Climate Buildings
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Rep. Earl Blumenauer wants better tax benefits for bike, transit commuters
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.)Photo: Thomas Le NgoWhat is a sensible political reaction to rising gas prices? Standing around shouting “Drill, baby, drill”? Or offering material support to commuters who increasingly opt for public transportation or biking to work? Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), who often sports a bike pin in his lapel (and rides a bike […]
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Watch Amtrak’s coverage shrink over time
Amtrak just had its 40th birthday, and like many 40-year-olds, it is a diminished version of what it once was. It's still hanging on, and some lines have even been restored over time, in part thanks to the efforts of the National Association of Railroad Passengers (who made these maps for Greater Greater Washington). But […]
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New Jersey to throw more money at long-stalled megamall
Stately pleasure dome or boondoggle? Xanadu gets a new name, and a new chunk of state money.Photo: Pro PublicaNew Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been quite literally making a federal case out of his refusal to return funding for the ARC Tunnel. Slated to be one of the biggest public works projects in the country […]
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11 U.S. cities honored as ‘walk-friendly’: Seattle ranks first
Seattle got the “platinum” ranking for its efforts to make the city more walkable.Photo: chrissudermanCross-posted from the Natural Resources Defense Council. After evaluating applicant communities in several categories related to walking — including safety, mobility, access, and comfort — the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC) last week announced the selection of 11 Walk Friendly […]
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Why the ‘coming housing calamity’ shouldn’t have to be calamitous
The housing market is changing. It’s time to move on from sprawl development.Photo: jcbonbonLast week, I wrote about the mind-bending case of a developer who is giving away cars in order to convince people to buy houses in a far-flung exurban development. It’s kind of like giving away cigarettes to sell funeral plots. The absurdity […]
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Detroit mayor celebrates demolition of 3,000th building
Who's ready to party like it's 12/12/2012? Detroit mayor David Bing, that's who! In an announcement made via Twitter, his office proudly declared that the city had demolished its 3,000th building of 2010. That's 10 times the rate at which the city demolished buildings in 2009. Bing's stated goal is the erasure of 10,000 blighted, […]
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The solution to the parking problem is charging through the nose for it
Normally, when a resource is scarce, we let the market set its price. So why not do the same with parking? That's what the city of San Francisco has decided to to, because it is populated with geniuses who own iPads and still manage to get a tan. By using “demand pricing” — in which […]
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Desperate sprawl developer gives away cars with houses
Desperate measures.My head nearly exploded at the breakfast table on Saturday morning. I was reading a piece in The New York Times about an Illinois developer who has finally found a way to unload the new houses he has built some 50 miles from downtown Chicago, in a place he has seen fit to dub […]
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How the bicycle economy can help us beat the energy crisis
This is the fifth column in a series focusing on the economics of bicycling. Libya. Bahrain. Iraq. Afghanistan. Canada. Fukushima. North Dakota. The Gulf Coast. Pennsylvania. Each of these stories stands alone as an urgent parable about our increasingly fragile reliance on affordable, plentiful energy. Take them together, and the myth of abundant fuel that our […]
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Bloomberg wants to cover New York City’s landfills with solar panels
New York City's mayor Michael Bloomberg puts birds on things, if by "birds" you mean solar panels and "things" you mean the city’s myriad defunct landfills. The so-called greening of brownfields is a nationwide trend, since landfills and other plots of ruined land close to or even within cities are often not suitable for other […]