If you’re looking to lose weight, get fit, make new friends or explore your local area, then national charity Living Streets has an idea for you. Why not take part in its Great British Walking Challenge?

The challenge, which lasts the whole month of May, is free to enter. All participants have to do is register on www.livingstreets.org.uk/gbwc. Once the challenge begins, a special online tool will monitor every walk taken (it can add up minutes spent walking, miles covered or steps taken – and even logs the numbers of calories burned).

Tony Armstrong, Chief Executive of Living Streets, said:

“This May we’re hoping to get the whole country walking. Every step will count as we unite on a mission to see how many times we can collectively walk between John O’Groats and Land’s End.. As part of the month-long challenge we’ll be asking people to walk to work and kids to walk to school for at least a week.”

Anyone can take part in the Great British Walking Challenge, regardless of age or fitness levels. You can take to your feet for a morning stroll around your neighbourhood, get off the bus a stop early, stretch your legs at lunchtime or walk to your local shops rather than driving. Every single step counts – and you could compete with your friends and family, neighbours or even work colleagues.

Walking is good for your mind, body and soul and the benefits are well documented:

Regular walking can reduce the risk of stroke, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, some cancers, osteoporosis and arthritis. It can also increase your good cholesterol and boost the immune system.

Walking can help you lose weight. When you walk, you boost your metabolism and burn more energy: walk for 20 minutes per day for a year and you should burn off half a stone (7 pounds) of body fat.

Walking releases endorphins, which can improve mood, reduce anxiety, aid sleep and improve self-image. Active people have a reduced risk of suffering from clinical depression.

Studies have found that walking can combat the decline in brain function associated with ageing and aid concentration

Tony Armstrong said, “The Great British Walking Challenge shows that you don’t need costly gym sessions or marathon training to get fit and active. Walking is a free and easy way to work more exercise into your daily routine – and it is often overlooked.”

-Ends-

For further press information please contact:

Carole Pendle

Pendle PR

On behalf of Living Streets

Tel: 07768 462601

Email: carole (at) pendlepr.com

Bangkok BRT - By Ilya Plekhanov (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

BRT is one of the fastest growing public transport systems. Approximately 134 cities worldwide— from Bogota to Beijing— have implemented BRT systems or priority bus corridors, serving more than 22 million passenger trips daily.

BRT is a mode of public transport that flexibly combines stations, vehicles, services, running ways and intelligent transportation system elements into an integrated system.

“The new website provides reliable and up-to-date data to help researchers, transit agencies, city officials, and NGOs understand and make better decisions to improve BRT and bus corridors in their cities,” said Dario Hidalgo, Director of Research and Practice, EMBARQ. “This is the first time that all of this publicly available data has been compiled in one place, but there is still more information available. We invite transit agencies and researchers to help us improve the knowledge base by sharing additional data to fill in the gaps.”

The new website allows users to compare BRT systems and bus corridors in all 134 cities in 36 countries. The database includes 95 different indicators on system operations, design and cost, including metrics like the number of passengers per day, commercial speed, and the length of corridors.

There is growing interest and demand for BRT as cities seek low-cost, sustainable urban transportation solutions. As the number of BRT systems increases, it is important to have current, accurate, and complete information about existing and planned systems.

The development of an online database was a joint data-sharing effort. EMBARQ and ALC-BRT CoE collected data mostly from Latin America, and the IEA contributed data from other regions.

“Previously, there was no single point of publicly accessible information about the worldwide BRT industry, and it was especially difficult to get an assessment of the industry’s size and how it was changing over time,” ALC-BRT CoE Director Juan Carlos Munoz said. “We finally have the right tools to set standards for this dynamic industry.”

Using information from this dataset, the IEA has estimated the energy and carbon dioxide (CO2) benefits of BRT implementation, and outlined several CO2-mitigation scenarios that rely in part on modal shift from light duty vehicles to public transit, including BRT. The IEA plans to recognize the extensive potential of BRT in its upcoming biennial report, “Energy Technology Perspectives 2012,” calling for the total network length of BRT systems to double by 2020.

“BRT is growing in importance as a transit alternative,” said Tali Trigg, energy analyst, IEA. “This database will be helpful to planners, and is an essential component in calculating energy efficient scenarios which inform decision makers of practical ways of transitioning to a more secure, sustainable and affordable energy future.”

