This is truly bizarre. In the United States there are now increasing incidents of marginal right wing protesters who are absolutely convinced that sustainable development projects, such as expanded public transit, smart energy meters and bike lanes, are part of a large secret United Nations plot to control all citizens and deny private property rights.
It looks like Cornell University is going to get a tremendous clean energy project in NYC — it will use solar energy, geothermal energy, fuel cells, and innovative design on a pretty large scale. It seems it’s just missing wind energy. Here’s more: null (via Clean Technica)
Last I wrote about Boston’s new bike-sharing program, Hubway, it was about how popular the service was. (Oh yeah, and I shared a test ride blog from someone at Boston University.) Well, the rockin’ and rollin’ on Hubway bicycles has continued. In four months, 140,000 rides were taken via Hubway. Even compared to several other bike-sharing programs, Boston’s is faring well. “[In] its first 2 ½ months, Hubway recorded 100,000 station-to-station rides, significantly eclipsing the pace of similar systems…
Imagine a road without lanes, without stop lights, without a bunch of signs. You back out of your driveway, close your garage door behind you, and drive at a slow but steady pace, alert to the fact that bicyclists and pedestrians have the same right of way as you. You don’t speed along, only slowing down because a sign up ahead notifies you that there’s a pedestrian crossing zone because everywhere is a pedestrian zone. You are more alert, more cautious, more conscientious of the road you share. Sounds farfetched, doesn’t it?
Learn about the history of school gardens and how they may be gathering momentum again
Back in May, I wrote about Open Source Ecology’s DIY Global Village Construction Set. It’s a wicked cool idea of a handful of DIYers, farmers, and engineers, led by Marcin Jakubowski, to help create:
“A world where every community has access to an open source Fab[rication] Lab which can produce all the things that one currently finds at a Walmart cost-effectively, quickly, on demand from local resources.”
Want to learn more about what it is like to live in an Ecovillage? Read on to learn about Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage’s Food Co-ops.
I recently read a headline saying that Scotland had made the “World’s First Urban Green Space Map.” Now, while that sounds pretty cool, I’m not sure if I caught what’s first about it. As you may or may not know, my master’s degree was in city planning — making urban green space maps is nothing new in the field. Even making online, interactive versions of the maps like this one is not at all unheard of. My only thought is that it might be the first national-scale map of its kind….
On PARK(ing) Day each year, citizens take back a bit of the green spaces lost to parking spaces. There is a message behind this event, and that is to demonstrate, in a very visual way, the quick decline in green spaces for humans, sacrificed for the ever-growing need for places to park our cars.
I have written about New York City’s planned bike-sharing program a couple times here on EcoLocalizer, and have written about bike-sharing programs in Paris, China, Barcelona, London (a couple times), Chicago, D.C. (sister site Ecopreneurist has as well — linking to that piece), Boston, and my current city of Wroclaw (twice). I’m a fan. But I’ve got one problem with many attempts at bike-sharing — the programs start too small. Well, NYC is not disappointing me. It’s starting with 10,000 bikes at 600 stations, comparable to Paris (probably the most successful and certainly the biggest program in the world, which started with 10,000 bikes at 750 stations).
Following up on my recent post on Boston’s new and highly successful bike-sharing program, Hubway, I thought I’d direct your attention to a great post on Boston University’s news site, BU Today, in which Leslie Friday describes her experience testing out Hubway. Here’s the intro:
D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare bike-sharing program has been a great success (despite its rather small size). Paris’ Velib bike-sharing program rocked the world with its tremendous, unprecedented success. Barcelona’s Bicing program was much more successful than originally anticipated. And so on and so on. Now, it’s being reported that Boston’s new bike-sharing program is a great success, even much more successful than originally anticipated.
As a city planner by education, I’m a big fan of Alex Steffen, since he talks all about reworking cities (especially U.S. cities) to be more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, more efficient, more enjoyable. But this TED video of Steffen shared with me by Eat Drink Better and Feelgood Style director Becky Striepe talking about the place of sharing in greening our cities is beyond the typical talking points and is quite interesting. I highly recommend checking it out:
Environment protection is a growing concern. As a result, numerous scientists devote their entire life devising ways to create a cleaner and greener earth. Here are some inventions they’ve created that will make earth safer and pollution-free (or less polluted).