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.

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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A new Brookings report points to policies in Germany that encourage compact, mixed-use development, suitable for walking or cycling, like this space in Freiburg. Photo by redskunk.

The Brookings Institution just released a new research report comparing sustainability in Germany and the United States: “Making Transportation Sustainable: Insights from Germany.” 

From Brookings:

This report examines the key differences and determinants of travel behavior in Germany and the United States. Americans travel by car twice as much per year as Germans and use transit only a sixth as much. Differences in car reliance between the United States and Germany are not solely due to income or residential density. Germans in the highest income quartile make a lower share of their trips by car than Americans in the lowest income quartile. And Germans living in low density areas travel by car about as much as Americans living at population densities five times higher.

The result is a transportation system in the United States that is less sustainable than in Germany.
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The traffic on the streets of Pune is busy with rickshaws, bicycles, buses and pedestrians. Photo by wili_hybrid.

In India, 105,725 people were killed and 452,922 people were injured in road traffic crashes in 2006, and the fatalities can be expected to grow to 260,000 in 2030, unless new policies are implemented, according to a study by Mohan, Tsimhoni, Sivak and Flannigan on road safety in India. The report, “Road Safety in India: Challenges and Opportunities,” was recently released (January 2009) by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute.
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Facing south from the Park Hyatt’s 65th floor China Bar in Beijing. Photo by James Fallows.

James Fallows of the Atlantic recently blogged about “today’s enormous, expanding Chinese cities,” comparing the more intimate architecture of Shanghai to the sprawling concrete slabs in Beijing.

“This is not a ‘which do you like better?’ discussion,” he emphasizes.

Rather the question is why the look and feel of Beijing seem so clearly to represent the direction Chinese cities are heading. To oversimplify what this means: although Shanghai probably contains more people than Beijing, it feels smaller. The roads are narrower, they’re more likely to bend or twist, the city unfolds on a smaller scale of neighborhoods and courtyards and little houses. Beijing is bigger and squarer and broader and more grandly imposing.

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SeeClickFix, founded in New Haven, Conn., allows users to report issues about problems in their community.

Giant potholes on your route to work? Obstructed views of oncoming traffic? Broken sewer grate?

Report these and other non-emergency issues to SeeClickFix.com, a free social networking and online mapping tool (powered by Google Maps) that “provides technology to empower citizens, organizations and governments to improve their communities.” (See the FAQ section for more info.)

“Community empowerment” on SeeClickFix comes in three easy steps, as the name implies:

See - see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
Click - open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
Fix - publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution

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A pedestrian street in Oaxaca. Photo by EReker.

The Center for Sustainable Transport Mexico, a member of the EMBARQ network, needs your help.

By voting for its proposal to launch a sustainable transport and urban planning network throughout Mexico, you can help us make Mexican cities better places for pedestrians, cyclists, and mass transit riders.

To vote, all you need to do is click this link, choose “Support It!” in the upper right hand corner, and fill in the left side of the pop-up box with your name, email and a password.

It’s quick, easy, and simple.

To learn more about the project, click here.

To learn more about the Center for Sustainable Transport Mexico, click here.

Source: “A Clean Break”, Foreign Policy magazine

“Most global cities aren’t the dirtiest cities,” according to Foreign Policy magazine. “In fact, some of the biggest, most integrated cities are some of the cleanest urban areas on the planet.”

The conclusions are part of the publication’s Global Cities Index, which ranks 60 cities depending on how “integrated” they are with the rest of the world. The index, published by Foreign Policy in partnership A.T. Kearney and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, gives each city a “globalization score” according to 24 metrics across five different dimensions: business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience and political engagement.
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