"...MapNTL is an online mapping and location-based services that delivers more online maps, point-to-point driving directions and geo-spatial ("where's my nearest?") searches to more businesses and consumers than any other supplier in Nigeria..."-Company...
I knew that Beijing has been cracking down on pollution, but I didn't know how they were going about it. It looks like authorities have banned vehicles on alternate days based on the last number of the vehicle's license plate. However, a representative of the Beijing Municipal Committee of Communications has said they will not extend the law after the end of the Olympic games.
I had heard about bans like this before in Mexico City. I've been told that wealthier families would often buy two cars and drive them on alternate days. As far as I have been able to find out, it looks like this idea started in 1986 with a program called Proconve in Sao Paolo. Apparently, local authorities have attributed large reductions in gaseous pollutants to the program. I'd love to know how many families...
Ottawa has introduced "a new GPS fleet tracking system on OC Transpo buses to improve service". Even with such a system, there may be significant challenges to running buses precisely on time with variable traffic.
Once buses are GPS equipped, however, it is possible to provide estimates of when the next bus will actually come. Guelph, Ontario, and Thunder Bay, Ontario are already doing this, thanks to a company called Next Bus. Here is a live example, showing when the next bus will come to a particular stop in Guelph.
You can also see bus maps for a given schedule being updated live. Here's an example in Guelph, and here's an example in Thunder Bay.
Inside and Outside Graphics are a live snapshot from NextBus.
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By Adam Stern of Terra Pass.
Pay-as-you-drive programs reward those who drive gently.
Here’s another example of how the tortoise beats the hare. The insurance industry is starting to offer lower rates for drivers who drive less, apply a light foot on the pedal, and avoid sudden stops. These driving habits save fuel and reduce carbon emissions. They also cut down on accident risks and the resulting insurance claims. Now technology is helping insurance companies identify such conservation-minded drivers and reward them with lower premiums.
To get the benefits, drivers have to agree to put a device in their car (it plugs into the same diagnostic port as the ScanGauge) that tracks driving patterns. Every six months, participants must upload the collected data and send it to...
The Texas highway department says no.
I thought this was interesting. The Texas highway department – Texas, no less! -- says that
roads simply don’t pay for themselves:
… no road pays for itself in gas taxes and fees. For example, in Houston, the 15 miles of SH 99 from I-10 to US 290 will cost $1 billion to build and maintain over its lifetime, while only generating $162 million in gas taxes. That gives a tax gap ratio of .16, which means that the real gas tax rate people would need to pay on this segment of road to completely pay for it would be $2.22 per gallon. This is just one example, but there is not one road in Texas that pays for itself based on the tax system of today. Some roads pay for about half their true cost, but most roads we have analyzed...
A couple years ago, I wrote a piece Why We Need An X Prize for Eco-Friendly Air Travel, encouraging a competitive approach towards innovating a way to slash air travel emissions:
Air travel presents one of the stickiest problems we face.
On the one hand, in a rapidly globalizing world, we need to fly to do business, build networks and see loved ones. Indeed, to many people (including myself, to be honest), the ability to travel easily and keep a global community is one of the greatest accomplishments of our civilization.
On the other hand, air travel is frying the planet. While air travel contributes only 3% of humanity's total CO2 emissions (making them a problem only a few times larger than, say, coal fires), air travel is growing at an astounding rate. ...
So, here's my...
40 cities, 2,058 neighboords, and one Walk Score to rule them all.
By Eric De Place
It's here! The biggest 40 cities in America ranked by their walkability. Plus, every single neighborhood in those cities -- all 2,508 of them -- rank-ordered for your walking pleasure.
** In a surprise upset, San Francisco edges out NYC for top honors in walkability. Who else made it into the Top 10?
** The Northwest's most walkable neighborhood is in Portland. It's the Pearl District, no suprise, ranking as the 15th best neighborhood for walking in the nation. (Seattle's best showing, Pioneer Square, is 18th). See the rest of America's best walking neighborhoods.
