Car Free Cities

I am often saddened by our reliance on cars (and trucks, vans, SUVs, etc.) in our society today. I strongly dislike having to drive most places if I want to do anything, and I cringe every time I drive/walk/bike by businesses and especially strip malls that are mostly parking lot (and at most times during a 24 hour period, empty parking lots). (Photo from Flickr by jgrimm / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

I enjoyed reading this blog post from WorldChanging about car-free cities. Check it out.

I thoroughly enjoy traveling to a place that is much less reliant on vehicles than my city of Fresno, such as San Francisco, the East Coast of the US, Europe, etc. I love the ability to get anywhere and everywhere without having to rely on a car. In fact, it's a lot less stress to not have to worry about a car, parking, maintenance, gas, and cleaning among others. But, the big question is. Is this really possible in our society, especially highly developed western cities that were built around cars? Not too mention the stress and possible waste of time driving (as opposed to taking public transportation, where you can focus on activities other than driving). It will likely be a fairly involved change, but it does not have to be difficult, it just requires a paradigm shift. Here are my ideas for making a less car dependent society.

• More mass transit - You've read about my love of high speed rail on this blog, and this concept fits in very well with that. Clean, fast, and modern transportation, such as high speed rail can easily connect distances of 400 miles or less. High speed rail can also easily replace a lot of air travel, such as in Spain where the newest route of high speed rail between Madrid and Barcelona has already replaced half of air travel on the busiest air route in the world (in only a years time). One of the great features of High Speed Rail is the placement of stations in the center of cities, as opposed to large airports that are often on the outskirts of cities or farther, and require extra transportation to get there. In Europe the fastest way to get from downtown London to downtown Paris is high speed rail (and Britain is an island!).
• More public transit - Once you get into a city using mass transit like high speed rail you should have the ability or option to walk to your destination, but often time or distance might be a factor. Without a good public transit system you give people few other options to driving. Misconceptions are also a problem with public transit in places where cars are king. Here in Fresno, CA the buses have a bad reputation, which is unwarranted and unfortunate because it is usually the people that don't use the bus that feel this way. I would love to commute to work without having to worry about rush hour traffic, other crazy drivers, and finding a good parking spot. The way to make this more attractive to people who like the freedom of cars is to have more buses (or other public transit) and more routes.
• More urban infill - Suburbanization which has been a trend for a long time is starting to show its major detractions. People getting more and more spread out leads to more vehicular use, longer commute times, longer commute distances, loss of agriculture/farm land, and strong relationship between cost of commute and gas prices, among others. The higher density of people living in an area, the closer amenities will be to serve these people. That means you won't be forced to drive two miles to the closest grocery store. Urban infill also helps make public transit more effective by concentrating the areas that are covered by routes. This can be accomplished two major ways. First, unoccupied buildings can be repurposed to include higher density housing. For example, in Fresno there are many high-rise buildings that are sitting empty that would make great housing buildings, in fact "In the past, the city council [of Fresno] requested that the vacant downtown buildings be inventoried and the results were the size of the two lost World Trade Center Towers" (Via Fresno Fusion). Second, places (especially business/strip malls) that have in the past included a lot of wasted parking space can repurpose that land to include higher density living, etc. Another big factor in urban infill is focusing on building up rather than out.

There are a lot more factors to reduce our dependence on cars and oil in our cities, but I believe these are important first steps. I think Fresno is taking its first few baby steps to accomplish some of these things with its most recent efforts for downtown revitalization. This along with California's plans for high speed rail throughout the state (with a station in downtown Fresno) will also assist greatly with this.

What do you think is important for our cities?

Perfect Time for Rail

As you know, I am quite passionate about High Speed Rail coming to California. I try and share this enthusiasm with others so they can see all the positives associated with this project. One of the arguments I hear most often from people that don't really understand the project is "we can't afford a project like this while the economy is in this state."

These people need to read this article on the California High Speed Rail Blog.

Bike To Work Day

As I was driving home today from work on CA-41 I saw one of the big light boards had a message flashing. I could tell it wasn't an amber alert, so I was at least glad about that. As I got closer though, I saw it said "Bike to Work Day" and then "Share the Road". I thought, that's pretty awesome. They are advertising bike to work day on the freeways, maybe some people will be more inclined to bike to work today.

I then thought, "wait... it's bike to work day today? How come I didn't hear about this sooner?" Then I thought, "what are they doing advertising that today on the freeway, during the afternoon rush hour? Isn't it a bit late to convince people to ride their bikes to work when they are already on their way home?"

Turns out that Bike to Work Day does not happen until next week on Friday. Would it be too much to ask for a date or at least a website to find out when the day is exactly?

Low Carbon Fuel Standard

You may have heard of California's recent move to a "Low Carbon Fuel Standard".

If you want to find out a bit about the effects this may have on the state, check out this post from the California High Speed Rail Blog.

While this is a perspective from the mass/public transit side of the debate, I think it still has a lot of merit. We saw a big increase in public transit use here in California after the last rise in the price of gasoline. This move by the government of California seems to be a focused and concerted effort to help reduce our dependence on oil.

