if you rode a bicycle, you’d be home by now


The Freeway Ride I on Channel 4 News from RichToTheIE on Vimeo.

Looks like I-40 between RTP and Raleigh, doesn’t it? That’s because Raleigh has some of the worst commuting traffic in the country. Reader Dave Wofford notes, “I bet Raleigh doesn’t tout being on this list.”

 

The perfect commute is easy, inexpensive and reliable.

In cities boasting such factors, like Buffalo, N.Y., Salt Lake City and Milwaukee, the trip to work is a breeze. But for commuters in Atlanta, Detroit and Miami, the daily grind is just that, thanks to bad traffic, insufficient infrastructure and drivers who resist carpools and public transportation.

Other spots that came out on top include Oklahoma City, Okla., Pittsburgh, Corpus Christi, Texas, and Eugene, Ore. At the bottom: Orlando, Fla., Dallas, Birmingham, Ala., and Raleigh, N.C.

Thanks to Dale and Tino for the heads up on the video set. The Crimanimalz vimeo channel has more.

Bikes for the World, Triangle event

  1. Click the image to download the pdf
  2. Print it out
  3. Hang it up in your office (in the break room or lunch area) or at school
  4. Donate a bike
  5. Change someone’s life

bfw2.jpg

Asheville’s Citizen-Times Editorial: Greenway benefits surely outweigh the costs

Editorial, Asheville Citizen-Times
published March 4, 2008

Buncombe County’s plans for a series of greenways promises benefits to residents and visitors that will more than outweigh the costs.

Whether used for recreation or to get to work, school, shopping or some other destination, outdoor pathways for walking, jogging and riding bicycles give people the opportunity to enjoy the natural beauty of the county’s mountain vistas while garnering the benefits of healthy exercise.

The need for parks and greenways increases as the county’s population grows and previously open spaces are gobbled up for development. Ironically, as the demand is increasing, so is the cost to buy land to create such facilities.

But, as we have noted previously, it’s not too much of a stretch to argue that money spent on parks is money saved in health care and law enforcement costs.

Health benefits

Studies have found that in a greener environment (more parks and opportunities for recreational activities) people report fewer health complaints and more often rate themselves as being in good health and as having good mental health. With 57 percent of Buncombe County residents overweight or obese, the need for places to participate in healthy physical exercise is undeniable.

Studies also have produced evidence that young people who live in communities rich in recreational opportunities experience less risk of anti-social behavior and higher rates of positive development.

Greenways, like parks, help build strong communities. Residents living near public green spaces report being more familiar with their nearby neighbors, socializing with them more and feeling safer than residents with no nearby green areas.

Devoting tax dollars to greenways not only improves residents’ lives, it may well save them money and grief in the long run.

Time is now

The county manages a number of parks, but doesn’t maintain any greenways. Fortunately, commissioners appear to recognize that it’s time to remedy that.

Commissioner David Young said parks and greenways spur economic growth.

“Companies are looking at what quality of life you have and how healthy your citizens are,” Young said. “It makes our community a more livable place for our citizens and those who want to come here.”

With the constantly rising cost of health insurance, it’s easy to understand why companies might look at whether a community’s residents are generally healthier than average before deciding to locate there.

Exercise access

Lower obesity rates correlate with “having things within walking or biking distance and having safe and direct ways to get there,” Kelly Evenson, who teaches epidemiology at UNC Chapel Hill and specializes in the effects of physical activity, told a Citizen-Times reporter recently.

“The one consistent voice I’ve heard from the community is that people want more parks, greenways and trails, and I think as leaders we have to find ways to make that happen,” Commissioner David Gantt said.

Planning for a system of county greenways is still in the early stages, so no cost estimates for the purchase of easements have been created.

Gantt said he’d like to see the county hire someone to seek grant funding and partnerships for greenway development. Doing so could move the process of developing a plan, acquiring easements and constructing the greenways forward more quickly.

As with the City of Asheville’s greenway plans, timing is critical.

Development in the region continues to move at a brisk pace. As more land is developed and prices rise, there will be less and less opportunity to create greenways and contiguous trails at an affordable cost.

