The European Commission on Monday unveiled a “single European transport area” aimed at enforcing “a profound shift in transport patterns for passengers” by 2050.
The plan also envisages an end to cheap holiday flights from Britain to southern Europe with a target that over 50 per cent of all journeys above 186 miles should be by rail.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Advanced community design models are emerging to provide some of the greatest opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use, climate-disrupting emissions and traffic congestion, while also offering affordable, high-quality lifestyles.
Envision living in a community that offers an abundance of local shopping, services and entertainment. The community is focused on a mobility center well connected to the region with transit and vanpools. The need to drive to work and other destinations is minimized. When you do drive, it is in an electric vehicle charged at your house or a fast charge station located in the mobility center park-and-ride.
Popularity: 43% [?]
Doug Farr is an architect and planner who wrote the book Sustainable Design: Urban Design with Nature. In this talk, Farr discusses how LEED certification of buildings can only do so much since it doesn’t take into account how buildings are integrated sustainably with its surroundings. He argues that we need to think differently about we organize our cities – more densely in more compact, complete, and walkable neighborhoods – to design sustainability into the way we live. The video is an hour and 20 minutes long, but may be worth it for the ideas and case studies presented about planning and architecture design.
Popularity: 46% [?]
Urban sprawl has rightly been blamed for contributing to increasing fuel consumption in the United States, since many commuters have little choice but to drive to work. But policies designed to make cities more compact will do little to reduce gas consumption by 2050, in time to prevent the worst effects of climate change, according to a new report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
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Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves.
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Is real-estate development always good? Is a community succeeding only if it’s growing? That was the post-war assumption in this country as skylines inched upward and suburbs sprawled. But like so many economic presumptions, the growth-is-good model may now be collapsing on itself.
Popularity: 25% [?]
Sometime in the last two years, the world crossed a threshold. For the first time in history, more people lived in cities than in rural areas.
For Carolyn Steel, it begs one of the great questions: How do you feed a city? We take food for granted, she says. We assume that it will magically always be there in our restaurants and supermarkets, but “it’s remarkable that cities get fed at all.”
We are as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were.
Popularity: 31% [?]
We’ve looked at how dense urban areas compare with sprawling areas in terms of per capita emissions and we’ve also looked at whether Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) and gas consumption is higher in areas that sprawl than in compact areas. In both cases studies have shown what we might suspect: areas that sprawl have more climate changing emissions, bigger and less efficient vehicles.
Popularity: 14% [?]
As both Berkeley and Oakland debate their downtown plans, there is growing recognition that the fight against global warming requires greater urban density.
Popularity: 18% [?]
The words “air pollution” may sound archaic or inflated. There is a sense that air has gotten dramatically cleaner and is not as worrisome a problem as some other environmental issues. Air rarely makes national news anymore, unless it’s about dirty air in another country, or unless there is speculation that a brown cloud is creeping over from China, dirtying the air in California – a theory that has yet to be proven. More accurately, America is dirtying its own air in cities from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh.
Popularity: 25% [?]