I do hope mass/public transit becomes more popular here in California, and especially in Fresno. If this LCFS is the answer then so be it.

Use of Space

A follow up to a previous post about adaptive spaces and getting full use out of a space.

I was thinking that if certain rooms in your house are only used 1/8 to 1/3 of the day, and that is not very good use, then Churches are even worse offenders.

Assuming even 4 hours of Worship services a week (which I will assume is even a high average) and there are 168 hours in a week, these places are sitting empty and unused for almost 98% of the time. I think I would find it difficult to reconcile that if I were going to be building a new Church building. Now, this of course doesn't ring true for every Church. There are many churches that meet in schools, such as my friend Luke Mundy's church RVC Fresno.

As well, from what I understand, the Mormon's do a better job than most at utilizing space, including multiple "congregations" using the same buildings

In one sense, the local Church meetinghouse is a religious building principally dedicated to Sabbath worship but is also used for social, educational, and community activities during the other days of the week.
-From Mormon Church

Check out this page which illustrates possible uses of money that would be available if all the real estate owned by churches in the United States was sold. While you might not agree with all the ways that money should be spent, it is very interesting to see what kind of impact could be made with this change of thinking.

This was also something my family talked about as we visited Saddleback Church a couple of weeks ago. We found out that Saddleback Church has around 100,000 members, of which around 25,000 are very active. While the main campus we visited seemed at first glance huge, daunting, and maybe even over the top, it probably is a better use of resources than a bunch of smaller churches each having their own buildings etc.

According to this site the median church in the U.S. has 75 regular participants in worship on Sunday mornings and an average of 186 attenders. Let's split up the 100,000 members of Saddleback by 125 people in a regular congregation and we come up with a whopping 800 different churches. That means 800 church buildings and parking lots. I don't know the exact number, but I would wager a lot of money saying that Saddleback doesn't come anywhere close to the square footage of 800 separate churches. This just goes to show the efficiency of scaling up, especially in churches.

What do you think?

Adaptive Spaces

This post on Treehugger really intrigued me. The facts about specific rooms only being used for fractions of the day were especially interesting.

This is one of the big reasons I bought a Smart Car. Sure there might be times when I could use my car to transport more than two people (including myself) but especially for this point in my life, I rarely do. When those situations come around, there are other options.

I do realize that a living space is a little different than a car, and that having dedicated spaces to which to retreat can be extremely valuable, these situations can just use a little bit of good old creativity, such as getting out of the house, etc.

Kid Energy

I love this article on Kid Energy from World Changing.

Kids have a lot of energy, so we really should try to harness it. It will also give kids a great opportunity to stay active, especially in this every increasing video game culture in which we live.

Hybrids

Please don't misinterpret this blog post. I am not necessarily against hybrids. I think they are doing their part to reduce oil consumption as well as greenhouse gas emissions, etc.

My issue comes when I read articles like this. Sure hybrids do all these great things, but they are much more of an interim step on our way to oil independence (no longer using oil/gas). In this article the Boston taxi fleet plans to have an all hybrid force by 2015. This may sound great, but that is 7 years off. In 7 years (I hope) hybrids are going to be old technology with relatively bad gas mileage, because other super-efficient and even no oil alternatives will exist, such as hydrogen, plug-in hybrids, and maybe even plug-in hydrogen hybrids.

I just think hybrids are short-sighted for what we really need to accomplish.

Fresno Co-Housing

Check out this development in North Fresno called La Querencia. It is a 28 unit sustainable neighborhood with common areas, pools, vegetable gardens, and solar panels. It looks pretty neat, and if I were in any position to be buying a house right now, this would be something I might consider. These are the kind of things of which Fresno should try and get a lot more.

Via Fresno Famous

Oil Profits

Here is an interesting article from the Brookings Institute about what the Middle East is doing and what they should be doing with their profits from oil, especially in our world where oil prices are rising so much.

This reminds me of what I have thought for the last number of years about my home province of Alberta, Canada and the oil revenues the provincial government receives from royalties from the Athabasca Oil Sands. While rising oil prices has made these reserves much more cost effective to exploit (even though it is non-conventional oil sources) it still costs much more money to extract the oil from the tar sands.

I have long thought that Alberta needs to do a better job of using this money to invest. Investing in both important "right now" projects, such as education and health care, as well long term projects is, in my opinion, the best option. Long term investments such as renewable energy projects could make Alberta another leader in energy, and could continue making money in this industry long after the oil is used up, or which I think is going to be much more likely, demand for oil goes way down.

Watering Schedule

If you've lived in Fresno in recent summers you have probably also heard the catchy tune the water resources department for the city has used to market and inform the citizens of this city as to when they are allowed to water their lawns.

I enjoy listening to and singing along to the song both on the tv and radio. I realized tonight that I haven't heard this advertisement yet this summer. Fortunately my apartment complex does the watering for me because while I know the tune and basic lyrics of the song I don't remember specifically which days even numbers water on.

I wonder if they've cancelled this marketing campaign. I will have to do some research.