Following are just a few examples of the data that is available from the new website:

• Worldwide, 129 new corridors have been implemented since 2000, and 37 since 2010.
• Latin American systems move more than 50 percent of global BRT daily passenger trips.
• 25 Brazilian cities have 87 bus corridors, totaling more than 560 kilometers– more than any other country.
• 18 of Asia’s 24 BRT systems began operations since 2006.
• Systems in 13 U.S. cities together carry nearly 600,000 passenger trips each day.

Please visit: http://brtdata.org/

Watch a screencast tutorial on how to use new website: http://youtu.be/KJU-fWvSBY0

The London scheme which launched in July 2010 attracts almost 186,000 cycle hires per week, with an average journey time of 16 minutes on weekdays and 29 minutes at weekends.

Current advice: NICE public health guidance, found insufficient evidence to recommend the use of cycling schemes to promote physical activity, other than as part of research studies where effectiveness can be evaluated. However, it recommended that professionals should continue to promote cycling, along with other forms of physical activity like walking, gardening and household activities, as a means of incorporating regular physical activity into people’s daily lives.

New Evidence: A health impact study (Rojas-Rueda D et al, BMJ. 343:d4521) focused on Barcelona’s public bicycle sharing initiative, Bicing, to estimate the health risks and benefits of travel by bicycle compared with travel by car in an urban environment.

‘Bicing’ was launched in March 2007 and by August 2009, when the study was carried out, 11% of the population had signed up to the scheme, although of these only 1.7% were regular users.

The researchers used a newly developed health impact model to estimate all cause mortality, focusing on physical activity, road traffic accidents and exposure to air pollution. They also considered reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

Results found the health benefits of physical activity from cycling using the Bicing scheme were large compared to the risks from inhalation of air pollutants and road traffic incidents (benefit:risk ratio 77).

In terms of its environmental impact the study calculated that annual carbon dioxide emissions were reduced by an estimated 9,062 metric tonnes, equivalent to 0.9% of gas emissions from all types of motor vehicles in Barcelona.

Commentary: “There are many reasons other than health for introducing public bike sharing schemes, for example, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, reducing congestion, managing public transport demand, making cycling more visible, encouraging cycling infrastructure, and making streets more liveable. But we know that any intervention that shifts the modal share from motorised transport to cycling will have a health benefit.

“This study assumes that 90% of people using the scheme started cycling as a result of Bicing, and that these people were previously making the same trips by car. Nevertheless, it does show that the benefits of cycling far outweigh the risks, as confirmed by other models.

“There is no doubt that the best way to increase physical activity is to incorporate it into activities of daily living, and cycling plays an important role through active travel for commuting, and local journeys for shopping, schools runs etc. There are examples in several towns and cities in the UK where bringing investment closer to European levels, and integrating a range of hard measures (coherent high quality networks linking everyday destinations, bike sharing schemes, reducing urban speed limits to 20mph) and soft measures (personalised travel marketing, school and workplace travel plans) increases cycling. There are some outstanding examples of public health teams engaging with local transport planners to ensure that health impacts are part of the argument for encouraging cycling initiatives. Bike sharing schemes though can only be part of the solution”. – Dr Alison Hill, Director – South East Public Health Observatory.

Source: Newsletter from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence

http://www.carfreeday.org.in/gallery.aspx

On November 27^th, 2011, I attended a Car-free day event in South Mumbai, India. It was organized by a 38 year old activist named Kalpesh Parekh and his Greenmile Foundation. They spent over nine months getting the necessary permits and sponsorships to close down a few major streets in South Mumbai to automobile traffic. Their goal was to stage a large bike-a-thon and walk-a-thon to draw attention to Mumbai’s traffic problems and promote bicycling and walking as alternatives to driving. Between 400 and 500 people registered, and paid a small fee to participate in the event which got support and sponsorship from a local TV station (Bindass), a local radio station and several local businesses. The organizers lent me a bicycle so I could ride in the 20km bike-a-thon and also experience riding in normal Mumbai city traffic.

http://www.carfreeday.org.in/gallery.aspx

Mumbai is a city of 21 million people on the Arabian Sea. Its climate is hot and humid and every year it gets hit by monsoons severe enough that many roads and city sections get completely shut down. It is the home of India’s film industry (“Bollywood”) and one of many Indian cities that have grown as a consequence of the technology boom that began in the 1990s. It is a city of extremes—extreme wealth, extreme poverty, extremely crowded public transportation, horrific traffic jams and extremely bad air quality. In many places there are no sidewalks, just a line on the pavement where pedestrians are supposed to walk. Rush hour is a thick mixture of pedestrians, cars, scooters, motorcycles, buses and other vehicles, all fighting for any small advantage. At times, it is so crowded, they barely move forward. It can take an hour to travel just a couple kilometers across a bridge, slower than a person could walk or ride a bicycle.

