yorkers have a third of the carbon footprint of the average American.

It's Car Free Day! Let's celebrate with a traffic jam, like China did

Today is Car Free Day in the U.S., a holiday that will probably be celebrated by fewer people than Talk Like a Pirate Day. But we might still end up more observant than China, which had No Car Day yesterday -- and celebrated with a giant traffic jam.

This park would turn an abandoned subway into an underground paradise

Sure, the High Line is great and all -- abandoned rail line turned into a beautiful outdoor leisure area, what's not to love? (Plus, reportedly you can see people getting undressed in the windows of one of the hotels that straddles the park.) But what it's really missing is an element of Neil Gaimany beautiful creepiness. I know! Let's put it UNDERGROUND.

That's the thinking behind the Low Line, a proposed park that would turn two acres of abandoned Lower East Side trolley terminal into an underground Eden.

Car crashes into bike store

Jesus, is nowhere safe from cars? On Tuesday, a woman drove her Cadillac right into a California bike store at 30 to 40 miles per hour. Nobody was seriously injured, but as the video shows, it was a close shave. Perhaps literally. The two people standing my the counter may actually have had the hair […]

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."