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Summitgoers push for sustainable cities
Philip S. Wenz, San Francisco Chronicle
s there life after cars? Could your house be transformed into a unit in a mixed-use, multifamily building with a vegetable garden on the roof? Would you drink "toilet to tap" water - purified, recycled sewage - or would you rather die of thirst?

These questions and many others like them were asked - and at least partially answered - by an eclectic group of avant-garde designers, builders, planners, organizers, artists and mayors (including Gavin Newsom) from around the world. They gathered at the Ecocity World Summit conference in San Francisco last month to share their ideas and experiences in an effort to create sustainable cities - and there was a palpable sense of urgency in their voices as they spoke of climate change, water and food shortages, soil depletion, deforestation and poverty.

They had come from every continent not just to identify pressing problems but also to discuss solutions. And they tied the problems and solutions to the form and function of humanity's largest and most resource-intensive creations: cities.

As the conference's principal organizer, Richard Register, director of the Oakland nonprofit Ecocity Builders, put it in his opening message, "Now we are nearing a threshold. Will we cross into a whole other realm, a whole other way of building (cities) - for people instead of for the requirements of machines (cars)? ... Are we going to redesign and start shaping cities on the human measure and for ecological health, before relatively inexpensive energy goes away forever?"

His last remark referred to "peak oil," shorthand for an abrupt decline in petroleum availability and a topic well understood and widely discussed by the conferees.
(10 May 2008)

Gas Prices Send Surge of Riders to Mass Transit
Clifford Krauss, New York Times
With the price of gas approaching $4 a gallon, more commuters are abandoning their cars and taking the train or bus instead.

Mass transit systems around the country are seeing standing-room-only crowds on bus lines where seats were once easy to come by. Parking lots at many bus and light rail stations are suddenly overflowing, with commuters in some towns risking a ticket or tow by parking on nearby grassy areas and in vacant lots.

“In almost every transit system I talk to, we’re seeing very high rates of growth the last few months,” said William W. Millar, president of the American Public Transportation Association.

“It’s very clear that a significant portion of the increase in transit use is directly caused by people who are looking for alternatives to paying $3.50 a gallon for gas.”

Some cities with long-established public transit systems, like New York and Boston, have seen increases in ridership of 5 percent or more so far this year. But the biggest surges - of 10 to 15 percent or more over last year - are occurring in many metropolitan areas in the South and West where the driving culture is strongest and bus and rail lines are more limited.
(10 May 2008)

Rising fuel prices are a driving force for change - away from autos
Alana Semuels, Los Angeles Times
Some L.A. residents are relying more on bicycles, trains, buses, scooters and carpooling - or just walking.
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When food and gasoline prices started climbing, Thomas Franklin started putting one foot in front of the other and -- the horror -- often walked where he needed to go.

"My friends ask me what's wrong with me," said the 29-year-old talent agency scout, who recently sold his Ford Escape and bought a Vespa scooter. Franklin relies on the scooter, public transit and his own two feet to get around town and estimates that he is saving about $70 a week by not driving to work in Los Angeles from his home in Van Nuys.

Franklin isn't typical. Cars are too ingrained in daily routines, and alternatives too scarce and scattered, for most people to give up driving. Only 7% of people in Los Angeles took public transportation to work in 2006, the last year for which figures are available, while 2.8% walked, 1.4% took a cab or motorcycled and 0.6% bicycled, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

But people are cutting back in a million little ways, and even in the Los Angeles area they're cutting back on driving. Interest in cycling is growing, gasoline consumption is down and bus and light-rail ridership is up.
(9 May 2008)

Planes fly more, emit less greenhouse gas
Thomas Frank, USA TODAY
The U.S. aviation industry has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 13% since 2000, even as the amount of flying has reached record levels, government data show.

The decline was among the steepest of any sector measured by the Environmental Protection Agency and came as total U.S. emissions of gases that warm the Earth remained level between 2000 and 2006. Greenhouse gases from cars and trucks rose 6% in that period, according to an EPA report issued in April.

Aviation has faced pressure to improve efficiency as fuel prices began soaring in 2003. More recently, elected officials and environmentalists have called for stricter controls on aircraft emissions, particularly carbon dioxide, the most prominent greenhouse gas.
(9 May 2008)
Note that a story from May 6 reported: Airline emissions 'far higher than previous estimates' (UK Independent). Is the US air industry that much more efficient than the world industry? -BA

UPDATE (May 12) Contributor John Gear writes:
I strongly suspect that "amount of flying" is being used for "number of tickets" which ain't the same thing as number of flights -- in other words, the airlines are slightly less horrible today in that they are not flying with 50-70% occupancy any more, which they used to do in the days of cheap fuel. Now most flights are jammed tight, as they should be. Next we need to prohibit flights between cities less than 500 miles apart.