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Green Transportation Depends on Reining in Space for Cars

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:45:00 +0000

by Angie Schmitt

One of the most gripping local transportation debates in the United States has been unfolding in Seattle, where the replacement of a highway along the waterfront known as the Alaskan Way Viaduct presents an opportunity to completely rethink a core piece of the city’s transportation system. So far, public officials have cast their lot with a plan to replace this elevated highway with an underground highway buried within a deep-bore tunnel.

Dan Bertolet at PubliCola argues that the tunnel plan is based on the erroneous assumption that maintaining car capacity transcends all other transportation objectives. Excess urban highway infrastructure, even if you deck it over with parks and public space, is antithetical to promoting more sustainable transportation, Bertolet writes:

A common argument made in support of a deep-bore tunnel to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way viaduct is that by putting all those cars underground, we’ll end up with a better pedestrian and cycling environment on the city’s downtown streets, the waterfront street in particular. That position may sound logical, but not unless you disregard several key realities of cars and cities.

First of all, focusing on how the tunnel would impact downtown streets ignores the impact it will have elsewhere. As I discussed in a previous post, car infrastructure inherently sabotages travel by walking, biking, and transit. The reinforcement of car dependence caused by the tunnel will dwarf any progress on alternative modes that might be made in isolated pockets of downtown Seattle.

Furthermore, there is a major flaw in the underlying premise that with a surface-only viaduct replacement scheme, utilizing the downtown street grid to make up for lost car capacity along the waterfront would force us to take space away from bikers and pedestrians. Because that premise only holds if you accept that car capacity is sacred.

New York City’s removal of car travel lanes along Broadway is an unqualified success story. They didn’t have anywhere else to put all those displaced cars, but that didn’t stop them from doing it anyway. And this rejection of the “car capacity is sacred” mindset is the path that Seattle policy makers will also have to get on if we ever hope to make a meaningful transition from our current state of unsustainable car-dependence…

Whatever configuration of street ends up getting built along the Seattle waterfront, it will eventually fill up with cars, even if we spend billions on a bypass tunnel.

In the case of the viaduct, to me that choice is a no-brainer: a low-speed, two-way, four lane boulevard along the waterfront. Yes, this will constrain car capacity. But here’s the reality: Reining in capacity is the only way we will ever make significant progress towards reducing driving, a goal that is not only aligned with basic principles of sustainable urbanism, but also happens to be an adopted goal of the State of Washington.

This post originally appeared on Streetsblog.
Photo: State and city officials have proposed converting Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct into a tunnel; via The Seattle Times

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Transportation at 3:45 PM)

Pakistan Flooding: Crowdsourcing Solutions

My Tam Nguyen — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:30:00 +0000

Rajan Pur, Punjab: An aerial view of flooded areas. | Photo by Mk Chaudhry/EPA (via The Guardian: Pakistan Floods: The Displaced and the Saved)

Triggered by monsoon rains in late July, Pakistan has been experiencing its worst flooding since 1929. Rivers burst their banks and entire communities have been destroyed. More than 20 million people have been affected by the floods, which is more than the number of people affected by the 2005 South Asia tsunami, the 2005 South Asia earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake combined. Pakistan's infrastructure is severely crippled, and millions of displaced people are at risk of falling ill from water borne disease, food shortages, and lack of access to clean water and medical care. The United Nations' Ban Ki-moon counts it as the worst natural disaster he's witnessed, and presses for increased international attention. Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, has even compared the challenges the country now faces to those during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent in which around half a million people were killed in mass violence. So how can we as a digitally connected global society lend a hand?

Crowdsourcing, using a group of amateurs or volunteers to solve a problem, has been repeatedly mentioned as a new tool to address development needs. It has been cited often in the news and blogs as capable of mobilizing the public for Pakistan's flood victims. It is accessible, and allows anyone with an internet connection or a cell phone to get connected and be of service through multiple channels. (We've covered crowdsourcing before on Worldchanging, see for example these post on: on deliberative and collaborative democracy, governance, and Jeff Howe, who coined the term.)

Organizations like Crisis Commons are mobilizing volunteers from the Silicon Valley to London for Pakistan, and are also providing additional crowdsourcing resources to facilitate volunteer participation.