Dishwasher

We had a new dishwasher installed in our apartment yesterday. Our old one had an issue where the detergent dispenser lid would not close. So the apartment handyman came out and told us he would just have them replace it! This problem was there a year ago when we moved in, and I didn't bother calling them about it because the dishwasher still worked.

At least this new one works properly and it is energy efficient!

Milk Jugs

I love milk. I grew up drinking milk. I would be very sad if I had to give up milk because it is one of my favorite drinks. With all this milk drinking my normal consumption of this delicious beverage happens from the economical gallon milk jugs. It is interesting to see that an eco-friendly milk jug is on the horizon, and I could see a couple of these in my fridge.


To me it looks a little industrial, and my guess the grooves that run top to bottom are there for structural integrity. I recycle my milk jugs when they are empty, and before throwing them in the recycle I always crush them down, I wonder if that will still be as feasible with this. Without a label it looks pretty plain too, I wonder how companies will dress them up?

(Via TreeHugger)

Honda Minivan

I just saw a commercial for the Honda Odyssey and they were touting the "green" nature and gas saving ability of the vehicle. The major way they tried to do this is by advertising that you could drive 483 miles on one tank of gas. They also share that the vehicle gets about 23 mpg highway.

A little quick math shows an approximately 21 gallon tank. This means that at current Fresno gas prices you would be paying almost $100 every time you fill up.

Long story short, distance you can travel on a tank of gas is not a great way to show how green a vehicle is. If I were to use this strategy to market, I would make sure the vehicle had an extra large reserve tank for fuel.

Website Recommendation - TreeHugger

It's time again for my website recommendation. Today I'd like to point you to TreeHugger.com.

I've linked to TreeHugger a number of times in past posts regarding the environment etc. I realized while reading through their RSS feed today that it is one of the most positive blogs that I read. I honestly get really excited and greatly look forward to the future just because there are so many exciting things happening in the "save the environment" section of industry and government. A lot of times, especially with the environment and climate change, we hear about how our world is dying and we are all screwed. TreeHugger has me less worried about the future of the environment and leaves me wanting to be proactive about the environment in everyday decisions.

I decided that I shouldn't keep this blog to myself, and that we can all benefit if we read this blog.

Smaller Packaging, Bigger Waste

I've been thinking this for a while, and I was happy that treehugger posted about the shrinking packaging size of consumer goods (at least here in the US).

One thing I learned in school, especially geometry and science, is that when you reduce the size of something it increases the surface area to volume ratio. That means as something decreases in size there is more outside needed to contain the inside.

With a number of companies decreasing container sizes to keep prices consistent, they are sacrificing amount of waste. Shrinking containers mean that for the same amount of product their is more packaging and therefore more waste in our landfills.

This is why bulk foods and concentrated products are so environmentally friendly, because they use a lot less packaging. One company that does a great job of this is Shaklee, which has a number of concentrated products that reduce the amount of garbage in the landfill. For example, Shaklee's full home cleaning kit is so concentrated that it saves 108 lbs. from entering the landfill compared to conventional "ready to use" cleaners available out there.

Taking Advantage of High Gas Prices

I've discussed before about people moving away from low gas mileage vehicles as gas prices climb steadily higher. This got me thinking about ways that one could Take advantage of that.

If people are getting rid of these vehicles it would seem smart to go into business doing something with these vehicles. Some ideas I've come up with include recycling/reusing parts for more environmentally friendly purposes, retrofitting them for low/no emissions, and turning them into some sort of amusement park ride.

Do you have any ideas?

Dodge's gasoline price lock

Other than probably being bad for the environment by convincing people that gasoline can be consumed like candy, Dodge's gasoline price lock may also make Dodge go broke.

Sure if gas hovers around $5 a gallon it could be alright, but if gas heads up closer to $10 a gallon that is a lot of money that will start hemorrhaging out of the company. I did a little calculation, and assuming 30 mpg (which is high for Dodge) that would be 400 gallons a year at the 12 000 mile per year limit. That could potentially be around $6 000 over the three years that dodge would have to pay.

I guess Chrysler will be pushing really hard for peace in the middle east.

Gas Can Blues

Here's an Ad from Europe for the Smart Car. Fortunately I do not have a gas can, so when I get my Smart Car I won't be causing any heartache for those plastic containers.

Smart: The Gas Can Blues
Uploaded by hourigan

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4mg0s_smart-the-gas-can-blues_ads

(Via AdFreak)

More Informative Traffic Lights

I like this idea of having traffic lights that actually tell you how much longer the light is going to be Red/Yellow/Green. It gives drivers a little more information and I think it could potentially reduce the number of red lights being ran. (Speculation of course).

Back in Edmonton, AB, Canada (where I'm from originally) there are a number of intersections that have warning lights a few hundred meters back that flash to alert the driver if they are going to hit a red light or if they will be safe for a green light. As a driver that helped me plan my driving a little better, and it got me much more in the mindset of slowing down in preparation for the red light, even if it looked green ahead. I think if most intersections had this it would start to train people to slow down much earlier for lights, and has the potential to save gas by reducing the amount we would have to slam on our brakes.