American streetcar manufacturer Oregon Iron Works turned to European company Skoda to get ideas for its new 10 T3 Streetcar Prototype, which will be open to the public this summer. Photo by United Streetcar.

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood made his appearance at the formal unveiling of an American-made streetcar — the first to be manufactured in the United States in nearly 60 years.

United Streetcar, a subsidiary of Oregon Iron Works, developed the light rail vehicle at a local factory in compliance with the Federal Transit Administration’s “Buy America” requirement that any vehicle purchased with federal funds has at least a 60 percent domestic content and undergoes final assembly in the United States. According to Rail magazine, United Streetcar’s vehicle contains 70 percent domestic content. (Read more about the history of modern streetcars in America here.)

United Streetcar President Chandra Brown said, “We see a market for this modern streetcar, as more and more cities look to fight congestion and have rail play a role in local economic development.”
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Open source technology: Software companies do it. Why not carmakers? Photo via Riversimple.

What if you could revolutionize the way cars are designed and built by opening the process up to input from the entire community?

That’s exactly what Riversimple is trying to do. The UK-based car company will license its energy-efficient automobile designs (available under Creative Commons non-commercial license) to the 40 Fires Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that will invite engineers, designers, lawyers and other car business experts to comment on high-level design matters, for example, the use of hub motors.

On its wiki, where most of the discussion will happen, 40 Fires writes, “all we really care about is that the license works to ensure that the cars can be built in hundreds of different variations around the world, by local companies and entrepreneurs as well as big multinationals if they like, and that no one company (whether Ford or Riversimple) can dominate the market and keep the ideas to itself.”
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A woman rides her electric bike without a helmet in Beijing. Photo by Ethnocentrics.

From TIME.com:

On the Streets of China, Electric Bikes Are Swarming
June 14, 2009
By Austin Ramzy

In China, electric bicycles are leaving cars in the dust. Last year, Chinese bought 21 million e-bikes, compared with 9.4 million autos. While China now has about 25 million cars on the road, it has four times as many e-bikes. [Compare these staggering figures to more modest numbers from the United States, where more bicycles (2.6 million) were sold than cars and trucks (2.5 million) during the first quarter of 2009.] Thanks to government encouragement and a population well versed in riding two wheels to work, the country has become the world’s leading market for the cheap, green vehicles, helping to offset some of the harmful effects of the country’s automobile boom. Indeed, as engineers around the world scramble to create eco-friendly, plug-in electric cars, China is already ahead of the game.

But is the popularity of the e-bike in the world’s most populous country necessarily a good thing?
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Sarah Kuck from WorldChanging interviews EMBARQ Director Nancy Kete for a feature story about the future of American transportation systems:

• What does transportation look like now in most U.S. cities? And where can we go from here?
• What do you think the future of high-speed rail should look like in the United States?
• What advice would you give the Obama administration?
• What do people commonly misunderstand about how transportation works in the United States?
• Would that knowledge of the real costs of driving make people more willing to support public transportation measures?
• Do you have a vision for what intermodal transportation will look like in the future?

To read the full interview, click here.

Steve Price won the Livable Streets Contest for his vision of a “complete street” in Portsmouth, Virginia.

Last week, GOOD announced the winners of its Livable Streets Contest.

It was a simple assignment: “Take a photo of a street or intersection you know and hate, and then use Photoshop or any other image editing techniques at your disposal to make the changes you’d like to see implemented.”

The winning submission was from Steve Price of Portsmouth, Virginia.

Contest judges Aaron Naparstek from Streetsblog and designer Carly Clark said Price’s “holistic approach is just what what’s needed in a barren urban environment like this. He’s thinking about new infill development, light rail, bike lanes, and outdoor space for pedestrians and putting it all together to create an entirely new neighborhood. Portsmouth should go and make this happen right now!”

Click here to learn more about the contest and see the other winning entries.

EMBARQ presents a slideshow about the concept of “Mobility Management (MM)” in San Sebastian, Spain.