Aid organizations are taking notice of the effectiveness of crowdsourcing, and both private and non-profit partnerships are taking hold: CrowdFlower, a for-profit company, generously donated their software to PakReport, which is primarily a map of real-time data collected from aid agencies, the media, and direct reports by email and text messaging. The map shows what resources are needed in flood affected regions and volunteers all over the world can process the requests:

For the time-intensive task of translating, categorizing, and geolocating these messages, volunteers from anywhere in the world can come online to help process each report simply by reading the message and filling out a form.
CrowdFlower's internal workings allow us to automatically cross-check this work among multiple volunteers so that the information is not susceptible to the potential errors of any one volunteer. This ensures data-quality for the aid agencies using the data and means that the volunteers can help without fear of accidently introducing bad information. (via)

If you'd like to volunteer with PakReport click here.

Screen shot from pakreport.org

Google is also getting on board with Pakistan reliefe with a crisis response page listing news sources, ways to give, and crowdsourcing links.

Crowdsourcing is a democratic philanthropy model for those of us who cannot afford the time and resources needed to fly to areas in need of volunteers. Additionally it expands options for participation beyond monetary donations (although that is also needed!). The digital public is being asked to actively participate, to give time, energy, and effort to truly make a difference, and crowdsourcing is the vehicle.

Editor's Note: Pakistan is still in need of millions of dollars in flood-aid (you can see how current pledges stack up country by country at The Guardian). Here are some additional links to organizations that are working in Pakistan and could use your help:

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - OCHA lists a number of ways to donate to UN response programs; only 64% of "The Pakistan Floods Emergency Response Plan" is currently funded, so they could really use more donations.
Canadian Red Cross - For those of you in Canada, the Canadian Government is matching ALL donations until Sunday.
American Red Cross - You can select the "Pakistan Relief and Development" program after clicking the red "Donate Now" button.
UNICEF - Donations help UNICEF provide clean water, immunizations and therapeutic food for displaced children and families.
AmeriCares - Donations help AmeriCares distribute medical aid.
CARE - Donations needed for health teams, mobile clinics and food distribution.
Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres - Donate to the "emergency fund" to help their efforts to distribute clean water, tents, and medical treatment.
OXFAM - Donations help them supply clean water and prevent the spread of waterborne disease. To support Oxfam's efforts in the U.S. click here; international donors can donate to OXFAM's UK emergency relief fund for Pakistan.
World Food Programme - Donations help to supply food to those affected by the floods.

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(Posted by My Tam Nguyen in Communications and Networking at 1:30 PM)

Echelon pitches smart grid apps platform

Martin LaMonica — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:51:42 +0000

Echelon introduces a network control device and software platform designed to collect data from smart meters and sensors and to automate jobs on local grid power distribution loops.

A Symbolic Solar Road Trip To Reignite a U.S. Climate Movement

Bill McKibben — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:45:00 +0000

An activist caravan to bring one of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels back to the White House symbolizes not only the time the U.S. has lost in developing new energy technologies – but also the urgent need for taking action on climate.

As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. It’s decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, we’re traveling backward—which in another sense is what I think we’re going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.

The bad news everyone knows. The strongest attempt ever to pass climate legislation through the U.S. Congress came up short earlier this summer. The inside-the-Beltway green groups took what seemed to be the route of least resistance: a very tame piece of climate legislation larded with special prizes for special interests. They worked it as hard as it could have been worked—and in the end it didn’t even come close. The fossil fuel industry and their allies in D.C. barely had to break a sweat shooting it down.

So—barring some unforeseen development—we’re not going to see significant action on the federal level about climate for at least the next two years.

And that means we’re far less likely to see significant international action on climate, since it’s hard for other governments to muster the political will to make tough choices when the U.S. is punting.

So what do we do with those two years? I think we use them to build a movement, which explains the solar panel we’re hauling south from Maine.

The story is painful even to consider. This panel went up on the White House roof in 1979, with then-president Jimmy Carter (in a wide tie, and with a bushy haircut) promising that it would still be there in the year 2000, producing hot water from the sun for whoever was then president. In fact, it didn’t make it through the next decade—it came down in the Reagan years, a symbol of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits and veer sharply down the path we’ve trod ever since.

Frugal folks at Unity College in Maine salvaged the panels, and put them up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. Meanwhile, around the world other nations took the technology and went to work. Germany and Japan took over the lead in photovoltaic panels, but solar thermal technology like this became the special province of the Chinese.

