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 The Washington Post:

Is there anything cities can do to encourage cycling? Portland, for instance, has twice as many bike commuters per 1,000 people as Washington. But maybe that’s just because Portland has nicer weather or more young people. It’s not clear that there’s an actual policy issue here.

Yet in a new new study (PDF) in the journal Transport Policy, Ralph Buehler and John Pucher suggest that cities might actually be able to influence how many cyclists are on the road. Perhaps all they have to do is — and this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise — build more bike lanes and bike paths.

Buehler and Pucher found that the presence of off-road bike paths and on-street bike lanes were, by far, the biggest determinant of cycling rates in cities. And that’s true even after you control for a variety of other factors like how hot or cold a city is, how much rain falls, how dense the city is, how high gas prices are, the type of people that live there, or how safe it is to cycle. None of those things seem to matter quite as much. The results, the authors write, “are consistent with the hypothesis that bike lanes and bike paths encourage cycling.”

Check out the rest of the article here. You can read more coverage of the study here, here and here. 

(Photo credit: Atlantic Cities)

Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Tom Toles highlights the increasing futility of denying the reality of human driven climate change. In this case, the “extremely early blooming of cherry trees” in Washington, D.C. is an example. More here, here, here,here, and here.  

(Cartoon source: Washington Post via Go Comics)

From Atlantic Cities:

Once, cities were built to channel storm water away from building foundations and roadways. But as urban areas have grown, rooftops, streets and other impervious surfaces have disrupted cities’ natural hydrology. Today, everyone from water authorities to home gardeners are looking to absorb rain where it falls, eschewing traditional treatment plants and underground sewerage tunnels that effectively neutralize runoff, but don’t do much else.

The first of these projects matured in Portland, Oregon, and Prince George’s County, Maryland. Now, dozens of cities including Washington, Philadelphia, and Louisville have embarked on their own overhauls. 

They are attracted, in part, by the lower cost of planting trees and gardens and retrofitting streets, parking lots and roofs. But it’s also a matter of pay-off. Taxpayers never see the underground fixes. But green infrastructure is something people can use and enjoy, says Joan Furlong, program manager at the Rock Creek Conservancy, a D.C. nonprofit group working with city officials to recruit residents and business owners to the RiverSmart Program.

“It’s become a really hot topic in the last five years or so. Before that green fixes weren’t really accepted by the regulatory agencies,” Gardner-Andrews says, particularly the EPA, which first publicly endorsed green infrastructure just five years ago.

The agency now endorses planting greenery to absorb rainfall as an important tool for adapting to rising sea levels and more extreme storms.

Wildlife also benefits. For instance, if you live in Maryland, planting White Turtleheads in your rain garden can provide much needed habitat for the state butterfly, the Baltimore Checkerspot, which will only lay its eggs on Turtlehead leaves, says Carole Barth, an environmental planner with the Department of Environmental Resources in Prince George’s County, Md.

But doing a rain garden requires careful site planning, experts say. If planted too close to buildings, they can exacerbate rather than alleviate basement flooding. And it’s important to find a patch of land where water percolates well through the soil, which is not necessarily the case everywhere. Researchers have found years of mowing and other activities sometimes leaves the ground so compacted that its about as permeable as concrete.

Check out the rest of the article here. Check out Wikipedia, the Sightline Institute, ASLA and CMHC for more on rain gardens including how to design your own.

(Photo credit: Huston Street Racing; graphic credit: Seine-Rat River Conservation District)

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)