Green Revolution Sweeping Through U.S. Cities

Neil Peirce of the American Prospect sums up sustainable practices in several American cities,

A "green revolution" is burgeoning in America’s cities and towns.

If the new, green, urban alchemy has an epicenter, it’s Chicago. A big share of the credit goes to Mayor Richard J. Daley and his allies. There’s a green roof on City Hall and greenery along roadway medians stretching out into the neighborhoods. Asphalt schoolyards have been converted to grass, vacant lots turned into community gardens, greenways and wildlife habitat nurtured.

Out across the nation, there’s fast-growing demand for public transit to save energy and transit-oriented development to curb sprawl. The move for major regional rail systems has now reached far beyond New York and Chicago, Boston and San Francisco to traditionally auto-dependent cities like Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Houston, and even Los Angeles.

Photo is of the green roof on Chicago City Hall’s: FrancisDre/Flickr

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

STREETSBLOG USA

Will Rahm Emanuel Show America What BRT Can Do?

|
With impressive urgency, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has spent his first months in office retooling and reconfiguring how the “City That Works” works. Emanuel’s energy is evident in changes from beat-cop deployment to the push for a longer school day, but perhaps the mayor’s most tangible efforts can be seen in his ambitious transportation agenda. […]
STREETSBLOG USA

Talking Headways Podcast: The Transportation Innovation Revolution

|
Shin-pei Tsay of Transit Center joins me this week to delve into her new report, A People’s History of Recent Urban Transportation Innovation, which examines how advocacy and political leadership have combined in several American cities to produce a more multi-modal transportation network. We discuss the cycle of change, why mayors and local activists (who Transit Center calls “the […]

Rising Demand for Transit Could Be a “Turning Point”

|
CNN also led off this morning with a relatively in-depth piece on U.S. cities scrambling to meet rising demand for mass transit. With a fight over billions of dollars of federal transportation funding set to heat up immediately after the swearing-in of the next president, this may very well be the most important transportation policy […]
STREETSBLOG USA

Without Transit, American Cities Would Take Up 37 Percent More Space

|
Even if you never set foot on a bus or a train, chances are transit is saving you time and money. The most obvious reason is that transit keeps cars off the road, but the full explanation is both less intuitive and more profound: Transit shrinks distances between destinations, putting everything within closer reach. A new study published by the Transportation Research Board quantifies […]