planted city

Here’s a shot of the NEU Community Garden taken from the south end of the Cambie Bridge on my walk home the other day.

The 46 plot garden gets its name from the Neighbourhood Energy Untility powering the former Olympic Village site/ Southeast False Creek mixed-use community located nearby. Vancouver now 74 community gardens with approximately 3260 garden plots citywide. Details here. 

I’ve got more photos here if you’re interested.

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)

From The Globe & Mail:

Broccoli, beets, carrots and peppers, spinach, romaine and buttercrisp lettuces. Since 2009, employees of the Vancouver Island community of Ladysmith have been turning the flower beds around the town hall into vegetable gardens, donating all their crops to the Ladysmith Food Bank. The produce display is beautiful – and bountiful.

“We sow a few hundred plants and get a good amount of vegetables,” says Glen Britton, an original member of the town’s employee-based Green Team and parks supervisor who oversees the planting and harvesting with six employees.

…

In-house employee Green Teams who come up with and manage environmental initiatives have become integral to most of Canada’s Greenest Employers for 2012. All Green Team members are volunteers, both off and on the company clock, for projects such as paper conservation, energy reduction, tree-planting and recycling electronics, often working in partnership with community organizations.

The Ladysmith garden project grew out of a combination of community, employee and city council support. One key needed for success is having support from the top down.

“When we established a Green Team in 2008, we left it open to all our employees so anyone who had an interest could be part of it,” says Ruth Malli, Ladysmith’s city manager and a member of their Green Team. “Meetings are held during working hours. We chose to do it on the employer’s time because we wanted to show employees it was important enough to dedicate some of their work time to it. A lot of work is done on their own time as well.”

Check out the rest of the article here. Also worth checking out, ‘These employers back Green Team initiatives’.

(Photo credit: Globe & Mail)

Getting Around: ‘Paris EV and Bike Sharing Programs’ 

From Translogic:

In a city as densely populated as Paris, driving your own car around is about as good of an idea as speaking English to every French person you encounter. Fortunately, Paris and similar cities are setup with substantial public transit systems. But for those moments when you need a car or bike, Paris has you covered.

.

Vélib’ is a new bike-sharing program that started in 2007 and has since grown into a city-wide alternative transit system. There are now almost 20,000 bikes that live at about 1,200 bike stations. These stations are scattered all around Paris’ city center, on average about 1,000 ft from one another. This kind of availability allows for quick and easy transportation, without having to hunt down bikes or places to lock them up.

…

If something bigger than a bike with basket is required, Paris also has an extensive car-sharing program called Autolib’. Launching in December 2011, Autolib’ operates similarly to Vélib, but for cars. Bolloré’s Blue Car is the vehicle of choice because it is cheap and all electric. The design comes from Pininfarina, an Italian design firm noted for their work with Ferrari.

.

At launch, 250 cars were placed around Paris in small convoys. All the cars connect to a terminal for charging and accounting. The terminal is used to rent and unlock the vehicle. Drivers can go up to 150 miles on a single charge and speeds can hit 80 mph — but don’t ever expect to go that fast around Paris. These cars are more for commuting, when you need to carry a lot of things, or need to go somewhere that public transit doesn’t go.
.

When drivers are finished, they bring the car back to an Autolib’ station and plug in. The car can fully recharge in 8 hours. The 30 kWh lithium-polymer battery is designed with frequent use in mind and can stand to last a long time.

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)

Building Urban Resilience: ‘Saga City - Our Communities Facing Climate Change’

From Saga City via Vimeo:

Urban planning has great effects on collective choices that contribute to climate change. By defining the shape of a community, urban planning determines part of its energy consumption, and thus, the quantity of greenhouse gases released by dwellers. Nevertheless, it remains largely out of the general debate on this issue. SAGA CITY invites you to learn more about these stakes through to story of the city of Colvert.

More here.

(Photo credit: Vivre en Ville via Saga City)

From The Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions:

Join us for a discussion with two of Vancouver’s most influential planning academics, Professors Mark Roseland and Ron Kellett. Learn more from Mark Roseland about what’s happened at the community level in sustainable development since the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. Find out about Ron Kellett’s work on engaging citizens through “measured visualizations” to explore and express the links of energy, GHG emissions and community planning.

When: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm

…

Live Web Stream: www.pics.uvic.ca/events.php

More here.

* Note that it starts at 5:00 PM Pacific time (8:00 PM on the East Coast)

From CleanTechnica:

Here’s a pretty cool urban farming solution—a Plantagon greenhouse for urban farming. Construction on the first one broke ground in Sweden last week. This unique vertical-farming greenhouse will also be “[part of] an international Centre of Excellence for Urban Agriculture, a demo-plant for Swedish clean-tech and a climate-smart way to use excess heating and CO2 from industries,” a news release on the groundbreaking states. Aside from offering an innovative vertical farming solution, “Plantagon plans to develop integrated solutions for energy, excess heat, waste, CO2 and water” in cooperation with several partners.

Check out the rest of the article here. You can also check out a video about the vertical farm on YouTube.

(Image credit:  Plantagon via CleanTechnica)

From The National Post:

Following recent high-profile cycling deaths in Ontario, results of a poll suggest four in five Canadians think until more cyclists respect the rules of the road, they won’t be able to gain the respect of motorists.

“What Canadians are saying is that there needs to be more understanding between motorists and cyclists,” Ipsos Reid associate vice-president Sean Simpson said.

Simpson pointed to Europe as an example of co-operation because bicycles are more common and both parties are accustomed to each other on the road.

The poll’s results also indicated Canadians are vastly in favour of more bike lanes.

Findings of the poll, conducted by Ipsos Reid exclusively for Postmedia News and Global News, show four in five (or 81 per cent) of those surveyed think Canada’s cities don’t have enough lanes devoted to cyclists, while nearly three in four (73 per cent) feel cyclists are right for demanding more respect from drivers.

Simpson said ordinarily, when a large number of people support an issue, more of them will say they somewhat agree, instead of strongly agree. In the case of bike lanes, the situation is reversed, with 43 per cent strongly supporting additional bike lanes, and 38 per cent of respondents saying they somewhat support the proposal.

More than half of all university graduates surveyed said they strongly supported bike lanes, with another 34 per cent said they somewhat supported them. The results show that younger people are more likely to support bike-lane expansion, but only by a margin of five per cent.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo credit: Globe & Mail; infographic credit: Globe & Mail)