Climate Transportation
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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.
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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. -
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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: -
![Gas sign, $5.27 regular.]()
![Gas sign, $5.27 regular.]()
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.
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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.
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The case of the disappearing bike lane
Sacramento may not have the best built-in bike infrastructure, but some residents are taking matters into their own hands and using guerrilla tactics to make their own.
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Perception vs. reality in 'bike-friendly' San Francisco
The city's four-year injunction on developing new bike infrastructure has finally been lifted, but will San Francisco be able to make up for lost time?
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Introducing the self-inflating bicycle tire
PumpTire has developed the world's first self-inflating bike tire, which actually takes in air and inflates to ideal pressure as you ride. This won't keep you from ever getting a flat or anything, but it could spare you a lot of tedious adjusting and checking of tire pressure.
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Corralling bike fever in Nevada City
Tiny, touristy Nevada City, Calif., is making big strides toward bike friendliness by planning to install bike corrals to replace parking spots -- which proves it can catch on anywhere.
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Musical GPS lets you steer your bike without looking at a screen
It's hard enough to look at your GPS and at the road while you're driving, but on a bike that split second of inattention could easily lead to injury. So Dutch researchers, who know from biking, have developed a music-based navigation system called "Oh Music, Where Art Thou?" It's a smartphone app that lets you navigate by following a strain of music through the streets. If the sound seems to come from the right, you go right; if it comes from the left, you go left. (Hopefully there's a needle-scratch feature for missing your turn.)
