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cities

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    The world’s top 10 walking cities [SLIDESHOW]

    Photo: Miss KA great city is a great walking city. So which is the greatest of them all? Travel book publisher Lonely Planet just surveyed its readers and asked them to pick the best walking cities in the world from a list of 186. Take a stroll through the top 10, counting down to the […]

    Grist staff Buildings

  • Putting a price on a city’s streets

    Streetfilms has dropped the latest in its “Moving Beyond the Automobile” series, this time explaining the economics behind congestion pricing for automobiles. The idea behind congestion pricing for automobiles is really pretty simple: “One of the most precious resources in a city is space, and that space needs to be priced.” That’s how New York […]

    Sarah Goodyear Culture

  • Edward Glaeser: Tea Party-style libertarianism could be good for our cities

    Cities: Land of the free, home of the brave.Photo: Thomas HawkWhen I talked with economist Edward Glaeser last month about his new book Triumph of the City, he touched briefly on the idea that Tea Party activists, rather than being natural adversaries of city-dwellers, are actually natural allies — if only unwittingly. Here’s what he […]

    Sarah Goodyear Culture

  • Grading cities on their carbon emissions

    The folks at Global Green USA have come up with an easy way to tell how a city is doing on its carbon emissions: give it a grade. That’s the idea behind Global Green’s City Carbon Index, an online tool unveiled late last month. It aims to measure a city’s emissions and helps to set […]

    Sarah Goodyear Cities

  • In post-quake Tokyo, bicycle transport is newly popular

    A new bike commuter? Maybe.Photo: Byron KiddIn the aftermath of Friday’s earthquake, which disrupted public transit, residents of Tokyo are turning to bicycles to make the trip to and from work. That’s the word from Byron Kidd, who blogs at Tokyo by Bike. I had seen him tweeting after the quake about an increase in […]

    Sarah Goodyear Transportation

  • I’m a rural resident. Where’s my subsidy check?

    The view from Washington, D.C., of the rural Midwest: quaint scenery on the way to the West Coast. Photo: Scorpions and CentaursI’ve spent the majority of my life living in cities, albeit mostly small ones in Wisconsin that New Yorkers might not call metropolitan. Before I moved to Lyons, Neb., I lived in Washington, D.C. […]

    Steph Larsen Agriculture

  • It’s the ‘burbs, stupid: on the Ezra Klein/Tom Vilsack dustup

    Carried away: Ezra Klein and Tom Vilsack ride an imaginary “raft of subsidies.” This week, an interesting — and, I think, bizarre — argument broke out between Washington Post political blogger Ezra Klein and USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack. The topic was whether rural residents deserve what Klein called a “raft of subsidies,” when in fact, […]

    Tom Philpott Agriculture

  • Where do the greenest commuters live? Not Portland

    New Yorkers on the evening commute.Photo: Mo RizaQuick: Who are the loneliest commuters in the nation? That would be the residents of Southgate, Mich., where 91.6 percent of workers drive alone. The city with the most pedestrian commuters? That’s Ithaca, N.Y., where 41.8 percent of commuters walk  to work (particularly impressive given upstate New York’s […]

    Todd Woody Culture

  • James Howard Kunstler: The old American dream is a nightmare

    Photo: Charlie SamuelsThe Great Depression gave rise to hobos and Hoovervilles. The Roaring Nineties brought us what New York Times columnist David Brooks termed “bobos in paradise.” Now our current round of layoffs and foreclosures has unceremoniously transferred millions of folks from the “affluent” to the “afflicted” category, exiling them from Brooks’s mythical exurban Eden. […]

    Kerry Trueman Culture