CNN reports that Americans are drove billion fewer miles in May than they did in May ‘07.
With high gas prices and a slowing economy, Americans are now taking fewer trips by car and are starting to rely again on muscle power to get around.
If we assume that the average fuel efficiency for all vehicles is 23.1 miles per gallon, that translates to 4.3 million fewer (metric) tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s the equivalent of 2200 tonnes of coal not burned.
One of the best features on Google Maps is the ability to get directions from Point A to Point B. But as useful as it is when driving to a new city, it’s not nearly as functional if you’re trying to walk your way to a downtown lunch meeting in a maze of one-way streets.
Not any more! Google Maps recently released a beta service where they search out the best walking routes, ignoring one-way streets and even finding a route with as flat a topography as possible.
Driving:
Walking:
However, the service is not yet complete. From the Google Maps blog:
Walking directions work well for short trips in urban areas, but we don’t always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there’s actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. There are still a lot of pedestrian pathways we don’t know about, and they might save you some time if you find them. We’re working on collecting new data on pedestrian pathways and on more effective ways to solicit your feedback, so that we can steadily improve this feature and get you where you need to be as efficiently as possible.
Little changes like this help us out of the mindset that The Car is the default mode of transportation. Good work to the folks at Google.
All across North America there are indications that cycling is hitting the mainstream (although sometimes with mixed results).
In my home town of Toronto, the biggest clue may have been last week’s successful police sting on a well-known shady bike dealer who allegedly instructed someone to steal a bicycle so that it could be ‘bought’ by him.
After the arrest, Police executed several warrents and discovered an amazing number of bicycles stored in the storefront, an upstairs apartment, as well as in several warehouses and rented garages around the city’s west end. Upwards of two thousand bikes have been found so far: Continue reading »
It’s no secret that I’m against nuclear power, particularly since we have all the technology and free sunlight that we need to power the world (the Earth receives the equivalent of the entire world’s energy demand free from the sun every 40 minutes). So when I hear people suggest that nuclear power is a safe way out of the climate crisis, I cringe.
T. Boone Pickens, a Texas oil man and a major donor to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth – the organization that discredited John Kerry and helped bring George W. Bush back to the White House in 2004 – has become one of the biggest backers of wind power in the United States.