We commend commissioners for recognizing the need for greenways and the benefits they would bring. We urge them to move forward with all due haste.

WUNC story on cycling for transportation

NC Voices: Growth & Transportation
Rose Hoban

As a part of our ongoing coverage of Growth and Sustainability — this week on Morning Edition we’re featuring a North Carolina Voices series on Transportation. One form of transit stands out for it’s energy efficiency, health benefits and fun – that’s people-powered transportation. But in the Triangle, that can be tough. It’s a place that’s been built primarily for cars — and many bikers says it’s just too dangerous to consider getting to work on two wheels or feet. Rose Hoban takes a look at the state of bicycle and pedestrian access in the area.

Download the mp3

Group bike ride part of Duke’s Focus the Nation festivities

Focus the Nation is a national effort calling for greater action, education, and awareness of global warming. From their website…

Focus the Nation will culminate January 31st, 2008 in simultaneous educational symposia held across the country. Our intent is to move America beyond fatalism to a determination to face up to this civilizational challenge, the challenge of our generation.

As part of campus-wide FTN activities, Duke University students are organizing a group bike ride. According to organizer Rob Fox, “the bike ride is tied in as a public awareness move for alternative transportation such as bikes.”

The bike ride is just part of a day-long schedule of events — click here for more.

If you want to take part in the ride, meet at Duke’s chapel, which is on West Campus. The ride starts at 10:30AM; it’s a fairly relaxed three mile route:

1. Start at Duke Chapel bus stop on West Campus
2. Go down Chapel Drive until the roundabout
3. Go down Campus Drive until Anderson St., take a right.
4. Continue down Anderson St. until Duke University Rd., take a right
5. Continue down Duke University Rd. until Cameron Blvd., take a right
6. Continue down Cameron Blvd. until Science Drive, take a right
7. Continue down Science Drive until Towerview Rd., take a right
8. Take the sidewalk leading from Wilson Gym towards the Chapel, turn left to get onto B.C. Plaza

Al Gore, stay where you are

In his December column for The Guardian, George Monbiot reminds us that Al Gore represented the United States at the Kyoto Protocol talks — you know, the major international summit on governments’ responsibilities to address global warming. The ones before Bali. The first ones that failed to reach any hard goals –

The European Union had asked for greenhouse gas cuts of 15% by 2010. Gore’s team drove them down to 5.2% by 2012. Then it did something worse: it destroyed the whole agreement.

If one considers the Kyoto Protocols a failure, then it is because major polluters like the US didn’t sign on. Instead of going into the Kyoto talks playing fair, ready to own up to our share of the responsibility of global fossil fuel consumption, our corporate government pushed the carbon credit trading system. The US never signed on because it couldn’t convince developing nations to agree to limits on growth.

Brian Tokar explains

[i]n Kyoto in 1997, then-Vice President Al Gore was credited with breaking the first such deadlock in climate negotiations. He promised the assembled delegates that the United States would support mandatory emissions reductions if their implementation were based on a scheme of market based trading of emissions. The concept of “marketable rights to pollute” had been in wide circulation in the United States for nearly a decade, but the Kyoto Protocol was the first time a so-called “cap-and-trade” scheme was to be implemented on a global scale.

Carbon credits and renewable energy certificates (REC) are financial agreements that corporations and governments use to justify claims that they are helping the fight against global warming. Purchasing an REC, in theory, amounts to investing in something that sequesters carbon. Purchase enough of these and, again in theory, you off-set the carbon emissions your company, state, or country is responsible for producing. RECs have two problems. First, as Business Week argues, “the most commonly used RECs, which are supposed to result in a third party’s developing pollution-free power, turn out to be highly dubious.” (citation, citation)

Questionable authenticity, however, is just a symptom of the main problem with RECs and credit trading schemes: that the bottom line by which these programs are evaluated is the bookkeeper’s bottom line. Profitability and environmental responsibility are not incompatible, don’t get me wrong; Chris King has been proving this for years. But when the public’s commitment to environmental change is defined by its breadth rather than its depth, capitalists look for quick fixes to complex problems. They look for ways to make environmentalism a consumer commodity. The rush to repackage products as “green” doesn’t always address the environment’s bottom line.

