Climate Change
Basics
What Washington Can Do For — And Alongside — Metro Area Planners
At one point midway through yesterday's Brookings Institution forum on metropolitan planning, moderator Chris Leinberger quipped that Portland was deliberately not represented. It's not that Portland isn't a model of sustainability, he explained, but that "we all have Portland fatigue" -- that urban policy thinkers are eager to expand the models of local development beyond Oregon.
October 14, 2009
Congestion Pricing: Still Good For Basically Everyone
Urbanists often find themselves falling into a pattern of thinking that boils down to the dictum that what's good for drivers must be bad for walkability, and sustainability, and all the things that they prize about well-designed cities. Drivers seem to believe this too, which is interesting because it often isn't true.
October 13, 2009
CNU Summit to Focus on Reforming Transportation, Planning Principles
The Congress for the New Urbanism will meet in Portland, Oregon, in early November for the annual Project for Transportation Reform,
a summit to further define and clarify emerging urban transportation
policies that embrace entire networks, rather than interdependent
transportation segments, and that seek to balance modal transportation
splits and reduce overall vehicular miles traveled (VMT).
October 9, 2009
Senate Climate Bill Delayed Yet Again As Obama Takes Nobel
As my colleague Ryan wrote earlier, the congressional climate change bill no represents the most meaningful path for urbanists, and advocates for clean transportation in general, to make their voices heard in the national debate.
October 9, 2009
Bridging the Local-National Message Divide: The Climate Bill is the Answer
This week, I was fortunate to attend the Open Cities conference in Washington (along with fellow Streetsbloggers Elana Schor and Aaron Naparstek), on the ways in which new media is shaping urban policy.
October 9, 2009
Two More Senate Dems Back Plan to Devote Climate Money to Transit
This week has brought news of a brewing compromise on the Senate climate change bill, introduced last month amid signals that the upper chamber would give only a bit more to clean transportation than the House's meager 1 percent set-aside of revenue from cap-and-trade carbon regulations.
October 8, 2009
The ‘Elitism’ Trap Migrates From Transport Reform to Climate Change
Transportation debates have a terminology all their own, whether arcane ("multi-modal"), hard to define ("subsidies"), or outright misleading -- as is the case with "elitism," the standard line that road-building acolytes often apply to those who suggest that the government focus more on expanding transit and other forms of clean transport.
September 30, 2009
Senate Climate Bill Released With Much Fanfare, Little Focus on Transport
Flanked by fellow Democrats, members of the military, and a crowd hoisting signs with buzzwords like "clean energy" and "green jobs," Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and John Kerry (D-MA) today released the first draft of their legislation to curb U.S. emissions and combat climate change.
September 30, 2009
The Assumption of Inconvenience
Early this week, I noticed a number of my favorite bloggers linking to this Elisabeth Rosenthal essay at Environment 360, on the mysterious greenness of European nations. The average American, as it happens, produces about twice as much carbon dioxide each year as your typical resident of Western Europe.
September 30, 2009
Senate Climate Bill Leaks: The Good News and Bad News for Transport
The Senate's climate change legislation will finally make its debut tomorrow, courtesy of environment committee chairman Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and foreign relations committee chairman John Kerry (D-MA). But the Washington Post has already obtained a "close-to-final" version of the bill [PDF], which provides some details but leaves unanswered the key question of how much aid will go towards clean transport.
September 29, 2009