Currently 2 million motor vehicles use just 2000 kilometers of streets and roads in Mumbai with 300 new cars being added every day. Mumbai has one of the highest traffic densities in the world with over 750 vehicles per kilometer.

Amidst all this traffic are a great number of bicyclists. Some people use bicycles to commute to work but, more than anything else, bicycles and tricycles are used to deliver basic goods and services. Bread, spices, milk, bottled water, cooking gas, newspapers, printed material, groceries and just about anything you can imagine is delivered by bike. Most of the bicycles are heavy, all-steel work bikes made by Atlas or Hero (India’s two big bicycle manufacturers). It’s not unusual to see an entire family or group of 3 or 4 people riding one bike. Riding a bike in South Mumbai is like riding a roller coaster or playing an adrenaline-inducing video game. You have to pay attention and flow with traffic or the game ends quickly and you get run over.

http://www.carfreeday.org.in/gallery.aspx

The Greenmile Foundation sponsored Car-free event is part of a growing green transportation movement in Mumbai. In February 2010, residents of the Bandra neighborhood farther north successfully closed off a long coastal street (Carter Road) and staged everything from bike races to dance and yoga classes in the street. They repeated the event in 2011. There was also a “Tour de Mumbai” in February 2011, the city’s first professional cycling race, organized by Union Cycliste Internationale, the Cycling Federation of India and ID Sports.

This latest Greenmile Car-free event was like a city bike or walking “tour”, something that’s common in Europe and the U.S.A. but rare in India. It featured a 20km bike-a-thon and 10km walk-a-thon. Prizes were given for the first, second and third place finishers but the event was less of a race and more of a celebration and reminder of what the city’s streets could be like without cars.

At 8am, riders and walkers gathered in front of Victoria Station in South Mumbai. After a few brief speeches by organizers and a government minister, a flag was waved and we were off. Though the turnout was lower than Kalpesh had hoped for, it was a fun event and people of all ages participated. I rode and talked most of the way with a local film maker named Rafeeq Ellias. At one point a reporter asked him why he was riding in the event and he replied with a slight smile, “Bicyclists and pedestrians in India are treated worse than homosexuals.” It was nice to actually be able to look at the city as you rode through it, rather than having to worry about whether some car, bus or truck was going to run you down. At the finish line, there were prizes, speeches and lots of photographs. With a little more organizing effort and sponsorship this event could grow to thousands or tens of thousands of participants. Kalpesh’s dream is to spread this event to other Indian cities and create a national cycling event like the Tour de France. He also wants to bring a bike-share program to Mumbai and do other things to promote cycling, walking and alternatives to cars. Automobile use in India is rising at an alarming pace. If we’re going to have the slightest hope of reducing global climate change and environmental degradation, we must beat back auto-centric development in countries like India and China. In addition to helping develop India’s public transportation sector, we would do well to support local activists like Kalpesh, or the KBS Foundation in Bandra.

For more information and photos of the event, check out—

http:/www.carfreeday.org.in/

- by Andy Singer

This article has first been published in La Décroissance.

With the relatively recent realization that the U.S. needs a comprehensive public transit system, it looks as though one might be on the horizon. According to the aforementioned report (Global Competitiveness in the Rail and Transit Industry), “In the face of challenges such as high gasoline prices, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions, public transportation offers a range of benefits over private automobile travel. Indeed, rising urban rail and bus ridership, as well as plans for high-speed rail corridors, suggest a rekindling of U.S. interest in these alternative forms.” At the beginning of 2011, U.S.’s President Barack Obama revealed his plan to build a high-speed rail system in the U.S. His plan includes the investment of 8 billion dollars and will conceptually provide a high-speed rail system accessible to 80 % of American citizens. In May 2011, the U.S. Department of Transportation also announced that it would invest 2 billion dollars in the project. (Congress has since cut off most of the funding for high speed rail)

Traffic in Mumbai/ cc Bodenseemann, Spring 2004

The  Carfree movement has caught the imagination of the people across the world. Perhaps it is is hassle faced by city-dwellers on a daily basis while commuting that motivates them to take an active part in such movements. The hardship is not only for those who are using an automobile – due to traffic jams etc, but also for all others who are subjected to increased pollution from the increasing number of cars working for an increased number of hours daily.

