“This report summarizes the cost and effectiveness of improved fuel economy, transportation system improvements and shifts in travel behavior on the reduction of man-made CO2emissions in urban areas.
We study in detail 48 major U.S. regions containing 41 percent of the U.S….
From Annie Leonard, co-director of “The Story of Stuff” project (mentioned previously here), comes a companion initiative, “The Story of Broke.”
“The Story of Broke,” told in an eight-minute-long film released today via the Web, calls for a shift in government spending — and our tax dollars — away from an ailing “dinosaur economy” in which some of “last century’s” businesses, including large oil companies and agribusinesses, receive subsidies. The story proposes we invest in the future, allocating more funding to green solutions, such as zero-waste, renewable energy, and energy-efficiency projects.
Leonard says: “It’s time to rebuild the American Dream; but this time, let’s build it better.”
Various environmental groups and economic justice organizations, including the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, Good Jobs First, National Priorities Project, and Physicians for Social Responsibility, among others, helped contribute to the story’s script.
The video and project’s Web site aim to serve as resources and as springboards for discussion and activism. Check them out.
(via thegreenurbanist)
Urban Density & Transportation Energy Consumption
Fascinating, but not surprising, how cities are clustered together by location.
(via humanscaled)
Forty years ago, London and Copenhagen had similar ratios of car to bicycle use, and both faced an exodus of workers moving out of the centre and into the suburbs. But after the energy crises of the 1970s, the two cities diverged. Danes were restricted in how much they could use their cars and commuters began to campaign for a better infrastructure for cyclists. Today, there are almost 200 miles of bicycle lanes in the city, and 40 per cent of its 1.8 million inhabitants cycle to work. The city has evolved cyclist-friendly policies, such as the Green Wave – a sequence of favourable traffic signals for cyclists at rush hour.
…
The key, it seems, is getting women cycling because only then has cycling become part of the mainstream. A recent poll by Sustrans, the UK cycling pressure group, asked women cyclists what would get them on to bikes and the answer was simple: better infrastructure, more bike lanes. Copenhagen’s separate, raised bike lanes with their own traffic signals are a must. And the lesson learnt from Gehl’s study is that infrastructure has to come first. Once it is in place, the message, says Colville-Andersen, is simple: “You don’t tell them it’s healthier to cycle, you don’t tell them they’re saving the planet, you just say that it is the fastest way from A to B. And they will come.
—
~ A couple of key paragraphs from The Independent’s ‘On your bike: What the world can learn about cycling from Copenhagen’. Scientific American’s ‘How to Get More Bicyclists on the Road’ is another worthy read on the topic and also points to the importance of women in increasing urban cycling rates.
(Photo credit: Copenhagenize)
(Source: plantedcity)
Open Session Proposal in Mobilities Research organized by Mimi Sheller (Drexel University), Malene Freudendal-Pedersen (Roskilde University), Sven Kesselring (Technische Universität München) and Ole B. Jensen (Aalborg University).
Mobilities research touches upon crucial social and political imaginaries concerning the challenges and issues related to environmental problems, climate change, sustainability, social exclusion and new societal configurations of mobility as we face the planetary limits of growth (e.g. Dennis & Urry 2009, Urry 2011). In this session we want to bring to the forefront elements of radical thinking and imaginative envisioning that from time to time surface through utopian and dystopian speculation about the future. Whether in literary, social scientific, architectural, cinematic or other genres of spatial representation, the session aims to open up the interesting tensions in these visions of the future of mobility, both realized and virtual.
While the more utopian outlook emphasizes innovative and unprecedented solutions to future mobilities, many 20th and 21st century future visions of mobility may be argued to carry dystopian dimensions such as the end of capitalism as we know it or the collapse of urbanism (e.g., Lefebvre 1973/1976; Graham 2010). The session will focus on how to connect earlier utopian ideas related to technology and design (e.g. Buckminster Fuller, Archigram, LeCorbusier, Bauhaus, etc.) to the contemporary practices and discussions about ‘alternative mobilities’ (e.g. off-the-grid living, Transition Towns, local/slow movements, etc.) and connect these to imaginations of future mobile utopias and dystopias (e.g. post-carbon mobilities, zero-emission mobilities, low-energy futures, cybermobilities, etc.). The session aims to connect research within geographies of mobilities with projects of utopian and dystopian thinking that have often inspired actual designs and practices. It shall explore the creative potentials in a cross-fertilization of these fields of thought.
Key references
Dennis, K. & J. Urry (2009) After the Car, Cambridge: Polity Press
Graham, S. (2010) Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, London: Verso
Lefebvre, H. (1973/1976) The survival of capitalism, London: Allison & Busby
Urry, J. (2011) Climate Change and Society, Cambridge: Polity Press
Please submit abstracts no longer than 250 words, along with a brief bio and contact information, to the session co-organizer: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu by August 30th, 2011. Those selected for the panel will then be asked to register for the meeting and submit their abstract on-line at: www.aag.org. A copy of the abstract, along with your personal identification number (assigned by the AAG), should then be forwarded to the session organizer(s) no later than September 21, 2011 (The AAG Deadline is September 28th).
(Source: mcenterdrexel.wordpress.com)
From The Washington Post:
For the past century, city streets have been designed to ease automobile traffic flow. But in recent years, sustainability and livability have become buzz words as policymakers seek ways to reduce congestion and pollution and improve the health of residents. They have become increasingly aware that getting more people on the street boosts public safety, raises property value and brings in more businesses.
In and around Los Angeles, where cars outnumber people on the streets and freeways and multi-lane roads divide neighborhoods, efforts are under way to reverse the refrain “Nobody Walks In LA” that was sung by the 1980s band Missing Persons. They include a plan to make over Figueroa Street, a major downtown artery for vehicle traffic, for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders.
