May 10
On May 4, 2007 EMBARQ’s Director of Research, Lee Schipper, gave a presentation at the 17th Annual Regional Planning Assembly held in New York City. This year’s conference, held at the swanky Waldorf Astoria hotel, was entitled, “A Bright + Green Future” and touched on the myriad issues surrounding climate change, energy, and growth in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut tri-state region.
(see complete coverage of Schipper’s talk on the EMBARQ website, including a podcast recorded at the event and slides from his presentation)
The event drew a lot of attention because of the recent announcement (to both fanfare and controversy) of Mayor Bloomberg’s “PlaNYC” proposal. Today, Streetsblog.org had a nice post on some of the conference’s workshops, including a number of quotes from Schipper about the siren song of biofuels and the promise of congestion pricing.
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May 08
Bicycles have been around for well over 100 years (see a brief history here), but the push to make bikes a viable alternative to automobiles seems to be truly hitting the mainstream. This weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) contains a prominently displayed article entitled “Building a better bike lane: Can the U.S. catch up to European cities?” (subscription required).
As a standard-bearer for free-market principles and conservative politics, the WSJ is seldom associated with alternative transportation issues.
But it seems that even financial executive-types are beginning to recognize the environmental, public health, and traffic benefits of replacing cars with bicycles for short trips and daily commutes. In fact, the article practically gushes over the good life enjoyed by bike-riding Europeans in cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen - where more than a third of commuters use pedal power to get to work. Read the rest of this entry »
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Apr 20
New York City’s contentious new proposal on congestion pricing has fomented a lot of passionate debate in the last few days.
Below are links to several transport experts’ analysis of congestion pricing in other cities:
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Apr 05
On March 30, Monica Bansal, a graduate student at Colombia University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation visited EMBARQ’s offices and presented her research on Delhi’s auto-rickshaws. These three-wheeled vehicles carry thousands of city residents each day, providing an alternative to private car trips and an important source of jobs in the region.
Unfortunately, auto-rickshaws are also major polluters. In Kolkata, for example, auto-rickshaws comprise 5% of the fleet, but an estimated 35% percent of vehicle-related pollution.
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Apr 03
On March 26, Lee Schipper, Director of Research at EMBARQ, waded into the cacophonous debate over biofuels during a presentation at the World Bank.
Biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel are often touted as a panacea for a host of environmental and energy-related problems. This hot topic has even become a centerpiece of high level geopolitics, as evidenced by President Bush’s recent trip to Brazil, where ethanol was a principle area of discussion. Brazil is currently one of the world’s leading ethanol producers, and during Bush’s visit the two countries agreed to collaborate on improving the technologies and markets for this alternative fuel. Read the rest of this entry »
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Mar 12
The buzz surrounding biofuels grew even louder this week during President Bush’s high profile visit to Brazil. Bush met with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Sao Paolo, where the two leaders signed a new green fuels agreement designed to increase the viability of biofuels as an alternative to oil.
Complete coverage of the event was carried in many publications, including an article in the Los Angeles Times.
The US-Brazil agreement contains three main areas of collaboration between the world’s two largest ethanol producers: developing new and better biofuels technologies; fostering ethanol production in smaller oil-dependent countries in the Western hemisphere; and establishing standards that promote an international market for biofuels.
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Jan 26
In a talk that appealed to computer geeks, policy wonks and transport engineers alike, Prof. Toni Lindau, EMBARQ’s CTS-Brasil Director, discussed his new “Microscopic Bus Rapid Transit Simulator.”
Prof. Lindau presented his innovative software tool at EMBARQ’s “Transforming Transportation” event, held as part of the TRB’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. Lindau described how the Windows-based program allows transportation planners to simulate various Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) alternatives within Latin American cities. Specifically, the software helps evaluate BRT routes and traffic flows, detect and correct potential problems, and train system designers, managers, and operators. Because the software simulates conditions before any actual construction has begun, it saves valuable time and money at each point along a project timeline.
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Jan 23
During EMBARQ’s Sunday session at the Transportation Review Board’s annual meeting I noticed that one of the day’s ongoing discussion topics dealt with the relationship between transportation policy and class politics. Transportation policy affects all citizens, but it does not always do so uniformly. The commonly held view (as Måns Lönnroth succinctly put it at the event) is that “buses are for poor people; cars are for the middle class.” This supposed truth often drives political decision-making, and can impede sustainable transportation solutions. Understanding the unequal benefits and burdens created by a particular transportation initiative is thus a critical concern. As a number of observers noted on Sunday, political-economic issues are so important that project success often relies more on gaining the support of the middle class than on engineering.
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