The information age also allows faster communication within communities which helps in the sharing of views on issues of common importance and concern. The recent past has witnessed people lending support to many such issues globally and coming out in the open to express solidarity for a cause. The only unfortunate part is that some such events also attract some unscrupulous elements who are more interested in personal gains rather than any real contribution to noble causes. Recently Mumbai in India witnessed one such Car Free Day where a Cycle Race and Walkathon was organized. The organizers were more interested in rubbing shoulders with politicians and government officials rather than seriously planning the event to percolate the importance of Car Free Days. The local media also fell into the trap and allowed its platform to be used for the tom-tom by the politicians and organizers. It is doubtful whether the city really experienced reduced emissions due to the Car-Free Day. While some of the vehicles were diverted to some longer routes to reach their respective destination with a view to accommodating the Car Free event, many vehicles were able to barge into the route which was meant for the Cyclothon or Walkathon. Both were problematic: the vehicles that were diverted to alternative/longer routes for their destinations produced more pollution than they would have done and the ones which moved parallel to the participants on the same road actually threatened the participants’ safety.

However, such movements should gain more popularity and international organizations like WCN and its members can play a formidable role in influencing people’s behavior.

A few suggestions for making such events more useful and beneficial could be:

a. The Car Free Days could be organized with greater regularity, say every month or once in a quarter.

b. Such events should also be held on working days rather than on holidays alone. If the event is organized on working days, the local government and authorities should endeavor to provide more public transport vehicles so that people can commute to their work place without using their own vehicles. Similarly, people may be encouraged to create car-pools to ferry more people in a single car.

c. Can “Exchanges for Proximity” be created?  It would be essentially a pool where the members would exchange their houses with a view to minimize travelling. For example Mr. A has a house in locality “X” but works in locality “Y”, similarly Mr. B has a house in locality “Y” but works in locality “X”.  Both exchange houses with a view to minimize travel to work. On the face of it such arrangements may seem difficult, but if tried could bring in new possibilities.

d. Small shopping complexes in close proximity to the residential complexes may be promoted so that the inhabitants of the residential complexes are either not required to travel more than 400-500 meters – a distance which is walkable for most people .

e. Use of cycles should be encouraged. This could be achieved if the leading lights of society use cycles at least once in a month, so that the behavior of the people at large could also be influenced.

f. Organizations like WCN and its members could enlighten the local governments and authorities about the “model-requirements” for holding carfree events. This would help to ensure that only those people who are serious about a cause rather than their own personal gain would take the lead for such events. This would also ensure the safety of the participants, which would lead to larger numbers of participants in all subsequent events.

— Arvind H Mittal

© Andy Singer - http://www.andysinger.com/

Vehicles impact the environment in numerous ways from their production, use and disposal. Below are some of the ways vehicles harm us and our environment.

Production

Manufacturing vehicles is harmful to the environment. The average U.S. vehicle (in 2007) required 1129 gallons of gasoline to produce. That’s equivalent to two years worth of gas bought by the typical driver and that’s before the car has ever hit the road. The hybrid Prius is minimally better, requiring 1065 gallons of gas to produce.

It isn’t just the gasoline consumed during vehicle production that pollutes the environment. According to Greenercars.org,

Environmental impacts start with mineral extraction and the production of the raw materials that go into the parts of a car. For example, iron ore gets turned into steel, which now accounts for most of the mass in vehicles…. The lead and acid in batteries are poisonous and dangerous…. Some degree of pollution is associated with all of these components, much of it due to the energy consumption, air pollution, and releases of toxic substances that occur when automobiles are manufactured and distributed.

Use

The average U.S. passenger vehicle uses 575 gallons of gasoline yearly. Hybrids, such as the Prius, guzzle about 255 gallons of gas a year.

Gasoline-powered cars emit the following greenhouse gases and pollutants:

- Benzene.

- Carbon dioxide (CO2).

- Carbon monoxide.

- Nitrogen dioxide.

- Polycyclic hydrocarbons.

- Sulphur dioxide.

About a third of all U.S. energy-related greenhouse gas emissions comes from transportation, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with carbon dioxide making up 63 percent of the greenhouse effect. For every burned gallon of gasoline, almost 9*10-3 metric tons of carbon dioxide are produced. The average American household produces 11.7 tons of transportation related carbon dioxide every year, according to a 2003 U.S. Energy Information Administration report.

After Life

Even after cars’ lives end, their materials continue to pollute our environment. Lead, nickel, and other hazardous materials are in car parts and batteries, leaking into the ground as they sit in junkyards and landfills.

