Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil
Last week the Urban Land Institute and PriceWaterhouseCoopers released their well-regarded annual analysis, Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010. The report, which has been published for the last 30 years, aims to advise the industry "on where to invest, what...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Cincinnati voters have rejected "Measure 9," an anti-streetcar initiative, by a 56-44 percent margin. The measure was aimed at killing a streetcar plan approved earlier this year by the city council, and would have required further referenda...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Fans of Larry David's hilariously cringeworthy hit comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm can't miss the Prius. It's in every episode, one way or another, and has been as long as the show has been on the air, I think. Replacing the...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil
Streetfilms has come through again with a great (if unsettling) 2-minute video on the hazards of crossing city streets. It was shot in New York, but it could have been made in any number of places where car-pedestrian interactions are...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore) has long been the U.S. Congress's leading champion of smart growth. On Monday, he announced the launching (if I recall correctly, actually a re-launching) of a Livable Communities Task Force within the Democratic Caucus of the...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Big-time kudos to Bike Pittsburgh for combing through new census data to extract and rank the commuting habits of the 60 largest US cities. The data chart on the organization's website, naturally, opens up with the ranking of bicycle commuting: ...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
For me, a post about Dubai (the amazing pace of construction shown above) must begin with some thoughts about Las Vegas and about the king of rock'n'roll, who performed in that city often and whose impersonators there remain legion. ...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
This comes via John Massengale, who says it was taken at the corner of 63rd St. and Park Ave. in New York. The red car is a vintage Fiat CinqueCento (500): Kaid Benfield writes (almost) daily about community, development, and...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil
From Wikipedia: "Carhenge is a replica of England's Stonehenge located near the city of Alliance, Nebraska on the High Plains. Instead of being built with large standing stones, as is the case with the original Stonehenge,[1] Carhenge is formed...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming , U.S. Law and Policy
There's a fascinating (if brief) interview with Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-MN), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, on the PBS "Blueprint America" website. Oberstar and his committee will play a major role in the upcoming overhaul of federal...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
You know, I don't think this design for a driverless car was created with tongue in cheek, though it certainly could have been. I generally think of futuristic designers and Google-ites as a fun bunch, so surely this is intended...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Health and the Environment , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil
The headline reads like something from The Onion, no? This comes to us via the WTF Department (actually from an article by Andrew J. Bernstein in The Saratogian): "Janette Kaddo Marino and her son, Adam, 12, wanted to participate...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Via tweets from Streetsblog and the Hillsborough County (FL) metropolitan planning organization, I just came across an article about how Copenhagen has made itself one of the world's best cities for walkers. The city is world-renowned, of course, for...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
For the most part, the climate change establishment - whether in government, industry, or the environmental community - has ignored the potential of land use strategies to provide significant reductions in carbon emissions while also producing multiple other environmental, economic,...
Posted by Kaid Benfield in Green Enterprise , Living Sustainably , Moving Beyond Oil , Solving Global Warming
Grist has an informative and fun read, written by Jonathan Hiskes and Katharine Wroth, on "the best US transit systems you never knew existed": "As cities big and small rethink how their residents get around, new systems are taking...
