planted city

A quote from the Forbes article, ‘Pedaling to Prosperity: Biking Saves U.S. Riders Billions A Year’.

Related:

~ Bicycling Magazine’s new ranking of ‘America’s Top 50 Bike-Friendly Cities’.

(Photo credit: Bicycling Magazine)

From UBC: 

University of British Columbia researchers are making bikeability research easily accessible to consumers and city planners by introducing bikeability “heat maps” in partnership with Seattle-based Walk Score® at www.walkscore.com/bike.

Combining data on availability of cycling infrastructure (bike lanes and trails), topography (hilliness), desirable destinations (attractions, shops and restaurants) and road connectivity, researchers from UBC’s School of Population and Public Health and Simon Fraser University worked with web developers from Walk Score® to develop algorithms to make the information easily accessible online.

Heat maps of Bike Score™ for 10 Canadian and 10 U.S. cities were launched today during National Bike Month in the U.S. and in advance of Bike Month in Canada. Victoria, Vancouver and Montreal rate highest in bikeability for Canadian cities; while Minneapolis, Portland and San Francisco lead in the U.S.

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“‘Walkability’ has become part of the popular vocabulary as more emphasis is placed on physical activity, community interaction and healthy living,” says Meghan Winters, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, who conducted the research while a PhD student at UBC. “Bike Score™ and the heat maps will help cities measure and improve their cycling infrastructure – a key to increasing ridership.”

Cycling rates in Canada and the U.S. are low in comparison to many European cities. This disparity is explained, in part, by differences in urban form and cycling infrastructure, says Mike Brauer, Professor, UBC School of Population and Public Health. With rising gas prices, however, more North Americans are looking for more affordable ways to get around, particularly in neighborhoods with limited access to public transportation and where distances are too far to walk to work or shopping.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Image credit: Grist via WalkScore)

From Climate Central:

Dramatically reducing emissions of one of the key contributors to global warming – nitrous oxide – will require farmers to change their ways of growing food, and citizens in the developed world to slash their yearly meat consumption, according to a new study published Friday.

The study by Eric Davidson, the director of the Woods Hole Research Center on Cape Cod, Mass., lays out actions that would be required in order to adhere to emissions scenarios developed by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Specifically, meeting the strictest emissions reduction scenario would mean that, in the developed world, the average person would need to cut their meat consumption in half by the year 2050. This would help ensure there would be enough food to feed the planet’s rising population, with nearly 9 billion people expected to call Earth home by 2050, up from about 7 billion today. Red meat consumption is growing in the developing world and is still on the increase in developed countries, trends that pose formidable obstacles to those seeking to reign in nitrous oxide emissions.

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A decline in meat consumption would have two main benefits, Davidson said. It would reduce the demand for nitrogen-based fertilizers, and cut down on manure production and use.

As for whether a 50 percent reduction in average per capita meat consumption is at all feasible by 2050, Davidson pointed to the relatively rapid changes in cigarette smoking habits seen during the past 50 years.

“If you had asked me 30 years ago if smoking would be banned in bars I would have laughed and said that would be impossible in my lifetime, and yet it has come true,” Davidson said in a press release.

“I don’t have an expertise to say how likely it is that people will change habits,” he said in a phone interview, emphasizing that he is not advocating vegetarianism, but rather is pointing out that in order to reach certain emissions reduction goals, cutting meat consumption in the developed world has to be considered as a sensible option.

The study notes that if people were to take an intermediate step and switch some meat consumption from red meat to pork, poultry or shellfish, they would help reduce nitrous oxide emissions. 

Check out the rest of the article here. For some low carbon food ideas check out Anna Lappe’s article, ‘Seven Principles of a Climate-Friendly Diet’ and the Center for Food Safety’s ‘Cool Foods Campaign’.

(Photo credit: Climate Central)

Three paragraphs from writer Tom Vanderbilt’s first article (‘The Crisis in American Walking’) in a great four-part series for Slate magazine, ‘Walking: America’s Pedestrian Problem’. 

(Photo credit: The Washington Post via Slate)

From Atlantic Cities:

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

Their two big findings about young people and driving:

• The average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) in the U.S. decreased by 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, falling from 10,300 miles per capita to just 7,900 miles per capita in 2009.
• The share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased by 5 percentage points, rising from 21 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

Young people are also making more use of transit, bikes, and foot power to get around. In 2009, 16 to 34-year-olds took 24 percent more bike trips than they took in 2001. They walked to their destinations 16 percent more often, while their passenger miles on transit jumped by 40 percent.