I sat not long ago with Huang Ming, China’s leading solar entrepreneur, in his space-age Sun Moon Mansion in Shandong Province looking over the stats: his HiMin Solar Energy Group has put up 60 million such systems across China—he estimated that when 250 million Chinese take a shower, the hot water is coming off their roofs. In a biting symbol of that passed torch, he keeps one of the Carter panels in his private museum.

There’s no question what we should have spent the last few decades doing. But there’s no point now in crying about why we didn’t: the only job is to try to get back in the game, to start catching up.

Some of that means spending the money so that we can make the next technological discoveries. Many, including the Breakthrough Institute and Bill Gates, are calling for big increases in R and D funding, which might help us somehow claw our way back toward the front of the parade.

But catching up also means making use of the technology we already have, in ways both practical and symbolic. We’re headed for the White House with this old panel, and with a promise from the U.S. company Sungevity that it will supply all the brand-new panels the president could ever want—as long as he puts them up on his roof where everyone can see them. George W. Bush, amazingly enough, actually put some solar back in the White House grounds—on the roof of a maintenance shed, and on, who knew, the Presidential Spa and Cabana. But since he didn’t tell anyone, they didn’t do much good. We want them up there on the roof, as visible as the White House garden, which helped boost seed sales 30 percent across the nation the year Michelle planted it.

So far, we haven’t heard a word from the White House about whether they’ll accept the gift and make the promise or not—which, frankly, surprises me. I can’t think of a clearer win for the president, a better reminder to the legions of young people who worked on his campaign that he is still focused on the future. He owes environmentalists more than he’s given them—by all accounts he decided not to push for the Senate legislation. He’s up against tough odds in Congress, of course, given the obstructionist GOP. But they can’t filibuster his roof.

What’s especially poignant is that we have gotten promises from other, much less likely, world leaders—Mohammed Nasheed, for instance, president of the entirely Muslim and quite poor Maldive Islands, the low-lying Indian Ocean nation that faces inundation from rising seas. He took the Sungevity offer, and he’ll be putting solar panels on his roof on October 10 (10-10-10), the same day that thousands of groups around the world will be participating in a massive Global Work Party, putting up wind turbines and laying out bike paths. The same day we want Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, out on his roof with a wrench.

The point of all these panels, of course, is not that we’re going to solve climate change one roof at a time. (Obama is doing lots of good practical things already—his “greening the government” effort is retrofitting federal buildings across the country with insulation, for instance). The point is that they help build the movement that we allowed to wither away.

Environmentalists lost sight of just how big a movement that would need to be. Too many groups convinced themselves that they could slide some legislation through Congress, make deals with industry, get things going without a fight. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work—the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise known to man, beat us. And they will beat us again and again until there’s a real, broad-based, popular, noisy movement underway in this country, a movement that can provide a currency (bodies, passion) equal to the currency the billionaire Koch Brothers can pony up to defeat climate legislation.

Some of that movement will go on at the local level, as we transform cities and towns and show what can be done. Some will be done on college campuses like Unity College, or Middlebury where I teach, which are showing the way forward. Some of it will be done in jails—I’d be very surprised if civil disobedience doesn’t become a bigger part of this battle in the years ahead, if only because it’s the tool we use to show our society how urgent, morally and practically, this crisis really is.

But some of it must be done symbolically. And there’s no more symbolic piece of real estate on this continent than the White House. Let’s hope that on the 10th of October it, at least, is transformed. It’s been a long, hot summer, in the capitol as in much of the northern hemisphere. Let’s make sure that next year that heat is put to some purpose—heating the Obamas’ bathtub, and helping power up a movement.

This post originally appeared on Yale Environment 360.

Photo of the Carter-era solar panel in Maine, being readied for the trip back to the White House, by Mark Tardif; via Yale Environment 360.

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(Posted by Bill McKibben in Movement Building and Activism at 11:45 AM)

DOE gives $8.5 million to grid infrastructure projects

Candace Lombardi — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:41:43 +0000

Infrastructure aid to Florida, Oregon, and New Jersey will enable states to make electric grids compatible with solar energy.