** But Seattle is the Northwest's walking leader, earning a higher overall score than Portland. (The Emerald City ranks 4 slots...
NaijaCar reports on the Innoson automotive initiative.
Nubia Estates offers private residence owners' Club.
Food crisis a boom for small farmers?
More on the opportunity in Africa's frontier markets.
Using oil palm crops to heal Lake Victoria
Burundian Ashura Kisesa, wins a young entrepreneur...
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The extraordinary growth in trade seen prior to the First World War and after the Second World War has often been attributed to a decline in the cost of transport. However, a new paper available from the National Bureau of Economic Research called Global Trade and the Maritime Transport Revolution suggests that the decline in the cost of transport had little influence on the growth of trade prior to the First World War:[W]e find little systematic evidence suggesting that the maritime transport revolution was a primary driver of the late nineteenth century global trade boom. Rather, the most powerful forces driving the boom were those of income growth and convergence. Finally, we suggest that a significant portion of the observed decline in maritime transport costs may have been induced by...
China equity fund to invest $300 mln in Africa.
Transcorp expands its hospitality footprint.
Food prices to spur agriculture investment.
Electric cycle rickshaws as a sustainable transport system via Inhabitat
Crustamer-Specialist processor of...
The Atlantic has a fun piece on GM's ambitious plan to bring the Volt to market by 2010. I generally don't go in for overripe tales of corporate heroism, and I definitely don't go in for economic nationalism, but hell if the story didn't make me want to hoist up an American flag and blast the Mellencamp from the transistor radio in my '68 Chevelle:
Because it will have both an electric and a gasoline motor on board, the Volt will be a hybrid. But it will be like no hybrid on the road today. Existing hybrids are gasoline-powered cars, with an electric assist to improve the gas mileage. The Volt will be an electric-powered car, with a gasoline assist to increase the battery's range.
Doesn't sound like a big deal, perhaps, but most industry watchers seem to think GM's goal...
Palm kernel meal and cassava peel meal as a feed for pig farmers.
Lagos takes page from Sao Paulo with a Heli-Taxi service
The supreme irony of solar powered fuel stations in Mozambique
Handmade cards from...
Carbon offset dealer TerraPass (with whom we're working on our Clean Slate offsets) recently launched a new version of their flight emissions calculator. The updated calculator uses data from go-to travel resource TRX to provide a more accurate, personalized account of your flight's carbon emissions.
TerraPass VP Adam Stein blogs about the new calculator:
The new calculator … takes into account a range of factors including plane type, route anomalies such as weather detours and holding patterns, cargo loads, seat pitch and width, etc. TRX engaged an outside expert to validate their emissions methodology.
Although we don't expect the world's passengers to stop flying – after all, we've known the climate implications of air travel for years – there's something to be...
Bike Radar reports on the advent of Bicycle Ambulances:
BEN Namibia launched a bicycle ambulance manufacturing plant in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek. Bicycle ambulances are ‘stretchers on wheels’ that attach to normal bicycles and tow a sick person or pregnant woman to a hospital or clinic where no other transport is available. In other African countries where bicycle ambulances are in use, there...
WAASPS is the first Ultralight air-work, training and aircraft assembly operation in Ghana.Services offered include:
-Crop Spraying
-Advertising
-Tourism
The company states that they are "...bringing affordable aviation solutions to the heart of the people and places where it can make a...
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We recently showed you a chair bungie-corded to the back of a bicycle. Scaling up a little, how do you move an entire apartment by bicycle? The Human Powered Vehicles Operators of Ottawa (HPVOoO) show us how. They have been experimenting with various uses of a large bicycle trailer they originally built as a parade float to carry a Hammond organ. On the web-page devoted to the trailer, they document the many bike trailer 'missions' they have undertaken since building the trailer, including fetching garden supplies for a local community garden, carrying 9 drummers in a peace rally, and experimenting with transporting the trike (the one usually used to pull the trailer) on the trailer itself.
In an article on Bike co-ops, trails, and Ottawa cycling, I told you about how the HPV...
