Climate Cities

Subways are the best

Recently I tracked down an article on the annual electricity use of the New York City subway system: 1.8 billion kilowatt-hours (kwh). To put that in perspective, the entire U.S. economy uses about 4,000 billion kwh annually. According to the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority, there were 1.499 billion trips made on the subway in 2006. So it takes a little over 1 kwh to move one person on trips, of varying length, in New York City.

That's 4.1 million riders per day, on average. So if 200 million trips a day are required in the U.S. for everybody, and if everybody rode a subway, we would need about 90 billion kwh for personal transportation -- about 2 percent of our current electricity use.

For comparison, let's use Gar Lipow's estimation that a super-duper plug-in hybrid would travel 65 miles using 8 kwh.  If the average trip was 8 miles, we would also have 1 kwh per trip. Something to strive for?

15 Green Buildings

Green building has grown up, from a tiny movement of hands-on idealists to an increasingly mainstream business sector that erects office towers and research centers. Sure, the structures on this list aren’t as low-impact as yurts or straw-bale homes, but they represent green building on a broader, more public scale — where energy efficiency and […]

Word Gets Around

New bike, parking policies leave polluting vehicles in the dust Now for some wheely good news (sorry, it had to be done): officials around the globe are moving forward on innovative eco-transportation schemes. Last week, the city council of Reykjavik, Iceland, enacted a rule that gives free parking to those who drive fuel-efficient vehicles. In […]

Time to get serious about bikes

I participated in another Critical Mass bike ride last Friday and thought I'd share some observations. This was the first time I have seen a patrol car at a gathering, although they didn't seem to know what exactly was going on. They cited one guy for drinking in public. The goofball had an open bottle of red wine. I had to smile as they dragged him off because half of the crowd watching was standing there with beers hidden in riding gloves or drink bottles.

The ride got off to a rocky start. Normally, a few of the several hundred riders will start circling the crowd to warn everyone that take off is imminent. But this time the dummies just took off while everyone else was still waiting for a signal. This spread the ride out. So, I decided to hang out at the tail end to see what that was like.

I found a woman and a mom and her young son trying to stay up with the other riders. When the crowd swept onto the highway things got dicey. I stayed with them to help run block on cars and tried to hurry them along. Now I know what a wildebeest cow and her calf must feel like when a pack of hyenas have weeded them from the herd. Another woman dropped back to help me protect them from the cars. We became surrounded by pissed off SUV drivers. The coup de grace was when a guy in a Porche deliberately slammed on his brakes. The young woman who had dropped back to help me ran right into his bumper and fell off her bike. He screeched his tires and left her lying there. She was pretty unhinged. I stuck with them until they got to an exit ramp where I told them that they really should not be participating in this ride. They simply were not strong enough riders. The exit ramp happened to be a few blocks from my house so I bailed out of the ride early hoping everyone got home safely.

Bridge to the 21st century?

Since 1998, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has been publishing an "infrastructure report card" detailing the sorry state of the various parts of our infrastructure. Unfortunately, national attention on the physical infrastructure only rises when something catastrophic happens, as it did in New Orleans in 2005, in Minneapolis on Wednesday after the collapse of a large bridge, or during an electrical blackout.

Like our ecosystems, the physical infrastructure is an essential part of the economy; the economy literally rests on the foundation of ecosystems and the infrastructure. Like the various ecosystems, such as forests and grasslands, lakes and rivers, the infrastructure has increasingly been treated like an asset that can be milked for all its worth, without investment. Like our ecosystems, the neglect of our infrastructure is the result of maximizing income in the short term; instead of insuring that there is some slack in a bridge or a forest, the economy has become nonresilient.

Greyhound gets some competition from Megabus.com

Buses, on average, get low passenger miles per gallon in the U.S., because they stop often and don't use most of their capacity. Coach buses -- providing prebooked travel between cities -- don't suffer from these limitations.

Megabus.com, a new niche player in this market, provides cheap, comfortable travel between nearby cities with travel time comparable to driving or taking commuter airlines (in a very small portion of the U.S.). Efficiency is 184 passenger miles per gallon -- without using hybrid buses or using any particular efficiency technology. They just use yield management ticket booking, where the earlier you book a ticket (relative to other passengers) the less you pay for your seat. (Thanks, Jordan Hayes for the tip.)

How does the Home Interest Mortgage Deduction affect sprawl?

Now that the housing market is tanking, is it a good time to talk about the absurdity of the Home Interest Mortgage Deduction?

I mean, it's truly crummy social policy. The biggest benefits go to the people in the highest tax brackets, own expensive homes, and earn enough income that they can itemize their deductions. So in essence, the HIMD is a ginormous housing subsidy for the well-off -- and one that dwarfs all of the housing subsidies to lower-income folks. This NY Times article lays out the case nicely: apparently, half the benefit of the deduction goes to the 12 percent of taxpayers who make at least $100 grand per year.

But the conventional wisdom is that the home interest mortgage deduction isn't just crummy social policy, but crummy environmental policy as well. Allowing homeowners to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes gives people an incentive spend more of their money on housing than they otherwise would. And people with extra money to spend on housing tend to buy larger homes on bigger lots -- which, in theory at least, means that the HIMD primes the pump for low-density sprawl.

But is this really true? Does the HIMD really accelerate low-density sprawl?

Calculate how walkable your home is

Some of you may have missed it, as Odograph introduced it down in comments, so I thought I’d bring it up front: Check out Walk Score, where you can plug in your address and find out how walkable your home is, on a scale of one to 100. My old place — a condo near […]

Britain’s gonna build some

Britain’s building five new "eco-towns": The towns, each with a minimum of 5,000 to 10,000 houses, will be built to meet zero carbon standards and will each showcase a specific project promoting energy preservation or green technology, the Communities and Local government office said. Projects to be showcased could include use of communal heat pump […]

Necessary

This op-ed from Rick Cole, city manager of Ventura, Calif., will be music to the ears of all you Gristians: The feel-good stage of California’s leadership on global warming is unsustainable. Kudos to the pop stars with their calls to switch lightbulbs and unplug cellphone chargers when not in use. But we can’t pretend that […]