Check out the rest of the article to read about the factors driving this shift in getting around. 

(Photo credit: Atlantic Cities)

A quote from the Shareable article, ‘The Boom in Cycling Benefits Everyone, Not Just Bicyclists’

(Photo credit: Shareable)

Getting Animated: ‘Food Rules’ by writer Michael Pollan

From Vimeo:

Based on Michael Pollan’s talk “Food Rules” given at the RSA, this animation was created in the context of the RSA/Nominet Trust film competition. Using a mixture of stop-motion and compositing, our aim and challenge was to convey the topic in a visually interesting way using a variety of different food products. We made a little table top set up at home and worked on this a little over three weeks. 

(Photo credit: Michael Pollan)

From The Guardian:

The inner workings of a libertarian thinktank working to discredit the established science on climate change have been exposed by a leak of confidential documents detailing its strategy and fundraising networks.

Desmogblog, which broke the story, said it had received the confidential documents from an “insider” at the Heartland Institute, which is based in Chicago. The blog monitors industry efforts to discredit climate science.

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The papers indicate that discrediting established climate science remains a core mission of the organisation, which has received support from a network of wealthy individuals – including the Koch oil billionaires as well as corporations such as Microsoft and RJR Tobacco.

The documents confirm what environmental groups such as Greenpeace have long suspected: that Heartland itself is a major source of funding to a network of experts and bloggers who have been prominent in the campaign to discredit established science.

Heartland is anxious to retain its hold over mainstream media outlets, fretting in the documents about how Forbes magazine is publishing prominent climate scientists such as Peter Gleick. “This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out,” Heartland documents warn.

Heartland operates on a range of issues besides the environment. But discrediting the science of climate change remains a key mission. The group spends $300,000 on salaries for a team of experts working to undermine the findings of the UN climate body, the IPCC.

Check out the rest of the article here. 

(Cartoon credit: Tom Toles via Go Comics)

Sustainable Transportation: ‘How the Dutch Got Their Cycle Paths’

From Smart Planet:

The Netherlands is famous for many things — tulips, drug culture, the Hague — and its bicycle infrastructure should certainly be on that list. Its capital city, Amsterdam, is one of the top biking cities in Europe, with 600,000 bikes in a city of 750,000 people, many of the country’s roads have multiple bike-only lanes or paths, and policy requires that every shop have bicycle parking.

Many cities would like to install similar infrastructure to save money, protect cyclists, and encouraging the energy-efficient and healthful activity. But how did the Netherlands get there in the first place?

A short documentary, made by the Dutch Cycling embassy, highlights the history of Dutch cycling and is well worth a watch.

You’ll find more on the documentary here. If this is of interest you may also want to check out the New York Times article, ‘The Dutch Way - Bicycles and Bread’.

(Photo credit: The Guardian)

From The Guardian:

From coal mines to rice paddies and cooking fires to diesel exhausts, 14 highly cost-effective measures could quickly curb global warming and save millions of lives, while also boosting global food production. That is the striking conclusion of a new study published in Science and the most authoritative look yet at the opportunities offered in tackling methane and black carbon - soot - pollution.

The headline findings are striking. The measures would reduce warming by 0.5C by 2050, very useful indeed with the world failing to get to grips with carbon dioxide emissions. And that’s only half the tale. They would also avert between 0.7 and 4.7 million premature deaths caused by air pollution every year and bump up crop yields by 30 to 135m tonnes a year.

Methane and black carbon have grabbed attention before, in a major UNEP report in 2011 for example, because of the speed with which measures to tackle them take effect. Black carbon floats in the atmosphere for about a week, methane for about a decade, while carbon dioxide hangs around, heating the planet, for about a century. That means cuts in methane and black carbon take effect quickly, though CO2 remains the larger problem.

Drew Shindell, at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who led the research is clear that this is not an either/or situation: “It is not at all a substitution. It would be a big mistake to focus on dealing with the near-term problems of methane and black carbon without also focusing on the problem of carbon dioxide as well.”

Nonetheless, his team’s work shows action on methane and black carbon is hugely worthwhile and, for the first time, the study shows reveals the regional benefits, from a more stable monsoon in India to better growing plants in Mexico.

Check out the rest of the article here. You may also want to check out Scientific American’s article, ‘How to Buy Time in the Fight Against Climate Change: Mobilize to Stop Soot and Methane’.

(Photo credit: AFP)