View the entire slideshow here.

Mobility Management

At the core of Mobility Management are “soft” measures like information and communication, organising services and coordinating activities of different partners. “Soft” measures most often enhance the effectiveness of “hard” measures within urban transport (e.g., new tram lines, new roads and new bike lanes). Mobility Management measures (in comparison to “hard” measures) do not necessarily require large financial investments and may have a high benefit-cost ratio.

-From the European Platform on Mobility Management

Students from Appalachian State University figured out how to make working bicycles out of recycled plastic bottles. Image from 2one2Design.com.

A friend of mine from high school was part of the winning team that took home the grand prize for the first annual Juicy Ideas Competition, sponsored by Google, for his and his teammates’ innovative and environmentally responsible bicycle design.

Squeezing Ideas out of a Throw-Away Item
Google Student Blog
March 2, 2009

How would you define innovation? Environmentalism? Or entrepreneurship? The Juicy Ideas Competition asked college students to demonstrate all three. Attracting nearly 900 college students from roughly 30 schools, The Juicy Ideas Competition asked students to create an innovative product out of a “throw-away” item. They were then asked to post a video that illustrated these three factors and post it to YouTube.

Videos poured in from all over the country - we saw everything from blankets made out of plastic bags to coffee tables made out of Gatorade bottles. But none of the ideas stood out as much as the four students from Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Spencer Price, Ryan Klinger, Andrew Drake, and Justin Henry created a working bicycle out of used water bottles to win the Juicy Ideas grand prize trip to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View.

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Bicycling is not just for born-to-be-bad renegades. Photo by laureskew.

Kyle Boelte published an article in The Christian Science Monitor entitled “The Soul (and Sense) of Biking to Work.” While he makes both a wonderful, practical, and emotional appeal to would-be commuter bikers - which I am all for - he discusses biking as if it were a renegade counter-culture. This is, I understand, the case for some bikers, who like the feeling of defying cars, which Boelte calls “metal beasts of burden.”

But there are also those who like to feel the satisfaction of altruism in the form of burning leg muscles rather than fossil fuels. And there are those scrimpers and savers who have joyously come out of the closet now that championing thrift has become cooler. There are also those who are learning - or have been forced to learn - to find ways to cut $$$ corners. These too have opted for the bike in some cases. (As for me, I cut back on the Starbucks lattes and take the metro to work more often.)

Nevertheless, the joy and economic appeal that Boelte extols in his ode to renegade biking will be short-lived if we don’t make more permanent changes. Most people are not renegades for long, although they might play with fire from time-to-time just to test the water. And what goes down must go up: the economic recession won’t last forever.
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Illustration by via GOOD Magazine.

GOOD magazine published its jam-packed, 112-page “Transportation Issue,” devoted to a “drastic rethinking of how we move around, how we design our cities, and how we power our vehicles.”

The articles cover a lot of ground, discussing the problems and solutions of congestion pricing; comparing choices that will make commuting to work more convenient (a dilemma that’s referred to as the “last-mile problem”); and also, reviewing a range of transport projects, like bus rapid transit in Bogota, carpooling in San Francisco, and bicycle rental in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Seattle’s streetcar, a.k.a. the South Lake Union Trolley (affectionately abbreviated as S.L.U.T.), not only moves people but also moves ideas. Photo by WintrHawk.

Fast Company named Seattle the “City of the Year” in its annual “Fast City” issue, which handpicks cities around the world that exhibit “smarts, foresight, social consciousness [and] creative ferment.”

San Francisco was chosen for its innovative public-private partnership that gives citizens access to bank accounts and financial education. Taipei was noted for its “zero land fill, total recycling” by 2010 plan. And New York got praise for its high-tech counterterrorism efforts.

But we at The City Fix were drawn to some other initiatives — greener, smarter, “faster” ideas about sustainable transportation and urban planning. We read the whole issue — so you don’t have to — and here are some highlights:
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