The Environmental Toll of Our Deficient Train System

Train systems are not something the U.S. is known for, unlike Asia and Europe. As a matter of fact, it isn’t an exaggeration to say that our train travel options are non-existent. When we do have the option to travel by train, we find it is either more expensive or comparable in price to travel by plane or car, which in many cases involves half, if not less, of the travel time of a train. European and Asian countries do not necessarily see price similarities or huge differences in travel time (unless the distance is exorbitant). The reason for these price and travel time discrepancies is mostly due to the fact that there aren’t many routes or a high usage of trains in the U.S.

While we all harp on the economics of it, we seem to forget the toll that plane and vehicle travel has on the environment when compared to train travel, which holds more passengers and emits substantially less CO2. It is difficult to know how plane versus train travel differs in the United States because of the lack of a sufficient train system. However, here is information comparing the two types of travel to routes from London to popular destinations in Europe from seat61.com.

An article on planetgreen.discovery.com purported that the CO2 emissions of traveling alone by car over long distances were almost as bad as airplane emissions.

As is very clear, train travel produces considerably less CO2 in the environment than both passenger vehicle and plane travel; and seeing how CO2 contributes to the greenhouse effect by over 60 percent, this means something significant to the way our travels affect the environment.

The U.S. currently has plans to expand our train systems. However, to realize the environmental benefits of train travel in the U.S. will involve massive expansion; it isn’t an overstatement to say that to fully realize these benefits will take to decades, if not our lifetime. Until then, the U.S. will continue to use vehicles and planes as our primary means of travel.

Andy Singer - http://www.andysinger.com/

—

Gina Williams is a guest post and article writer bringing to us information on the environmental impact of vehicles and an insufficient train system in the U.S.

Gina also writes about various topics like “electric cars versus gas powered cars“.

]]> http://carbusters.org/2011/12/11/the-environmental-impact-of-cars-and-trains/feed/ 1 http://carbusters.org/2011/12/05/bicycle-portraits/ http://carbusters.org/2011/12/05/bicycle-portraits/#comments Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:31:10 +0000 carbusters http://carbusters.org/?p=2585

As you might know, South Africa is a world within one country, home to various cultures, with a tragic history of segregation and racism. Through this project we hope to give people a glimpse into each other lives through a well known object of movement, practicality and joy – the bicycle. Looking at individuals through their, sometimes unconscious, involvement in bicycle culture, we will inadvertently touch on many charged issues like the implementation of public space, lack of infrastructure development and also social problems like class division and unequal wealth distribution, but also perhaps bring those unfamiliar to each other together in their love for a simple thing…

—
Stan Engelbrecht

www.bicycleportraits.co.za
www.bicycleportraits.co.za/kickstarter

Community gardens can satisfy more than just their gardeners’ nurturing  instincts for food and Nature. They add instant visual beauty and interest near bike and pedestrian routes.  After all, car drivers are usually moving  too fast to encourage up close lingering and reflection on budding plants and garden art.   Sample approaches of community gardens in relation to active transportation routes, will be highlighted for cities of Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary.

A Bright Spot in Industrial Area by Leslie St. Spit- Along Toronto’s Waterfront Bike Route

Leslie St. community gardens protected by fence on right. Waterfront bike-pedestrian path connects between Beaches area, east Toronto and along Lake Ontario into downtown Toronto by Harbourfront. Road is heavily used by trucks during work week 2011. Photo by J. Chong

Fifteen years ago, before community gardens became the blooming rage for growing local food and flowers, I used to cycle to work daily and pass a large community garden along Toronto’s Waterfront bike route  –not far from the Leslie St. spit.  At that time, this garden had a low wire fence where one could look over top to see a profusion of plants, compost piles and garden lawn chairs scattered about for resting.

Now, the Leslie St. Allotment Community Gardens are protected by higher secure fencing.  But these gardens still thrive in the same location.  They have expanded and matured with some lawn grass rows and ever-thickening bushes.  Most likely, the choice location wasn’t because of the bike path location. It was  the reality, that sometimes people could drive and stop briefly to unload soil and other gardening tools.  Besides, the location was on a convenient plot of public land across from a light industrial area that continues to have flotillas of trucks rumbling on the road.  Thank goodness for a marked bike and walking route.  Without the Leslie St. allotment gardens and signed pathway, this area would be dull, bleak and an area to avoid.