Nor do REC’s and carbon credit trading give us any real sense of the responsibility we bear. On the international stage, trying to buy our way out of environmental responsibility can make us look like an ass.

I appreciate the new feature in the Independent, Zork Asks, because of what it is designed to do — it takes an outsider’s perspective on something very close to the heart. It’s difficult to step outside of your own culture, to see it as someone outside would see it, but sometimes that perspective is the most revealing.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore addresses the UN climate conference in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia on Thursday Dec. 13, 2007. (AP / Dita Alangkara) Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore addresses the UN climate conference in Nusa Dua, Bali, Indonesia on Thursday Dec. 13, 2007. (AP / Dita Alangkara)

Monbiot and Zork are alike in that they both take the perspective of an outsider — the latter, though is merely a fictional character, a thought experiment conceived by someone for whom completely adopting the outsider’s perspective is impossible. Monbiot, though not an alien, though not a little green man, though not from another planet, is able to take an outsider’s perspective on U.S. politics because of his nationality. He’s not an Amurican, and that gives him a looking glass with stinging clarity.

“So why, regardless of the character of its leaders, does the United States act this way?,” Monbiot asks. “Because, like several other modern democracies, it is subject to two great corrupting forces — (sic) corporate media and campaign finance.”

Take the corporate perspective out of government, and carbon credit trading doesn’t make any sense. It’s greenwashing, plain and simple: another policy solution that allows us to buy a guilt-free conscience with profits made on coal-fired power plants.

Every time Corporate America uses the word sustainable I can’t help but think that a global system of emissions credit trading is the least sustainable solution to global warming. Given how he is credited with bringing environmentalism to pop-culture, bringing phrases like “climate change” and “carbon neutral” into the popular parlance, Gore makes perhaps a better environmental activist than he was an environment-focused politician.

snow

Twelve hours of snowfall in Ontario.
January 1st, 2008

Free recycling, reuse of bike parts

The good folks at Resource Revival want your old bike parts, and they’ll pay for the shipping to get them.

From their website…

Recycle your bike chain and freewheels with us!
It’s easy as 1-2-3.

 

      
 

Just throw greasy chain and freewheels in a box (no rust please) We take whole freewheels and/or loose freewheel cores & cogs. Sorry, we are not taking cassettes or any other parts at this time.

      
     
     

Call or email when the box is full and let us know the actual weight (not an estimate). Boxes should weigh at least 30 lbs and no more than 50 pounds.

      
         
     
We send UPS to pick up the box(es) at no cost to you. They’ll even bring the labels!    
   

answers@ResourceRevival.com or 1-800-866-8823

All recyclers will get their shop name listed on the Resource Revival website and have a chance to win prizes at the end of the year.

How much easier can they make it?

innovate or die

innovate or dieSince in my last column I criticized the folks at Google for being short-sighted in their thinking about how to improve transportation, I want to post an update. In “Hybrid car pitch a step backwards,” I implied that the software giant known for creative thinking is selling itself (and us) short by encouraging the development of new plug-in hybrid automobiles. Hybrids, in my opinion, will not only keep us dependent on gasoline longer (by stretching the fuel supply), but keep us dependent on an automobile-based transportation model whose dangerous side-effects (if you can call 40,000 deaths per year side-effects) are not being factored into the race to answer the challenges of climate change.

Fortunately, the hybrid-development contest is not all Google has up its sleeve. Innovate or Die, a contest sponsored by bicycle manufacturer Specialized and Google, is soliciting entries from inventors working on how to improve human-powered vehicles, or transit. The language of the contest organizers clearly suggests an understanding that transit will play a significant role in adapting traffic for a sustainable future.

Hopefully George Bliss or some equally creative unknown inventor will get involve, unveiling the next amazing thing in human-powered movement. Segways need not apply.

Carnival of the Green

The air is thick this morning, my first day back to work since vacation. It’s dense with water vapor and a stagnant quality that makes it hard to breathe. It feels like the air trapped by plastic wrapped tight over the top of a bowl of left-overs that mistakenly sat overnight on the kitchen counter.