…
The shift toward building “complete streets” reflects a broader change in federal government policy. Last year, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued new guidelines that moved to end “favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized” by including cyclist and pedestrian needs in new road projects.
Check out the rest of the article here.
(Image credit: GOOD)
Read about Dave Horton’s fascinating research on cycling in the UK via
Save our cities: build for bicycles, not cars
Photo courtesy of Carlton Reid
An interesting, passionate and honest piece from Dave Horton, a sociologist working at Lancaster University’s Environment Centre and currently working on the Understanding Walking and Cycling project (which I have posted on recently).
Initially the article starts out with a pretty glum but unsurprising update on the current state of cycling in the UK. Horton comments that after significant research the main findings of his research indicate that….
the vast majority of people never willingly cycle journeys which they could otherwise make by car. Richer people tend to ‘get’ cycling, but do it mainly for pleasure and mainly off the road. Poorer people tend not to get cycling, though some still ride out of necessity, on the footway. Nowhere across our research exercise did we find a culture of normalised, everyday urban cycling.
Horton goes on to argue that in order to make mass cycling in the UK a reality and reach a level of cycling comparable to say, Copenhagen, cycle advocates need to listen to what people say is dissuading them from cycling, accept those points and develop one confident and united way forward. Without having ‘our own house in order’ as Horton states, we can’t hope to influence politicians or transport policy.
Unsurprisingly, his research has identified that the main thing preventing cycling in the UK is a fear of traffic! He argues that we need to create separated cycle infrastructure to protect cyclists and encourage and facilitate cycling.
I have to say that I agree completely with him. Having been to Copenhagen and observed their cycle infrastructure and experienced first hand the kind of mass cycling that we here in the UK only dream of, I am convinced that highly visible and protected cycle routes on main roads and at junctions are a must!
I simply have too much experience of spending time with too many people, of too many different kinds, all of whom clearly won’t be moved onto a bike under currently prevailing cycling conditions. The sheer weight of evidence that most people will not ride a bike on busy roads is unambiguous and uncompromising.
We need radically to restructure our urban mobility systems in ways which will get people out of their cars and make them cycle. Half of the infrastructural change required is underway – the push for a maximum speed limit of 20 mph on residential streets is gaining momentum. But the other half of the key infrastructural change required needs a similar push, and this push should be for very high quality and continuous segregated cycling infrastructure on our biggest and busiest urban roads, the kind of roads on which almost everyone today refuses to cycle.
The task might seem enormous, even impossible. But it’s not. Think about how things change. Our research has made very clear the normality among a large proportion of the population of using a car for short journeys. But this normality has been produced over only the last fifty or sixty years. We used to travel differently, and we will do so again.
Mobile cultures, cultural (im)mobilities
Panel organizer: Noel B. Salazar (University of Leuven, Belgium): noel.salazar@soc.kuleuven.be
Panel abstract:
Although humans have always been on the move, discourses of globalization and metaphors of ‘flow’ have conjured up images of unfettered movement. Partly influenced by neoliberal and free market ideologies, transnational mobility has become one of the most powerful stratifying factors, leading to a global hierarchy of movements. Purposeful border-crossing mobilities, usually of the temporary kind, are widely accepted as a desirable and even normative path (e.g. rites of passage) towards success: career achievement through educational exchange and work experience abroad, and wellbeing or quality of life achievement through international tourism and lifestyle migration. Across the globe, such forms of geographical movement are made meaningful by being variously linked with the accumulation of economic (resources), social (status) or cultural (cosmopolitanism) capital. As more people cross borders, nation-states attempt to maintain authority over the meaning of their movements. An all too exclusive focus on the most mobile people alone conceals the wider effects that dominant ideas of (im)mobility and transnational networks have on societies and their cultural fabric as a whole. The papers in this panel will ethnographically address the following questions: How is achievement-through-mobility ideologically constituted across cultures and which mechanisms and institutional regimes ensure its transmission and self-perpetuation? How do people experience, understand and negotiate positively valued transnational mobilities? How much are people aware of the ways that culture influences boundary-crossing mobility patterns? And, turning the question around, what is the role of transnational mobilities in the constitution of culture(s) and cultural heritage?
Submission of abstracts:
Please send an e-mail to the panel organizer with the following data: title and 150 word paper abstract, name, affiliation and full contact details
Deadline: 22 July 2011
General information on the conference:
http://www.iuaes2013.org/
Noel B. Salazar, PhD
Cultural Mobilities Research (CuMoRe)
Author of Envisioning Eden
EASA Executive Committee (2011-2013)
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IMMRC-Anthropology, University of Leuven
Parkstraat 45, bus 3615, BE-3000 Leuven, Belgium
Tel: +32 (0)475 53.73.13, Fax +32 (0)16 32.59.02
http://kuleuven.academia.edu/NoelBSalazar
(Source: GOOD, via secretrepublic)
‘Smart car’ model predicts the behavior of human drivers | KurzweilAI
The researchers test their algorithm using a miniature autonomous vehicle traveling along a track that partially overlaps with a second track for a human-controlled vehicle, observing incidences of collision and collision avoidance (credit: Melanie Gonick)
MIT researchers have developed a software system for “smart cars” that predicts the behavior of other human drivers, to prepare for a world where the road is shared by both human and artificially intelligent drivers.
They tested their algorithms with toy-sized cars on a miniature track.
The key of their research is to create a system that carefully evaluates drivers based on their behavior and flags trouble cars.
Researchers set up 100 potential collision scenarios on two overlapping circular tracks, with some cars remote-controlled by human drivers and other cars operating based on preset algorithms.