Vancouver’s Spirited Reclaimation of Abandoned or Underused Land
Some Vancouver community gardens display creative reclamation of abandoned public right of ways and other underused land plots, such as traffic calming circles.  Just a 5-minute walk from the Granville Public Market, lst Ave. near Fir St., are recent new community gardens lining the  abandoned Molson branch rail line from the Arbutus Corridor, another abandoned rail line.

The gardens line a well used bike route that feeds to and from the popular Burrard St. Bridge separated bike lanes that are 2 blocks away. The Burrard Bridge separated bike lanes have a daily average of 5,300 cyclists. (2011)

Davis St. Village community garden in heart of Vancouver BC at a busy corner of Burrard and Davie St. Cyclists transit, cars and pedestrians converge in this area. 2011. Photo by HJEH Becker

You can’t help but stop by to marvel bright red poppies, miniature tongue-in-cheek, homemade transmission line art and jewel-coloured floral annuals dotting  decorative grasses, ground cover plants and some veggies, including tomatoes.  It’s a brave garden: it has no fencing –yet. There’s even an arbour built right by the rail crossing sign.  Certainly cyclists have to slow down anyway to look,  in order to angle their wheels safely across the rail line.

One of several traffic calming circles containing community gardens. Ontario St. bike route, Vancouver BC 2010. Photo by J. Chong. A road centrepiece that slows down cars, cyclists and pedestrians.

After cycling another 10 minutes north on the separated bike lane via the Burrard St.  Bridge, you will reach the Davie Village garden.

This community garden is planted right in the heart of downtown Vancouver,  at a street corner thronging with people, car traffic, buses and bikes during the day.  The garden has overtaken land where there was once a gas station. The land was specially prepared to contain soil contamination for gardening on top.  There, sunflowers rise like smiling, calm faces to greet the harried crowds and traffic.

The City of Vancouver had only discovered within the last few years, that its cycling network had some major routes close to a wide range of community gardens. Here are maps that combine its bike routes and community gardens.

Bright Spots in Calgary– A Prairie City

Calgary has less of a lengthy history and number of community gardens. People tell me it’s the shorter warm growing season since it is over  400 km. north or 8 degrees latitude north  of  Toronto.   While Vancouver has over 2,500 community garden plots, Calgary has 30 community gardens with over 115 garden plot allotments.

So the expectation to find many of Calgary’s community gardens near its signed bike routes and paths, is a bit premature at this time.  The most obvious community garden would be a large full community garden behind Fort Calgary along the heavily used Bow River bike path in the downtown core.  If it weren’t for the occasional concert and staging area for annual Calgary Stampede, this flat prairie parkland is otherwise underused. The community garden is a bright spot under the blazing hot, naked sun.

As you continue along the path and near the heritage Simmons Bedding Factory which now house architectural offices, there are temporary community gardens in the rising, rehabilitated East Village area.  The gardens pop cheerfully and humbly amongst the construction flurry of condos, a new Central Library and more.

Butternut squash, tomatoes, flowers and visual interest at Leslie St. Allotment Community Gardens. Toronto 2011. Photo by J. Chong

Community gardens and bike-pedestrian routes, if well-positioned and integrated into community design, enhance neighbourhood property values, health of its residents, and promote conviviality among people in shared outdoor activities.

Further Reading and More Photos of  Other Community Gardens
Calgary Horticultural Society.  Community Gardens. List provided with links.

Chong, Jean. People’s Oases: Community Gardens. In Cycle Write Blog. Apr. 9, 2010.

Chong, Jean.  Touring Vancouver’s Community Gardens Along its Bike Route. In Velo-city Global 2012 Conference Blog. Apr. 15, 2011.  Includes community gardens on front lawn of Vancouver City Hall.

City of Vancouver.  Community Garden Walking and Cycling Tours. Includes maps.

Toronto Community Garden Network.  Community Gardens in Toronto and GTA. For unknown reasons, Leslie St. Allotment Gardens are not on this list.

—- Jean Chong

http://thirdwavecyclingblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/25/community-gardens-near-cycling-and-pedestrian-routes-complementary-community-amenities/

You can't have Wall Street without the oil economy. And oil's pushers, Big Oil, are doing better than ever. Image: Leader Nancy Pelosi via Flickr.

Wall Street is the best immediate target for a huge protest movement, since it was the freewheeling gambling of big banks that pushed the economy over the edge in 2008 and started the Great Recession.

Now, as Occupy movements pop up around the US and across the globe to draw attention to economic inequity and the government corruption that abets rule by the top 1%, Occupiers should not forget that ExxonMobil is as guilty as Goldman Sachs in buying politicians and squeezing the 99%.

