In this great ad from MTV a donkey named Lolo takes the bus. The caption says “If Lolo can save the planet, why can’t you? Leave the car and take public transit. Let’s stop global warming.”
The car industry’s total annual advertising expenditures for the US alone were $16.3 billion in 2006 according to media research firm TNS Media Intelligence. In the face of this barrage of automobile advertising, it’s nice to see some time, money, and creativity invested in well done TV spots promoting public transportation. I’d love to see more of this. If anybody has any more examples of this kind of messaging please post them here or send them to me at rthom[at]wri[dot]org.
Way to go MTV! Check out the campaign at mtvswitch.org.
Every year in January, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Transportation Research Board holds it’s annual meeting. Over the years, this meeting has become one of the largest transportation conferences in the world, drawing over 10,000 transportation professionals and enthusiasts to Washington, DC for the week long event.
EMBARQ, the WRI Center for Sustainable Transport will be heavily involved in this year’s event, hosting a session on Sunday and hosting its own Transforming Transportation event together with the World Bank. Because there are hundreds of panels, presentations, committee meetings, and poster sessions it’s easy to get overwhelmed. To make it easy, TheCityFix.com has put together a list of the top events to check out while at this years TRB annual meeting:
Robin Chase, founder and former CEO of Zipcar, joins TheCityFix.com as a regular contributor. Robin will be cross posting select items from her personal blog, Network Musings, where she’s been writing on the world of sustainable transportation.
Robin Chase is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. GoLoco helps people quickly arrange to share car trips of all lengths between trusted friends, neighbors, and colleagues, and handles online payments from passengers to drivers for their share of the trip costs. GoLoco’s innovative combination of social networks and online payment systems recasts how we think about car travel, making it a time for socializing and with a new emphasis on trip efficiency, in order to reduce per passenger costs.
Robin is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world. Zipcar’s use of the Internet and wireless technology enables rental cars to emulate personal cars. Zipcar’s disruptive technology gives its members on-demand access to cars by-the-hour, revolutionizing people’s relationship to their cars and improving the quality of urban life for all. Read the rest of this entry »
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is a cost-effective rapid transit solution that acts like an above ground subway but with extra long articulated “accordion” buses instead of rail cars and physically separated lanes so that the buses don’t have to compete with traffic. Passengers pay at the station before they get on and the buses come frequently, just like in a subway.
Electronic ticketing system in a Mexico City BRT station
But unlike a subway, BRT is typically 1/10th of the cost, so cities can do much more with the money they have available and ideally make a bigger impact on congestion and pollution while managing the forces of motorization and urbanization. Take a look at some videos on BRT here and here.
Photo of Brooklyn-Queens Expressway by See-ming Lee on flickr.
Author Will Self walks. He walks where people are not meant to walk. He walks out of airports into cities and from cities into airports. He has walked from the middle of London to Heathrow, from LAX to Watts, from O’Hare into downtown Chicago. In a humorous piece by radio show Studio 360, Will Self walks a particularly unwalkable piece of terrain, from La Guardia into Manhattan. In the process he climbs fences, walks through cemeteries and somehow must deal with the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (a project of Robert Moses, New York City’s “Master Builder”).
In his new book, “Psychogeography”, Self explores how geographical environments shape our psyche. He believes that modern transportation such as highways and airplanes disorients and distances us from the world around us but that walking has the ability to reconnect us to the spaces we inhabit.
“I’m interested in orientation. I’ve been traveling around the States on author tours for 15 tours now. A lot of these North American cities I’ve been in and out of numerous times, but I never knew where I was. That’s an abuse of me and an abuse of the city, to reduce it to an assemblage of cab rides, bookstores, encounters with journalists, barrooms, and then back to the airport. These walks allowed me to reclaim these cities.”
In an urban world dominated by cars and freeways, walking around cities “is a form of dissent,” Self tells us, it’s “an insurgency against the contemporary world.”
WalkIt.com is a new website out of the United Kingdom that wants “to get people walking more”. In step with the likes of Google Transit and Walkscore, WalkIt.com provides a free, easy to use web service that maps the easiest way to walk from point A to point B in the cities of London, Edinburgh, and Birmingham. You just provide your starting location, your final destination and any in-between stops, and the website plots the best route to follow while letting you know the distance, the time it will take, the calories you will burn and the CO2 that you will save by walking instead of driving, taking a cab, or taking a bus. Read the rest of this entry »
The City Fix would like to welcome it’s newest blogger, Wei-Shiuen Ng. Wei-Shiuen is currently an Environmental Research Associate at the Tellus Institute in Boston, where she provides research and analytical support for Sustainable Communities and Corporate Redesign initiatives. Prior to joining Tellus, Wei-Shiuen was a Research Associate at EMBARQ, the World Resources Institute (WRI) Center for Sustainable Transport in Washington D.C., where she has gained experience in transport demand and energy consumption modeling, sustainable transport policy analysis, as well as urban transport project management in Asia. Her research areas were focused on the environmental and social consequences of motorization and mitigation measures, in addition to the development of transport emissions measurement tools.
An urbanite, who has lived in different cities across Asia, Europe and North America, Wei-Shiuen is interested in solving urban environmental problems, especially through the application of fiscal policies on transport demand management and innovative vehicle technology. In her spare time, she enjoys taking advanced vehicles for high speed test drives. Wei-Shiuen holds a Masters in Environmental Science from the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, where she concentrated on energy and climate change economics and policy, and studied the economic impact of sea level rise. She received her Bachelor of Science in Environmental Economics and Environmental Management from the University of York in the United Kingdom in 2001.
This weekend EMBARQ participated in the 5th Annual AltWheels Festival , which is the largest alternative transportation and energy festival on the east coast of the U.S.
Held on Boston’s City Hall Plaza, this year’s AltWheels was a flurry of activity featuring everything from homemade biodiesel cooperatives to web 2.0 ridesharing company GoLoco to plug-in hybrid manufactures to Moonbeam, a contender for the Automotive X-Prize.
One highlight was an appearance by the Mayor of Boston, Tom Menino, who announced a new diesel retrofit grant program for Boston, promised to plant over 100,000 trees in Boston over the next 12 years, and to make Boston the most bike friendly city in the country.
In an Earth Day special, MTV’s Pimp My Ride will feature the greening of a ‘65 Chevy Impala. During this very special episode of Pimp My Ride the crew will be replacing the original engine of the Impala with a 800 horsepower diesel engine that will run on biodiesel. While this should be entertaining, chances are it won’t touch EMBARQ’s Mexico City Diesel Retrofit videoRead the rest of this entry »
Lee Schipper at TRB. Photo by Ethan Arpi.
Photo of Brooklyn-Queens Expressway by 
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