planted city

WalkScore ranks the ‘Top 25 Most Transit Friendly US Cities’ 

From Triple Pundit:

The rising gas prices are forcing everybody to take a second look at how they commute. Now WalkScore is helping people do this. They recently released a report of the most transit-friendly cities in the United States.

Cities were graded on how commuter-friendly they are, not just by ranking the quantity of transit available but also how convenient it is to citizens. Walkscore calculated the Transit Score of over 1 million locations in the largest 25 cities and used a combination of algorithms and heat maps to come up with the ranking.

These rankings will help people who are looking for a new home to pick a city with good transit systems.

The scores will also help city officials figure out which transit lines are weak in their cities so they can make improvements.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Triple Pundit)

From TriplePundit:

Resilient cities, those that are working to transition towards a low-carbon economy while also preparing to avert the worst of climate change, are gaining interest and attention from policy makers, city councils and others worldwide. In fact, today, leaders from the public and private sector, supported by ICLEI (see below) and the U.S. Green Building Council, are launching a National Leadership Speaker Series on Resiliency and Security in the 21^st Century.

“The battle to prevent catastrophic climate change will be won or lost in our cities…” (C40 Cities Initiative)

Cities account for up to 80% of GHG emissions globally and are home to more than 50% of the world’s population (headed to 60%, 5 billion people by 2030). As I mentioned in my previous post, if we refocus our efforts on the right solutions soon enough, we can mitigate the worst of climate change while actually improving our city economies and growing corporate profits.  Hunter Lovins and I recently published a book entitled Climate Capitalism to share stories of cities and companies around the world who are profiting from that transition to the low carbon economy. Furthermore, the longer we wait the more we will have to pay for adaptation.

…

The Top 10 Resilient Cities Are….

10.) Tokyo, Japan

9.) London, UK

8.) New York, USA 

7.) San Francisco, USA

6.) Paris, France

5.) Vancouver, Canada

4.) Stockholm, Sweden

3.) Barcelona, Spain

2.) Curitiba, Brazil

1.) Copenhagen, Denmark

You can check out the runners up and why each city ranked where it did here.

From the Economist:

Chicago and New York are just two of the ten American cities—the others are Austin, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle—who are members of the Large Cities Climate Leadership Group (mercifully renamed the C40), which now comprises 58 cities around the world. Roughly 297m people, less than 5% of the Earth’s total, live in the 40 charter-member C40 cities. But they account for 18% of the world’s GDP and 10% of its carbon emissions. In total, cities house more than half the world’s population, and account for two-thirds of its energy consumption and over 60% of its greenhouse-gas emissions.

These cities’ plans vary. One particular strength of urban, as opposed to national or even state climate-change policy, particularly in a country as vast as America, is that cities are different; what works in one may not in another. Missy Stults, who until recently was climate director for ICLEI-USA, an NGO that works with local governments on the subject, says that for climate-change plans to work, “the actions you take have to be local”, tailored to the particular needs of each city. Portland’s plan, for instance, calls for 90% of its citizens to be able to walk or bicycle “to meet all basic, daily non-work needs” by 2030: a laudable and achievable goal there, but far more difficult in sprawling cities such as Los Angeles or Houston. New York’s PlaNYC pays more attention to wetlands and coastal issues than CCAP does, because New York has more coastline and waterways than Chicago.

But there are shared goals as well. All ten American C40-city plans have some sort of transport-policy aspect, whether public, such as switching to hybrid or electric taxis and buses, personal, such as encouraging cycling, or both. They try to reduce the amount of rubbish going to municipal landfills by encouraging composting and recycling; some push for converting waste into usable energy. Many propose more efficient outdoor lighting, which accounts for almost one-fifth of energy consumption across C40 cities and is mostly old and inefficient. And most plans push for retrofitting homes and offices to make them more energy-efficient—especially crucial in densely built cities such as New York, where buildings account for 75% of greenhouse-gas emissions.

These measures are not only environmentally sound. By and large they also save taxpayers money. This makes their benefits far more tangible than simply contributing to a good outcome in the distant future; and a much easier sell.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Christian Science Monitor)

From The Independent:

According to the results of a new study released June 30, San Francisco is the greenest city in the USA and Canada, with Vancouver coming a close second and New York third.

The study was commissioned by Siemens and conducted by independent research organization the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The study ranked 27 major cities in the USA and Canada across nine environmental categories - CO2 emissions, energy, land use, buildings, transport, water, waste, air quality and environmental governance.

Overall San Francisco was found to be the greenest city, however the rankings changed across each category: Denver was ranked first in terms of best “energy usage,” New York in terms of “land use,” Seattle in terms of “buildings,” New York for “transport,” Calgary for “water,” San Francisco for “waste,” Vancouver for “air” and, in terms of “environmental governance,” Denver, New York and Washington DC were all ranked joint first.

Siemens and the EIU also conducted a similar study of European cities the results of which were released on June 21. The European study looked at 29 major cities, 12 of which were in Germany; the cities ranked “above average” were Amsterdam, Berlin, Bremen, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Helsinki, Leipzig, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg, Oslo, Stockholm, Stuttgart, Vienna and Zurich.

According to the results of the EIU study released on June 30 the overall top ten US and Canadian cities on the Green City Index are:

01.   San Francisco
02.   Vancouver
03.   New York
04.   Seattle
05.   Denver
06.   Boston
07.   Los Angeles
08.   Washington DC
09.   Toronto
10.   Minneapolis

(Image credit: NRDC Switchboard)