The New York City General Assembly recognized the role of Big Oil in the declaration of grievances against corporations that it put out in late September: “They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.”

Yet, in media coverage of OWS, little attention has been paid to the role of oil companies in tanking the economy. Perhaps it’s because sneering banksters and coke-snorting stock traders are such satisfying and visible targets of middle-class ire over unemployment, home foreclosures and stagflation.With so many people to hate on Wall Street, who has time to notice all the baddies down in Houston?

But while the crimes of Wall Street are very real (if rarely prosecuted), Big Oil may actually be the bigger villain in today’s economic tragedy.

By hooking the public on its product and then continually quashing alternatives from solar power to conservation, the petroleum industry has played a more fundamental role than Wall Street in making the global economy unfair, unsustainable and vulnerable to dangerous crashes — and even catastrophic collapse.

And while it’s easy to finger high flyers at AIG, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch for the banking collapse that hit in the fall of 2008, the media has overlooked the underlying cause of that collapse — record high crude oil prices reaching $147 a barrel just a month before the banks started to fail.

“As oil prices soared from $35 per barrel in early 2004 to almost $150 per barrel in the summer of 2008, consumer price inflation in the US tripled to a rate of almost six per cent. It didn’t take long before interest rates caught up to inflation and, in the process, blew up the massively over-leveraged sub-prime mortgage market and the economy with it,” economist Jeff Rubin has explained.

Dollars are backed by oil

Today, the US dollar and all the world’s other major currencies are effectively backed by oil, which they have been since they went off the gold standard starting in the 1930s, as Rep. Ron Paul has so effectively explained. For more than a century, in a world of fiat currencies and ever-expanding credit, cheap oil has enabled an explosion in global manufacturing and trade.

Given how much manufacturing has moved from industrialized countries to China, it’s safe to say that there would be no global economy at all without refined products of crude oil — particularly the diesel fuel that runs the container ships and big-rig trucks needed to move Chinese products to domestic markets.

So, without oil, banks would have little money to lend, traders would find few stocks and commodities to trade and there never would have been enough credit flying around in the 1990s and early 2000s to enable financial weapons of mass destruction like sub-prime mortgages and credit-default swaps.

Our whole out-of-control money, banking and financial system are marinated in oil. This means that if Wall Street is like an office coke dealer, then Big Oil is like the kingpin of the Medellin Cartel.

Starve the beast

Silly chain emails calling on drivers to boycott one brand of gas station, say BP, in order to bring down the price at every retailer’s pump, just distract from the real problem with oil. Even if it made any difference (which it won’t), whining for cheap fuel is degrading and disempowering, keeping us just where the oil companies want us, hooked to their product.

Instead, people empowered by the open-air education in active citizenship that we’re all getting from the Occupy movement need to focus on things that we can do individually and together to reduce the economy’s reliance on oil while fighting against the corrupting influence of Big Oil in politics. Here are the top five:

1. Get oil money out of politics.

Oil and gas companies have donated $238.7 million to candidates and parties since the 1990 election cycle, 75 percent of which has gone to Republicans, who have worked shamelessly to protect industry subsidies and fight restrictions on drilling. But to get oil money out of politics, we’ll have to attack the issue of corporate politicking in general.

The Founding Fathers saw corporate power as a threat to their new democracy. “Let monopolies and all kinds and degrees of oppression be carefully guarded against,” said Samuel Webster in 1777. Madison and Jefferson feared a pseudo-aristocracy of corporations and echoed the sentiment that large corporations needed to be subordinate to ordinary citizens. Only in the age of the Robber Barons did it become legal and acceptable for large companies to support political candidates and lobby politicians. At the same time, the Supreme Court laid the framework for “corporate personhood,” a mistake which the court solidified in 2010 with the infamous Citizens United case that lifted nearly all restrictions on corporate political giving.

The solution? Pass a constitutional amendment declaring that corporations are not people. That may not be as hard as it sounds. Most Americans, including 68% of Republicans, support an amendment to get corporate money out of politics.

2. Cut direct subsidies to oil companies.

Over the last sixty years, 70% of all government subsidies for energy have gone to fossil fuels, as opposed to just 10% to renewable energy. Oil and gas companies alone have received a whopping 58% of all subsidies, and they continue to receive this corporate welfare despite reporting record profits. In an economy where market demand is clearly sufficient to ensure that companies make money — and lots of it — from pumping gas and oil, only the massive political influence of the industry has been able to maintain obviously unnecessary taxpayer handouts.