Land Art Generator Initiative and the Weather Field Project

Alison Killing — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 19:00:00 +0000

The results of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) have just begun to be made public. The LAGI is an open design competition for a land art intervention that can double as a renewable energy power plant, in the United Arab Emirates. From the initial postings of select entries on the competition's blog it would appear that many of the entrants have met the organizers' ambition of showing how large scale power generation could be done in a way that is both sympathetic to the surrounding environment and beautiful. The competition's brief stressed that the winner would not be the entrant with the scheme that generated power with the greatest efficiency, although this, together with feasibility, would remain an important consideration. Instead, the winning design should be land art first and a power plant second. Additionally, the best design should attract visiting tourists and raise awareness of issues around power generation, and also provide acceptable and even appealing power stations for the communities who live near them.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this competition is in creating the space for re-imagining power plants and extending understanding of the different forms that they might take. Two existing desert projects prove the viability of renewable power generation in the area: The Desertec Project has made the case for the potential of large scale solar power in this part of the world; and the Masdar City development, adjacent to one of the sites for this competition, successfully applies regionally-suitable renewable technologies for producing fresh water and generating electricity at a large scale. The LAGI competition has opened up an opportunity to move beyond the strict pragmatism of a pure focus on efficient power generation of projects like Desertec and Masdar City, and allowed equal consideration to be given to other aspects, such as form and beauty. However, it is the competition organizers' intention to build the winning entries, so teams have to demonstrate the viability of their concepts, in addition to producing visually compelling sculptures.

Several proposals tackle the immediately apparent opportunities and constraints of the desert, those of ample sunlight and scarce fresh water, while others look further afield. One of the most striking entries to appear on the competition blog so far is the Weather Field, by Lateral Office and Paisajes Emergentes. The design draws on the wind power available in the Gulf and imagines a field of para-kites – a cross between a parachute, kite and glider – spread across the desert, each one able to generate enough electricity for three energy efficient homes. The park would be publicly accessible and would attempt to engage with visitors in a variety of ways: the kites themselves would provide a dynamic aerial display; periscopes attached to the kites' tethering system would enable views over the Arabian Gulf; and, adventurous visitors could be harnessed to a para-kite. The power of the concept was extended when these parks were imagined as part of a larger strategy for the Gulf, with energy parks full of kites gradually taking the place of the infrastructure necessary for oil extraction and refinement. Although not the most easily realizable proposal, it certainly succeeds in challenging the idea of what a power plant is.

Other entries will appear on the competition blog at the rate of a few a week throughout the autumn, with the winner to be announced in January 2011.

Alison Killing is an architect and urbanist based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

All images of the Weather Field project via Land Art Generator Initiative.

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(Posted by Alison Killing in Energy at 11:00 AM)

Frito-Lay snacks on electric delivery trucks

Candace Lombardi — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:27:52 +0000

Its Smith Electric trucks will first be used in New York, with other regions to follow, as the snack food giant and PepsiCo subsidiary adds 176 EVs to its fleet.

Thrivability, Food Forests, and Recycling the City

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:

2009
Worldchanging Interview: Jean Russell on Thrivability
Jon Lebkowsky interviews Jean Russell about her idea for replacing "sustainability" with "thrivability"...

2009
Food From Forests
David Foley writes about Food Forests, which he argues are one important way of winning the great wager through learning to tend the Earth like a garden now...

2005
Recycling the City
Jamais Cascio explores what to do with city waste, particularly in post-disaster zones like New Orleans, and notes that the underlying issue is to figure out how we can make our waste material less potentially hazardous and easy to disassemble and reuse to begin with...

Other recent "look backs":
September 3
September 6
September 7

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Development at 10:00 AM)

Thrivability, Food Forests, and Recycling the City

WorldChanging Team — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:

2009
Worldchanging Interview: Jean Russell on Thrivability
Jon Lebkowsky interviews Jean Russell about her idea for replacing "sustainability" with "thrivability"...

2009
Food From Forests
David Foley writes about Food Forests, which he argues are one important way of winning the great wager through learning to tend the Earth like a garden now...

Other recent "look backs":
September 3
September 6
September 7

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Sustainable Development at 10:00 AM)

Peugeot, Mercedes diesel hybrids en route for 2011

Candace Lombardi — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 17:45:33 +0000

The Peugeot 3008 Hybrid4 and the Mercedes-Benz E300 BlueTec both promise over 60 miles per gallon, and it looks like the French automaker will be the first to market.

Charging stations to line ‘EV freeway’ in Tennessee

Martin LaMonica — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:48:40 +0000

The Tennessee Valley Authority and Ecotality to unveil blueprint to connect three cities in Tennessee covering about 425 miles of road with public and home charging stations.

Dr Farooq Abdullah in the opening ceremony of CSP TODAY INDIA