When we walk out our doors in 20 years to take a drive, what kind of a vehicle will we get in?
The preferred answer, of course, is a pair of sturdy shoes or a well-maintained bike. But the reality is that at least for next couple decades, personal motorized mobility (a.k.a. cars) will be some part of the mix. So how do we do them right?
We're looking more and more at the combination of electric vehicles, smart grids, product-service systems and good urban development as a means of restructuring our personal transportation options and impacts.
Now, WWF has published a pretty good summary of the case for plug-in vehicles (all-electric or hybrid), from an emissions and energy security stand-point.
Here, essentially, is the main take-away:
Electric vehicles are highly energy...
This is interesting:
In an analysis of the potential impacts of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles projected for 2020 and 2030 in 13 regions of the United States, ORNL researchers explored their potential effect on electricity demand, supply, infrastructure, prices and associated emission levels. Electricity requirements for hybrids used a projection of 25 percent market penetration of hybrid vehicles by 2020 including a mixture of sedans and sport utility vehicles. Several scenarios were run for each region for the years 2020 and 2030 and the times of 5 p.m. or 10:00 p.m., in addition to other variables.
The report found that the need for added generation would be most critical by 2030, when hybrids have been on the market for some time and become a larger percentage of the...
Google posed a challenge to all the attendees of the American Public Transportation Association's recent TransITech conference: get your city on Google Transit by Earth Day 2008. We've written before about how great a tool it is, and were proud to help instigate it. Transit now shows up as an option for every "driving directions" trip you type into Google Maps (if your city is hooked up), encouraging the use of public transit and making it easy for those that would otherwise never even try it. It's a win for the transit agencies, too, because their specialized trip-planner websites are all made with expensive proprietary software, while Google's system is free and they publish their API.
If your city isn't hooked up, you can play along at home by writing your local transit...
by Clark Williams-Derry
Via Brad Plumer: a traffic jam in in a bottle.
To me, it's pretty remarkable how closely the real-world experiment above matches up with this java-based computer traffic simulator.
WARNING - if you click the last link, and you're at all geeky, prepare to lose your afternoon!! A few years back I wasted hour after hour playing with the java settings, and watching "traffic" jams materialize and melt -- just like in real life. My favorite quirk: for one lane-narrowing scenario, I could make traffic flow along beautifully at 40 miles per hour, but seize up like glue at either 20 mph or 60 mph. Another fave (and very relevant to congestion pricing debates) was letting traffic flow along smoothly at, say 1,400 "cars" per hour,...
by Brian Smith
Portland, arguably America’s greenest city, will host the 2008 conference Towards Carfree Cities VIII: Rethinking Mobility, Rediscovering Proximity, from June 16-20, 2008. The conference will bring together activists and professionals from around the world to share strategies for building sustainable transportation systems and the transforming cities into human-scaled environments rich in public space and community life.
This year is the first time carfree activists, planners, and thinkers will gather in North America. The conference will showcase recent strides made in Portland’s urban landscape and teach participants about the city’s approach to sustainable living. Previous conference sites have included: Lyon, France; Timisoara, Romania; Prague, Czech...
Yoseph Seyoum CEO of PhantomPlate, is the inventor of Photoblocker a spray that can be applied vehicle license plates. It "...renders red-light and speed cameras useless. The spray can be applied to license plates to make them hyper-reflective and unreadable when the camera flashes. The Product is a hit with drivers...",Loneinventor.
See related news report:
via Selam...
by Justus Stewart
I. The Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, was the site of a conference last week titled “Systems, Cities & Sustainable Mobility.” The building is an adaptive reuse (most of the conference took place in a converted wind tunnel), and is LEED certified. It is also, most important for the topic at hand, walking distance from the Gold Line, which connects downtown Los Angeles to Pasadena.
The conference opened on Wednesday morning with a keynote from WC’s own Alex Steffen, who set the tone for what would be the conference’s central theme: is green technology (in this case cars) enough to bring about a sustainable future? Alex issued the challenge that we had to completely re-design our systems, not just our technologies; that we need a new...