Posts tagged with 'car culture'
What Do Cheap Cars Mean for India's Cities?
What Do Cheap Cars Mean for India's Cities?
An Indian street scene. Photo by Satbir from Flickr. Last week the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune ran a story on the new Tata Car priced at $2,500 coming out in India in 2008. Some time ago ...
The Hidden Costs of Personal Mobility
The Hidden Costs of Personal Mobility
A biker struck by a car in Beijing. Courtesy of pmorgan of Flickr. It’s helpful to think about traffic safety with the following thought experiment: What would happen in a democratic forum, if the world’s population, represented by elected officials, ...
What's Worse: Production or Use?
What's Worse: Production or Use?
Photo by Stephane Foulon. From Road and Track. This week’s addition of BusinessWeek includes an article about Gordon Murray, a celebrated race car designer, who is switching gear and working to create “a compact, fuel-efficient urban vehicle for the masses,” ...
How to Debunk the Junk
How to Debunk the Junk
Bigger isn’t always better. Photo by powebooktrance. Recently CNW Marketing Research, an Oregon-based automotive research group, published a paper making the audacious claim that the Hummer is actually more energy efficient than the Prius. The study later showed up in ...
More Highways, Less Traffic?
More Highways, Less Traffic?
Photo by Justin Ulmer. Published in JPG Magazine. Is building roads good for the environment? The European Road Federation seems to think so, arguing in a recent paper that, “More investment in road infrastructure is needed to remove bottlenecks, avoid ...
A Project in Social Forecasting
A Project in Social Forecasting
From the BBC: “How will climate change have affected the world by 2050?” Listen to Lee Schipper, EMBARQ‘s Director of Research, as he explains how urbanization, climate change, and transportation will combine to effect the world’s cities. Note: This file ...
New Yorker Embraces Congestion Pricing
New Yorker Embraces Congestion Pricing
Bloomtown: The Mayor plans to boost spending on public transport. (Photo: Frank Franklin II/AP) This week’s Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker features an opinion in support of congestion pricing for lower Manhattan. Written by climate journalist ...
Ford Creates New Post - Vice President for Sustainability
Ford Creates New Post – Vice President for Sustainability
Are Times Changing in Detroit? On Monday, The New York Times reported that Ford Motor’s chief executive acknowledged the link between greenhouse gases and global warming and vowed to respond to the threat of a heating planet by creating a ...
Cheap Cars, More Traffic
Cheap Cars, More Traffic
Residents in Taiwan snarled in traffic. The latest edition of Business Week includes an article about car companies using ultra-efficient business models to produce super cheap cars that are affordable to the masses in the developing world. Lead by Tata ...
Do Commuters Have Souls?
Do Commuters Have Souls?
This week’s edition of the New Yorker includes a splendid piece on The Soul of the Commuter. Why, the article asks, do American’s subject themselves to painstakingly long commutes, even when these commutes aren’t in their best interest? “People may ...
Air Pollution in China and India
Air Pollution in China and India
In an article published in The Guardian, Jonathan Watts and Randeep Ramesh describe the clouds of noxious fumes swirling around India and China’s industrializing cities. While much of the pollution can be attributed to inefficient coal burning power plants, the ...
A Sustainable Parking Garage? Only in LA
A Sustainable Parking Garage? Only in LA
A friend of mine who lived in Los Angeles once told me that on bad days the city felt like one large parking lot. These days things have improved…slightly. That’s because LA now boasts the construction of the first sustainable ...
Clean Green Cars
Clean Green Cars
Last week, our friends over at autobloggreen wrote about a new website launched in Britain which aims to provide consumers with environmental information about automobiles. The site, Clean Green Cars, markets itself as “a green motoring guide,” and asserts that ...
Cleaning Up the Streets
Cleaning Up the Streets
The above graphic illustrates how the highest concentrations of carbon monoxide and ultra-fine particles occur at the center of roads. As the graphic shows, the further you move from the road, the lower your exposure is to these particles. Dr. ...
Transportation and Socioeconomic Class
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 ...
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