transportation
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Robert Cluck: Texas doctor, Republican mayor, clean-air champ
Deceptively clear skies over Rangers Ballpark in Arlington.Courtesy jacorbett70 via FlickrPhysician Robert Cluck spends his mornings working at Arlington Memorial Hospital and his afternoons as mayor of Arlington, Texas, a city of 375,000 that has one of the worst ozone problems in the country. Seeing children with asthma in the emergency room has led him […]
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Is drunk biking better than drunk driving?
Courtesy blurofinsanity.comEric DePlace at the Northwest policy shop Sightline responds to my question about why we mandate parking at bars if driving in general and drunk driving in particular both harm the public good: One thing that does work as an alternative to drinking and driving — and I can vouch for this — is […]
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Charlotte does light rail right
Charlotte is car-loving NASCAR country, a vast suburbia of cul-de-sacs and strip malls. Yet its new light rail line is a national model for success, outstripping ridership projections and inspiring millions of dollars in high-density development. How did sensible transportation planning come to sprawlburbia? Not by appealing for “sustainability,” that’s for sure. In the end, […]
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Planning politics: How Charlotte’s mayor championed light rail
Pat McCrory, former mayor of Charlotte, speaking at a transportation summit in 2009.Photo courtesy Willamor Media via FlickrPat McCrory, elected mayor of Charlotte in 1995 at the age of 39, had no idea transit would be the defining issue of his tenure as leader of the city. “I did not run on the issue of […]
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Tell me again why we mandate parking at bars?
They’re not all this big, but you get the pointPhoto: jgrimm FlickrOne of the silliest barriers to green urban development is mandatory sprawl, i.e. local zoning codes that require sprawl-style development, even when consumers (in the “free” market) want to buy property in walkable, compact developments. And one of the craziest examples of this dilemma […]
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Measuring neighborhood diversity and liveliness with ‘JaneScore’
Perhaps you know about Walk Score, the delightfully intuitive tool that calculates how walkable a neighborhood is and ranks it on a 100-point scale. (My Seattle neighborhood gets an 85; my suburban Chicago hometown gets a 31.) It was cooked up by Seattle developer Mike Mathieu and others to help quantify walkability and promote its […]
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Hottie bikers in Miami Beach, Complete Streets in St. Louis
Ten minutes of biking a day and you too can look like this.Decobike.comSpend enough time watching the Senate dither on the climate threat/energy quest/defining challenge of our time and it’s easy to lose sight of the sanity and localized progress happening around the world. A few quick examples: Miami Beach added a bike-sharing program to […]
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Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants ’20-minute neighborhoods’
Newish Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants to build more “20-minute neighborhoods” in his fair city. From a Fast Company interview: We’re also working to make every section of Portland a complete 20-minute neighborhood to strengthen our local economy. Two-thirds of all trips in Portland and in most American cities are not about getting to and […]
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An Electrifying Vision: 20 Million Plug-in Hybrids in 5 Years (Video)
With the backdrop of devastated communities and ecosystems in the Gulf, President Obama took the opportunity to challenge the nation to move our clean energy transition forward–but what would that look like? Marc Spitzer of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) makes his case for a transformation of our vehicle fleet to plug-ins. He is […]