I was noticing the unusually thick smell of auto-exhaust when the three dump trucks passed me, each blowing an opaque cloud of soot. These clouds hung in the asphalt corridor between the trees as I made my way through them. Consciously, I tried to breathe shallow, but instinctively, I breathed deeply — I was in middle of a two-mile climb with more than 40lbs of gear and bike to haul.

A gray and brown swirl of soot and grime circles the drain of the shower at work. The same particulate dulls the brightness of my otherwise yellow jersey. I wonder what breathing that stuff does to my lungs, then wonder why I ride in a place where days like today are the norm.

Durham’s air is thick for the same reason that exhaust clouds hang in the Cornwallis Rd corridor — the wind just doesn’t blow.

In the three cities I visited recently there was a constant breeze. The Gulf-born winds across Tampa and Jacksonville, Florida constantly scrub the air. Residents of those cities can exercise outdoors without concern for ozone pollution. Even Atlanta, a city that seems more red — Republicans, Coca-Cola, banking — than green, enjoys the benefits of clean air because the wind is constantly moving across the sky.

So, why not move to one of those places? If I am going to bike commute, then, in Durham, that means filling my lungs with voluminous amounts of toxins every morning and evening. And even though public health officials think that the benefits of a regimen of exercise outweighs the individual costs of exposure to poor air quality, just think how much better it would be to ride every day in clean air. Such thoughts are immanent on my daily ride to work.

But to bail on Durham and move someplace else is to give up on the work that needs doing here. It’s the moral equivalent of abandonment: rather than take responsibility for the mess you’ve made, just move somewhere else and start over. Communities are not fungible. If I don’t do what I can to create a clean environment here in Durham, I’ll not likely appreciate Tampa’s environment either.

A better idea is to love the place where you are. Durham’s Greenhouse Gas Plan needs support, and I’m sure there’s something in your town, in your place, that needs your support too. (Link updated; thanks Ellen)

This week’s Carnival of the Green includes submissions from others who are rolling up their sleeves, unafraid of real work.

At Behavioral Ecology, Matt MacManes asks whether the Moss Landing power plant (near San Francisco) is killing marine mammals? “The power plant releases 900,000 tons of CO2, 60 tons of NOx and 4 tons of SO2 into the atmosphere yearly, and 1.2 billion gallons of hot water (50C) DAILY into the ocean,” he says. “ Why do we continue to operate it? Will darkness fall upon San Francisco if we closed it?”

Nina at Queercents asks us to consider the effects of congestion pricing in major metropolitan areas of the United States. “Have you heard the buzz about congestion pricing?” she asks. “What can $8 a day buy you? Soon, the right to drive into NYC.”

The Coding Grasshopper has a follow up to a documentary about Carbon offsetting and whether it actually works.

Leon, at Sox First, takes a look at ways that climate change is affected corporate board room discussions. “Climate change is shaping up the big corporate governance issue of the 21st Century,” he says.

David at The Good Human asks a question I’ve wondered myself — “Why In The World Do Businesses Leave Their Lights On At Night?”

One more corporate concern is whether Burning Man is selling out?

Arvind Devalia submits an urgent plea to save the greenery of Regents Park in Central London for future generations.

Chris Baskind at Lighter Footstep reminds homeowners that traditional milk-based paints are a safe, non-toxic alternative to interior paints containing petroleum products and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

GP presents Present Simplicity posted at Fish Creek House - INNside Innkeeping.

Tracy at Eco Street offers tips to give your garden a green makeover.

and Tiffany Washko presents Eco Friendly Birthday Party posted at Natural Family Living Blog.

The finale for this week’s Carnival is an entry that wasn’t submitted — just one I came across while reading. The author asks a pertinent question that bears repeating in this new wave of popular environmentalism: whether the green aspects of green consumerism outweigh the costs of consumerism itself. Like her, I too am skeptical. Living green is about simplifying one’s demands of the world, and green consumerism is still consumerism. How do we get out of this box?

Thanks to everyone who submitted entries, and thanks for the work you all do to raise the profile of environmental issues. Enjoy this week’s Carnival. Next week’s host is the Organic Researcher.

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