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  • Greenbuild ends on a note of cautious optimism

    When he took the stage for the closing session of this year’s Greenbuild, amid flashing lights and a thumping rock anthem, USGBC CEO Rick Fedrizzi got right to the point: “When people say green building is over, tell them there were 29,752 people at Greenbuild. That doesn’t sound like we’re at the end of the […]

    Katharine Wroth Cities

  • This year’s Greenbuild is buzzing

    In her column this week, Lisa Selin Davis wrote about the optimism of those in the green building movement. Today I saw it in the flesh. It was astonishing, the sight of more than 800 companies and organizations packed into Boston’s Convention & Exhibition Center for this year’s Greenbuild. Big guys like Honda and DuPont […]

    Katharine Wroth Cities

  • Bay Area is now a Better Place ™

    Thursday, Better Place announced a commitment to build a network of electric car charging stations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. I counted 18 TV cameras. People are hungry for change.

    Adam Browning Cities

  • In a word, no

    Late last year, I began to get the sense that green building fatigue was setting in. On my end, I sighed when a press release announcing a new LEED building landed in my inbox; that fact, alone, no longer seemed like news. But all over the country, the housing bubble was beginning to burst. I […]

    Grist staff Cities

  • Sad sentences can say so much

    “The Federal Highway Administration has approved Utah’s plan for a Mountain View freeway — if the state can afford it.” — “Freeway gets greenlight from the feds,” Salt Lake Tribune

    Katharine Wroth Cities

  • The whopper of a conference starts today

    This year’s Greenbuild Expo kicks off today, and I’m … not there. But I will be later this week! It looks to be both inspiring and overwhelming — check out the official program for an eye-blurring good time. In advance of the event, the U.S. Green Building Council put out the word that it expects […]

    Katharine Wroth Cities

  • To save themselves, the Big Three should become ‘transportmakers’

    Irony of ironies, the one set of products that could save GM is the one that GM destroyed — the electric trolley systems of America. According to the well-known research of Bradford Snell, GM killed the electric trolley, because in 1922 they decided that the only way to increase car sales was to eliminate the […]

    Jon Rynn Cities

  • Why bail out the car companies when they bailed out on us?

    I have a new Salon article, “Is Detroit worth saving?” It is built around this piece, but I have expanded on the sad story of the Big Three Medium Two walking away from the development of hybrid gas-electric vehicles in the 1990s. I’ve been asked why I think they gave up on hybrids. The answer, […]

    Joseph Romm Cities

  • Tolls reduce congestion, but they price people off the roadway

    Brilliant. That’s the word that kept crossing my mind as I read this clearly written report [PDF] about the Puget Sound Regional Council’s study on using road tolls to fight congestion. The study found that a well-designed, comprehensive system of congestion-busting tolls could make a major dent in traffic backups in the Puget Sound. It […]

    Clark Williams-Derry Cities

  • Placemaking in the Cabinet

    Excellent news: “White House to Establish Office of Urban Policy.”

    David Roberts Cities