Once we can curb the power of corporate money in politics and make Congress and the White House more accountable to citizens than to corporations, we need to repeal all direct subsidies to fabulously profitable companies from ExxonMobil to Chesapeake Energy.

3. Cut indirect subsidies for oil through the ARSE (auto/road/sprawl) Complex.

While subsidies given directly to the oil industry get the most attention in the media, it’s really the subsidies that they receive indirectly in many different ways that artificially inflate oil company profits. And these dwarf direct subsidies, as David Roberts writes at Grist.

Indirect handouts to oil include $3 trillion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq along with billions more in ongoing costs each year to protect shipping lanes for oil tankers from the Strait of Hormuz to the Niger Delta. Then, add in costs to human health from air pollution and climate change, which may be hard to tally, but are easy to recognize. As Bill McKibben has put it, making the connection between oil and finance, “Wall Street has been occupying the atmosphere.” Finally, billions more spent on a transportation infrastructure of roads for personal cars will turn out to be money wasted when America finally makes the inevitable transition away from oil-based transportation.

Starting as soon as possible, the US should put a moratorium on new road construction, as groups in the UK are pushing for. Then, would it be too radical to quickly ban the sale of any new gasoline cars, as Norway has proposed doing in 2015? After that, it will be much easier to start a crash program of repairing our passenger train system while promoting transportation that doesn’t require oil like bicycling and walking (see below for more on that).

4. Remove barriers to renewable energy.

If the US is to retain any semblance of an industrial economy and be able to provide the jobs that the Occupiers want in a future beyond oil, then we’ll need to trade in today’s inefficient personal cars, trucks and planes for electric trains powered by clean, safe energy sources like solar and wind.

Fifty years ago, auto and rubber companies dismantled the best rail system in the world to create a bigger market for cars and tires in the US. Now, auto and oil companies continue to use their influence over government to cripple public transit and prevent the US from building a modern rail system. Likewise, Big Oil is trying to strangle clean energy in its cradle by killing the public support that helped all energy sources to grow in the past (Solyndra “scandal,” anyone?).

Even worse, dirty energy interests, including oil and gas companies, have helped turn government into an obstacle to clean power through monopoly electric utilities on the state level. To generate power, electric utilities favor natural gas, along with coal and nuclear power, over solar and wind. And even if a utility has little interest in building out its own clean generation, the utility may still invoke its legal monopoly power to stop anybody else from installing solar and wind in that utility’s service area.

To break the iron grip of yesterday’s energy sources on the neck of the energy sources of tomorrow, it may take nothing less than passing a mandatory Renewable Portfolio Standard on the federal level, requiring electric utilities nationwide to offer their customers more and more clean energy over time and thus creating a growing market for solar and wind.

5. Conserve and relocalize.

While it will be necessary for the United States to build out all the clean energy we can as quickly as possible, we also need to be realistic and recognize that no amount of renewable energy sources are likely to replace the huge amount of fossil fuels that the world economy relies on today, as Richard Heinberg has demonstrated. Therefore, we’ll have no choice but to use less energy in the future. And as they say in cop movies, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way.

Today, we continue to feed our addiction to oil by trying to squeeze out every last drop of tar sands or deepwater oil, no matter how dirty, dangerous or expensive. Concerns about climate aside, from the viewpoint of supply alone, that’s just kicking the can down the road. Sooner or later, continuing to feed our fossil fuel addiction will lead inevitably to an oil crash that will bring suffering a hundred times worse than the 2008 Wall Street crisis.

A better way would be to start powering down our whole economy now, while we can still do so with some control. A big piece of that will require the US and other rich countries to bring their manufacturing back home from China. We need to stop outsourcing and then we need to reverse it. On the national level, OWS can help a movement gain steam to repeal the deceptively named “free trade” and reinstate import tariffs to protect the domestic industry that’s still left and start bringing our factories back home.

Meanwhile, on the community level, the Transition movement offers an increasingly popular model for towns and cities to take more control over their economic fate and start reducing their reliance on imports from big corporations by providing more of their goods and services at home. Cutting our purchases of consumer products made 5,000 miles away is perhaps the best thing we can all to do use less oil now and in the future.

– Erik Curren, Transition Voice

Source: http://transitionvoice.com/2011/10/top-5-ways-to-occupy-big-oil/ ]]> http://carbusters.org/2011/11/26/top-5-ways-to-occupy-big-oil/feed/ 0