Climate Cities

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  • Polishing turds is expensive

    Great piece on why LEED-certified houses typically come at a premium.

    (h/t Sam Smith)

    JMG Cities

  • Stimulus spending going to roads?

    Reason to worry about the stimulus bill: Missouri’s plan to spend $750 million in federal money on highways and nothing on mass transit in St. Louis doesn’t square with President-elect Barack Obama’s vision for a revolutionary re-engineering of the nation’s infrastructure. Utah would pour 87 percent of the funds it may receive in a new […]

    David Roberts Cities

  • Making Bulgaria look good

    James Howard Kunstler, oft derided as seeking to return America to a pre-industrial state, actually wants to return the country to the glory years of the industrial era, when the major components of our industrial infrastructure were in place and flourishing while Progressive Era reforms were making cities more habitable and humane. This allowed us […]

    JMG Cities

  • Study finds that tolls and parking charges are key to ease traffic

    Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, put out a report on how to get traffic moving faster. They considered lots of the standard solutions — improving signal timing, clearing accidents quickly, encouraging telecommuting, and so forth — and found that many of them could, in fact, provide some temporary congestion relief. […]

    Clark Williams-Derry Cities

  • Reintroducing regionalism to green building

    Ever since green building was wrested from the hands of hippies and tucked safely in the technology sector — there are probably more articles about it in Wired than Mother Earth News these days — we’ve been under the impression that the greenest buildings are the newest buildings. Those nifty, skin-thin photovoltaic panels and that […]

    Grist staff Cities

  • Transit ridership up; everyone agrees it should be funded

    This week the Washington Post reported that mass transit ridership is rocketing upward — "the largest quarterly increase in public transportation ridership in 25 years" — even in the face of falling gas prices. This correction that now sits atop the story is amusing: This article about an increase in mass-transit ridership incorrectly said transit […]

    David Roberts Cities

  • SanFran anti-transit activist puts $1 million between the city and bike infrastructure

    Streetsblog brings word of a bafflesome episode in the life of San Francisco: Two-and-a-half years after a judge issued an injunction preventing the city from adding any new bicycle infrastructure to its streets, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and the San Francisco Planning Department have released a 1353-page Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) […]

    David Roberts Cities

  • L.A. will go big with solar power under mayor’s plan

    Los Angeles will source one-tenth of its energy from solar power by 2020 under a plan unveiled Monday by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Considering the town’s many celebrities, a plan to tap star power is certainly forthcoming.

    Grist staff Cities

  • Vast majority of feds’ flex-fuel cars still run on straight gasoline

    The federal government has poured billions of dollars into building up a fleet of 112,000 flex-fuel vehicles capable of running on an ethanol blend — but the attempt to move away from fossil fuels has so far largely failed, as 92 percent of the vehicles still run on straight gasoline.

    Grist staff Cities

  • Avego makes ride-sharing a normal reality

    The thing about energy-driven collapse is that it’s uneven — it’s not like the calendar flips back and we all return to having the things we had in the past. Rather, we’re going to have this huge overhang of technology from the peak period of affluence and abundance. Sometimes that’s going to be bad (buildings […]

    JMG Cities