It’s not surprising that Portland and New York are ranked high in a new report about the best places to get around without your car, but the other bike-friendly destinations may surprise you. Have you tried walking to work in Alaska?
The Best U.S. Cities For Biking And Walking
“How did snowy Minneapolis beat out Portland, Ore., for the title of best bike city in America? This year, Minneapolis is adding 57 new miles of bikeways to the 127 miles already built, and an additional 183 miles are planned over the next 20 years.”
Short film by the Congress of New Urbanism, an advocacy group for more pedestrian friendly neighborhoods and diversity of housing types, highlighting instances where highways have decreased quality of life and property values for communities, and removing them vastly improved, well, everything. I would say, they do have a point - unless you’re travelling interstate, highways don’t always speed things along.
Fun fact from the video: Vancouver, BC doesn’t have ANY highways! And yet they get along just fine.
Extra: another video case study from the city of Portland, Oregon which also did away with certain stretches of freeway and filled in the areas with…parks. Leslie Knope would be proud.
via hwysnbywys:
Zipcar Adds Plug-In Prius Hybrids to Its Fleet
Source: Fast Company
The next generation of electric cars is now available to the car-less—at least, to Zipcar members in Boston, San Francisco, and Portland.
The car-sharing service announced this week that eight Toyota Prius plug-in hybrids are now available to those three cities as part of a pilot program that will explore how the technology can work in large-scale car-sharing programs.
“Zipcar is an ideal test bed for early consumer acceptance of EVs,” said Scott Griffith, Chairman and CEO of Zipcar, in a statement. “This project will allow companies to receive direct feedback from thousands of consumers in three cities and help evaluate how EVs fit into a large-scale car sharing model.”
Toyota’s plug-in Prius, set to be released to showrooms in 2012, can travel on pure electric power up to 62 MPH for approximately 13 miles before shifting into conventional Prius hybrid mode, where it averages 50 MPG. Zipcar is planning on charging its fleet using both conventional 110-volt outlets (a three-hour charge time) and 220-volt chargers (a 90-minute charge time). Customers will be allowed to take the plug-ins out for $7 per hour.
Weeels may be a “transit utility,” but Chris Smith from Portland Transport has debuted what he is calling the world’s first “Transit Appliance”.
Drawing upon a number of a variety of Open Source software components (including Linux), the Open Hardware “Chumby”…
Worldchanging: Bright Green: Future City: Portland & Networked Urban Sustainability
In preparation for our Future City event this Friday, we’re comparing progress towards urban sustainability in Portland and Seattle.
When cities first stepped up as leaders in climate action, a few simple projects would get you noticed. For a good 15 years, just doing anything set you apart. But, almost without realizing it, we have walked into a new phase of urban sustainability – version 2.0 – where cities are being pushed to tackle the really tough issues. Retrofitting City Hall is nice, but the real game revolves around how we plan and travel through our cities, how we build and run our buildings, and how we make and use energy. “Go big” as they say “or go home.” Or in this case “go big at home.”
In 2009, the Portland Sustainability Institute, in partnership with the City of Portland, launched the EcoDistricts Initiative as part of the Portland region’s broadening commitment to sustainability. The EcoDistricts Initiative is a comprehensive strategy to accelerate sustainable neighborhood development. An EcoDistrict is a neighborhood or district with a broad commitment to accelerate neighborhood-scale sustainability. EcoDistricts commit to achieving ambitious sustainability performance goals, guiding district investments and community action, and tracking the results over time.
Fast Company interview with Portland mayor Sam Adams, on working to make every section of Portland a complete 20-minute neighborhood to strengthen the local economy.
Learn about the new ways in which federal and municipal stakeholders are collaborating to promote the economic, physical, and social development of small- to mid-sized cities. Speakers will share their knowledge about successful strategies for economic and social development and discuss opportunities and challenges faced by their growing cities in these difficult economic times. Conference topics will include economic development, the creative economy, sustainability, transportation, housing, education, etc. The conference will provide a forum for dialogue on these issues and offer participants a chance to contribute their thoughts toward concrete policy proposals. This is an opportunity to help shape an effective strategy for urban America. Speakers from six cities will present best practices in use at each of their own municipalities:
Cities can develop solutions more efficiently if they collaborate using open standards and open source. Several major cities (NYC, Toronto, D.C., more) are already coming together to help develop an open standard for 311 services with Open311. Cities and developers are also coming together to share solutions for transit, Open Trip Planner for example. Cities first have to open up their public data and civic technology if they want to benefit from developer communities and other cities. As a brilliant example of sharing, the open data and open source legislation that was recently presented in Portland actually borrowed some of the language from similar legislation in Vancouver.
- Philip Ashlock, TOPP Labs, The Open Planning Project, NYC
